Stuck on the island of misfit Democratic elites
We’ve all laughed at the self-deprecating Will Rogers quote: “I don’t belong to any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” It’s a funny line because we recognize that there’s an element of truth in it.
Less well known is Rogers’ observation contrasting the nature of America’s two major parties: “Democrats never agree on anything,” he said in another Depression-era aphorism. “If they agreed with each other, they’d be Republicans.”
As a party, Democrats are an amorphous coalition of interests and identities that, at its best, reflects the nation’s ongoing diversity. The Democrats of the 1920s and ‘30s that Rogers cheekily counted himself among wouldn’t recognize the party today and would probably be scandalized by it.
That’s because the DNA of the Democratic Party changes and mutates with each generation as it attempts to become more inclusive. As Democrats embraced the New Deal, government expansion, intervention into markets, women’s rights and full civil and voting rights for blacks, it attracted the support of immigrants, working-class people, young whites and minorities.
During the early-to-mid 1960s, most of the highest-ranking Democrats in the U.S. Congress were avowedly racist and had used their enormous clout to blunt the advance of civil rights legislation for decades. But the masses of potential black voters in the far more populous North made ignoring their interests in claiming rights already guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution untenable.
President Lyndon Johnson knew that supporting and signing civil rights legislation would alienate key members of the Democratic establishment and concede the once solidly Democratic South to Republican control for generations.
Richard Nixon’s cynical “Southern strategy,” which consisted of scaring working-class and rural whites about black progress during his 1968 presidential run, confirmed Johnson’s fear of future Republican electoral routs.
Dixiecrats and pro-segregation Democrats moved into the GOP column over the next decade, completely flipping historic sympathies that had identified the two parties since the Civil War.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s last year on Earth consisted of opposing the Democratic establishment’s incremental approach to civil rights after LBJ publicly broke with him after he criticized the Vietnam War.
MLK’s calls for a massive reorganization of the American economy at the expense of the military budget made him a pariah even among the civil rights establishment.
As much as he appreciated both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, MLK was convinced that only sustained and systemic structural change could make a meaningful difference in American life. He was in the early stages of proposing a grand alliance across class and race when an assassin’s bullet took his life.
In death, MLK’s reputation was rehabilitated by Democrats who feared him and Republicans who loathed him. For decades, it was difficult to stumble across anything he said after his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. MLK’s later calls for reparations and a radical reallocation of billions of federal dollars to address America’s problems were expunged from the record.
I’ve been thinking a lot about MLK and his final days recently because of the enormous freak-out the Democratic establishment is undergoing thanks to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ victories in New Hampshire and Nevada.
Like MLK, Mr. Sanders is calling for dramatic change to the system that feels like a cut-and-paste of the civil rights leader’s agenda in some places. But unlike MLK during his last year of life, Mr. Sanders is enormously popular and has amassed a movement that appears willing to go to the polls and vote for him. This is what terrifies the Democrats, despite the lip service it pays to MLK’s ideas.
In recent days, Mr. Sanders has had his Nevada caucus victory compared to the 1940 Nazi invasion and occupation of France, and members of his campaign staff described as an “island of misfit black girls” by two “liberal” talking heads on what is ostensibly the liberal cable news network.
Practically every day on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Democratic establishment pundits talk openly about what it will take to stop Mr. Sanders from getting the nomination. Their hysteria is officially over-the-top and a sign of how out of step they are with the people who actually matter most — the voters.
On Monday, host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican turned independent, called for Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Amy Klobuchar to drop out so that someone from the Three B’s — Biden, Buttigieg or Bloomberg — can step up and consolidate the “stop Bernie” vote before it’s too late. Left unexplained by the cable TV host is why he believes followers of the two senators would necessarily join such an effort instead of throwing their votes behind Mr. Sanders.
Personally, I’m a much bigger fan of Ms. Warren than I am of Mr. Sanders, but I will gladly vote for Mr. Sanders in a head-to-head against Donald Trump in November. I believe most of my fellow Americans would, too, including voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida.
Why Democratic elites and many liberal pundits tend to endlessly engage in shortsighted attempts to derail the popular will in the party is a mystery. While millions of Democrats express their desire to see significant change, a coterie of party insiders are always there to say “no” by attempting to put their thumb on the scale instead of letting a race play itself out. Given the disaster that 2016 turned out to be because of journalistic malpractice, it should at least be incumbent on the media to have a little humility and refrain from trying to manufacture outcomes. Let the people vote.
From where I sit, the Democratic Party elite has a terrible track record. It doesn’t really know what it takes to win a national election. It has consistently misjudged what its most motivated voters want and is just as likely to use fearmongering about Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as its Republican counterparts, which is amazing.
Groucho Marx once said: “All people are born alike except Republicans and Democrats.” As reluctant as I am to contradict the almighty Groucho, I would amend his aphorism to say: “All people are born alike, especially Republican and Democratic elites.”