The Demise of the Democrats

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The Demise of the Democrats

It’s time for the Democrats to face reality. They’re going to lose, and probably lose big, in November. Not only will they lose the presidential race, but the House and Senate will no doubt continue to squirm under the reichish boots of the Republicans.

But how did this happen? How could they have botched such an opportunity? How could they possibly lose to an administration that has constantly lied, distorted the truth, lost well over a thousand lives in Iraq, colluded with huge corporations not only to milk the public cow for billions in Iraq, but to make a shambles of the environment as well? How could they possibly lose to a mental misfit who can hardly utter a sentence without gutting its grammar and syntax and who has surrounded himself with what amounts to the worst band of ethical criminals we’ve seen in this country since the moral minuses who surrounded Richard Nixon?

Well, as Mortimer Snerd used to reply when Edgar Bergen asked him how he could be so dumb: “It ain’t easy.”

Indeed, after the Democratic convention, most political pundits ventured the opinion that this would be Kerry’s election to lose. And, by golly, he’s doing just that. Evidently taking Michael Dukakis as his role model, he and the Democrats have decided to play a friendly game of cribbage while Bush and the Republicans are at the table playing cutthroat poker. Like some patsy in a boxing match, Kerry has been beaten about the head by Swift boat liars and the dirty tricks of Karl Rove to the point of being knocked out in the first round.

And all the while his loopy handlers – all 500 of them – have been urging Kerry not to attack the president and to go easy on Bush policies, lest some ephemeral focus group get upset and tell him he’s getting too nasty. In addition, they decided to secrete John Edwards away in some hidey hole, lest he “overshadow” Kerry. Overshadow? What’s to overshadow? How can you overshadow someone who disappeared for the whole month of August and whose campaign agenda and message is as convoluted as the Minotaur’s maze?

What on earth did these dimwits think the Republicans were going to do? Stand around and play a sedate game of croquet on campus lawns while they conversed hospitably with their Democratic opponents? They know, or they should know, that the Republicans are guttersnipe hard-ballers whose object is the jugular and whose methods have no ethical restrictions. When you’re dealing with the likes of Karl Rove, you don’t run off around the country tilting at windmills like Don Quixote and expect people to run to your defense. No, you put on the gloves, haul out the shovels, and get down in the gutters where your opponents are slinging the mud.

You can’t play nice with these people. And you can’t play nice with these people because the voters, despite what they say in their idiotic, meaningless focus groups, are listening to them and lapping up the terroristic muck they’re tossing around.

Or, if you’re not willing to wallow in the gutters, you better damned well have a message that the voters can understand.

But the Democrats no longer have any such message. As far as I’m concerned, the Democrats lost their ethos, or primary persona, when Bill Clinton and his cronies dreamed up the blob-like mess known as the Democratic Leadership Council. For when they did this, they decided to abandon their base on the left and leave progressives lurching around, looking for someone who still reflected their values. They finally latched onto Ralph Nader – and may do so again this year – which lost the election for Gore.

Instead of building on progressive values, the DLC took the Democrats to what can only be called the muddled middle, which resulted in such ridiculous positions as “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” among other things. Rather than emphasizing programs that would help the poor, the middle class, unionized workers, women and gays, the Democrats became Republican Lites, or, as Schwarzenegger might call them, “girlie men.”

At least the Republicans are smart enough to energize their various constituencies on the far right. They have no intention of abandoning, say, Christian evangelicals, and moving toward the middle. No way. Yet this is exactly what the Democrats did under the misguided leadership of the DLC. They abandoned their constituency on the left and, as a result, totally lost whatever core framework they had within which to function.

As a result, while the voters know exactly what to expect from the rightist Republicans, they have no idea what the Democrats represent anymore. So afraid have the Democrats become that they’ll offend this or that group of voters, that they’ve virtually offended everyone by presenting such as wishy-washy agenda for the nation. And while the Republicans can still worship Ronald Reagan with gusto, you’ll rarely hear a Democrat refer to FDR, Harry Truman or John Kennedy. Why?

As Ralph Nader so well put it a few days ago, “The Democratic Party, under the influence of its corporate supremacists, is a gutless, spineless, clueless and hapless party and needs to be challenged by liberal Democrats.”

In the end, if the Democrats lose this election – and they will – I suspect we may well see the demise of the party. Democrats around the country are going to be so disaffected, so disgusted at the way in which party handlers have conducted this campaign that there well may be a revolution in the ranks.

This is exactly what happened to the Republican Party, until Barry Goldwater appeared on the scene and dared to proclaim his conservative values in a campaign against Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater lost miserably, of course, but at least he sowed the seeds which have now germinated into a conservative majority that controls the party and the country.

And this is what may well happen to the Democrats, or whatever new party replaces them. It will take only one man like a Howard Dean to emerge and begin to espouse the progressive values of the old Democratic Party to start the ball rolling. And next time a presidential election rolls around – if there is a next time – leftist voters won’t be looking for someone “electable.” No, you can bet the farm that they’ll be looking to someone who has the guts to stand up for progressive national and international social and economic programs.

Let’s face it. Time is running out for this country. Four more years of Bush and his cronies will well nigh do us in. Iraq, and indeed the whole Middle East, will be in a shambles. Perhaps thousands more American lives will be lost in more meaningless neocon-spawned wars and in Iraq. The economy, to say nothing of the environment, will smell like some gigantic waste pit that no superfund can clean up. The rich, of course, will make out like bandits, while the rest of us disappear into economic nothingness.

To counter this we must have a strong opposition party. The Democrats are not it. We can only pray that from the ashes of the Democratic Party some phoenix-like leader will emerge to restore sanity and balance to the what’s still left of the democratic process.

September 22, 2004