Domestic incidents in Democrats’ household
There’s tumult and shouting coming from the Democratic Party household. There’s the sound of things being thrown and broken. Should the police be summoned?
Yes, the Republican family, too, has its differences, especially since Uncle Trump, as erratic as he is rich, moved in uninvited. In the GOP family, the insufferably pious and the manna-worshipping moneychangers dwell side by side as uneasily as Turks and Greeks. But friction in the Republican household is generated mostly by ideological squabbling. There are the big corporation Republicans, the leave-methe-hell-alone libertarian Republicans and the Paleolithic authoritarian right-wing Republicans. But the thing is that the Republican family is mostly white and nominally Christian. This helps to minimize the emotive content of family disagreements.
The Democratic household has its ideological differences, too. Should taxes be high or even higher? Should bureaucracy be extensive or even more extensive? Should the successful be soaked with high tax rates or slapped with outright dispossession? But what makes the Democratic household’s domestic disturbances especially raucous and obstreperous — a cross between a roller derby and a SmackDown — are the ethnic/national origin/racial/religious designations.
The academics have classified this phenomenon as “identity politics.” Of course, the country has always had ethnic politics. There were the Italian voting blocs and the Irish voting blocs and before them the German voting blocs.
Democrats have refined and intensified the tradition. Today the party’s rah-rah identity groups wear their labels the way Ohio State students wear their Buckeyes or Penn State students their Nittany Lions sweatshirts. Democrats’ school sweatshirts identify their wearers as African American, as Hispanic, as Jewish or as Muslim.
What you are is key. Lots of ethnic/religious/ racial/national origin/immigration status beancounting goes on under the Democratic roof. There are still some Irish, Italians, Poles and what-haveyou, lumped dismissively together as “whites.” But their family role tends to be self-effacing.
They focus their efforts on promoting the sensitivities of the other family “identity groups.” They encourage those identity groups’ perceptions that they face relentless, insurmountable bigotry. Latino Immigrants, especially, face ferociously unwelcoming, Know-Nothing mobs of no-good, yanquis north of the border. Or so it is constantly suggested. Similarly, Muslim immigrants face the merciless taunting of Islamophobic, xenophobic, right-wing hordes of latter-day Triple K pluguglies.
Nevertheless, despite such prospects, the Democratic family insists the immigration sluicegates be kept wide open for hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners. And that no barriers impede the millions of Mexicans who are determined to sneak over the border for abuse and mistreatment in the dreaded land of the despised gringo.
“Only the Democratic family understands your situation and is willing to protect you and your interests,” the family lore tells the identity-group constituencies.
But, as the ruckus emanating from the Democratic household indicates, all is not sweet harmony and tranquility under the family roof. A California high school girl recently dramatized the point with a racist Snapshot video that multiplied into a social media mini-tsunami. The girl’s video featured a tirade against “uglyass black people,” declaring “they should just fxxking go and die.” Other girls mugged and giggled in the background of the video.
Local coverage pounced on the video as yet another alarming example of runaway racism in the horrifying era of Trump. Coverage tilted the story with such guidepost “facts” as that the school involved is “predominantly white.” (Incorrect. It has a white
plurality of 38 percent.)
Eventually — before the story could go national — the student’s name became known: Desirae Fernandez. Oops. Never mind.
Her identity tamped down national coverage, in the view of some observers (e.g., David Cole’s Takimag.com blog) in a way that would not have occurred had the girl been of, say, Swedish or Dutch extraction. According to this view, her favored Latina status gummed up the news media narrative that Hispanics, like African Americans, are strictly victims of bigotry, never carriers of it. Whether that assessment is valid or not, one of the bigger California papers, the Sacramento Bee, finally saved the day, so to speak, coming to the rescue with a report purporting to reveal the school festering with rancid Anglo white racism, notwithstanding Miss Gonzalez’s unanticipated appearance in the starring role.
In any event, there’s no suppressing the reality that something less than brotherly love prevails when the Democratic family convenes around the supper table. It’s hardly a secret that there’s animosity between African Americans and Hispanics. And how would there not be? They live, after all, in the same hard-scrabble economic environs, jostling for scarce jobs and stretched-thin school and social services “resources,” in cities small and large, from coast to coast, from Trenton to Los Angeles.
Although the Democratic family leaders try to avoid mentioning the point, African Americans surely have managed to notice that Latinos are faring significantly better than they are, according to standard paycheck measures.
In 2015 and 2016, black unemployment averaged 8.4 percent, Latino unemployment a significantly lower 5.8 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. A 2017 Census Bureau report noted a Latino advantage over African Americans in median income, $47,695 to $39,490.
The BLS’ “Labor Force Participation Rate” data also show a significantly higher percentage of African Americans than Latinos left outside the workplace, i.e., jobless but no longer even counted in the unemployment data — an average 38.4 percent of blacks vs. 34.2 percent of Latinos over those two years.
Resentment may not be warranted in these circumstances, but it’s likely humanly hard to avoid.
Elsewhere in the Democratic household, rancor is more open and nasty. The Anti-Defamation League’s polling continues to find seething hostility among one major Democratic constituency, African Americans, for another, Jews. And the polling shows this hostility enthusiastically shared by Muslim and Latino constituencies.
The ADL’s surveys ask such questions as whether the respondents think Jews have too much financial and political power. Thirty percent of blacks and Latinos say yes, revealing “deeply entrenched anti-Semitic” attitudes, according to ADL (vs. just 3 percent among whites). Among Muslims globally, anti-Semitism is a rampant 49 percent, according to the ADL’s surveys.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Nation of Islam “Minister” Louis Farrakhan draws whooping, foot-stomping, sellout audiences among one Democratic family constituency for his rabble-rousing performances, railing against Judaism as “a deceptive lie” and declaring that Israel “had foreknowledge” of 9/11 but gave only Jews a heads-up.
Yet, as baffled observers have noted, Jews in the Democratic household seem more inclined to overlook anti-Semitism close at hand and fret over suspected anti-Semitism further afield — among white evangelical Republican Christians, for example.
Looking ahead, the antagonistic dynamics of the Democratic household promise (or threaten) to become even more volatile as new boarders are taken in. For example:
• Democratic family benefactors such as billionaire financial magnate George Soros, billionaire hedge fund mogul Tom Steyer and international investment banking colossus Goldman Sachs — all bankrolling the Democratic family while strident “social justice-warrior” rhetoric denounces the very plutocratic greed and income inequality those benefactors personify.
• Latter-day environmental Luddites hostile to such advancements as automobiles and electricity — and indeed to humankind itself, to childbearing, because humans equal pollution.
• “Transgender” activists demanding a “right” to use the restroom of their choice without regard to to the sexual apparatus they were assigned at birth. Plus, militantly zealous “feminists” who say gender is merely a “patriarchal social construct” and who oppose use of the pronouns “he” and “she.”
• And activists who demand that bakers be forced, under penalty of law, to confect products signifying acceptance of matrimony for those of same-sex orientation — an orientation of which Muslim members of the Democratic household, ahem, singularly and sternly disapprove, some to the point of favoring vicious physical violence against that orientation’s members.
Mix these all together and. . .whoa, Nellie!
It may be that the Republican Party vanishes like the Whigs, the victim of the platitudinous, hypocritical hooey it spreads like a farmer’s wagonload of manure. The entertaining Trump is, at least for the time being, sparing the Republican family the fate of dying out from the anesthetizing effect of its tiresome George F. Babbitt/Elmer Gantry routines.
As for the Democratic family, it may self-destruct from irreconcilable factionalism — this plus an overload of crackpot inanity. But at least its demise seems unlikely to be due to plummeting TV ratings, if only it can find a way to keep Trump from hogging the entertainment limelight.
To invoke the immortal words of Red Barber, it looks like the Democratic household is indeed heading for a real rhubarb, one that’s gonna tear up the ol’ pea patch.
--davidneese@verizon.net