The Democratic Party I Know and Don’t Love

Lyndon Johnson, our second great emancipator, did his utmost to ship me to Vietnam. Richard J. Daley and his uniformed thugs had my friends beaten up in the streets of Chicago. Hubert Humphrey, the great defender of organized labor, spent the last years of his political career solemnly licking Lyndon Johnson’s boots.

Still, I went to work for the McGovern campaign in 1972. On election day I walked a precinct in Southern California until the polls closed at 7:00 p.m. Pacific time. I didn’t have the cell phone that would certainly be in my pocket today—I didn’t even have a transistor radio—and so it was that people who opened the last few doors I knocked on in the near darkness of that California evening actually burst out laughing at me before closing the door in my face. I may have been the last person on earth to hear that the election was already over, that McGovern had won only one state and the District of Columbia.

Thirty-four years later, at a fundraiser in Arizona a liberal friend had dragged me to, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, a property developer in Phoenix and ex-chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party, let me know in no uncertain terms that it was those anti-war crazies who got Nixon elected, and that we (meaning the Democratic Party) were never going to go there again if he had anything to say about it. He wasn’t the only senior Democrat of consequence who’s served me up that deeply cherished nonsense over the years.

And so it’s gone since—the Clintons and their “New Democrats,” Obama’s “more than a collection of red states and blue states,” et cetera, et cetera. The members of the DNC, who, like Godechot’s Bourbons, have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, now reverently present us with the ghost of Joe Biden—take him or leave him—and warn us earnestly that if Trump gets elected in November it’s all going to be our fault again, just as Nixon was in 1968 and 1972, and Trump was in 2016.

To which I say, “I’m done with this. No matter how it goes this time, we’re done. Peddle your paralysis elsewhere.”

2 thoughts on “The Democratic Party I Know and Don’t Love

  1. bystander July 17, 2024 / 11:53 am

    Well, that was well said. And, boy-howdy am I right there with you.

    “… take him or leave him…”, eh?

    “The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution “fail” while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.” -Jon Schwarz

    Even knowing the above, I bristle at the thought that that they’ll look to blame anyone but themselves, and doubly bristle at the thought that they really didn’t care if they won anyway.

    • William Timberman July 17, 2024 / 12:27 pm

      Sad truths, to be sure, and poisonous to the enthusiasms and boundless energy of youth. The bill for that—betraying your own children—always comes due eventually. But not today—right, Hillary, right Mr. McAuliffe?

      Clearly, at some point early in the Reagan era the Democratic Party decided that my generation was too messy, too unruly, too unpredictable to be relied upon for electoral success, and for the ruling party spoils and sinecures that came with it. Realizing, as Republicans had realized long before them, that people with money were the only really stable constituency, they went into business for themselves, refashioned themselves as a wholly self-contained enterprise, deaf to the entreaties of the remnants of their own historical New Deal coalition, and impervious to Eleanor Roosevelt’s or Lyndon Johnson’s sympathy for the perennially disenfranchised.

      They were warned what the consequences would be. Over and over, my generation pleaded with them to consider the consequences. They laughed at us, or vilified us, or called the cops on us. And now, at long last, the bill is coming due. I suppose I should be feeling smug about that, gloating about being right, but I can’t. If the ship goes down, we all go down with it. I’ve lived too long to take any pleasure in that. They’ll pay for their misjudgments one way or the other. I have no desire to be one of the people standing in line to collect.

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