Provocations: The challenge of being a Democrat
Republicans have their loose cannon to struggle with, namely erratic, impulsive, mouthy President Donald Trump. But they have it easy compared with Democrats.
If you’re a Democrat, you’ve got your work cut out for you. And complicated work it is, too.
Democrats have some weird stuff on the party agenda. Trump, on the other hand, makes it comparatively easy for Republicans, at least in this one respect: His agenda is ordinary and mundane.
Even ho-hum. He’s not aiming for revolutionary transformation or epochal change.
He talks about a strong economy; about a trade relationship with China on terms more favorable to America; about securing the southern border from hordes of illegals, and about limiting U.S. military meddling in distant places where Islamic hotheads are at one anothers’ throats.
Whether you agree with his approach or not on these matters, Trump has set the Republican agenda with unexceptionable items.
Democrats can only wish they had it so easy.
Their party is confronting them with wrenching issues, with transformational issues, with discombobulating issues. And there’s no ducking them. The party is posing questions it insists must be answered and answered now, today, this minute. For example:
Can an immigrant from, say, Nigeria — an undeniably black person from an undeniably black nation — be counted as part of the black community in America? The question takes identity politics to a whole new level of bean-counting complexity.
Either way Democrats answer, they’re going to be bombarded with nasty trolling. The partisans in this factional party dispute are ill-humored and lethally serious.
One of these factions goes by #ADOS — African Descendants of Slavery. ADOS says no, a Nigerian immigrant absolutely cannot be included in America’s black community.
Meanwhile, an opposing faction, CBCPAC — Congressional Black Caucus Political Action Committee — takes the position that yes, a Nigerian immigrant may be, and should be, counted as an American black.
This is no mere academic debate. The two factions are lunging for the jugular.
Meanwhile, elsewhere out there on other fringes of the Democratic Party, an equally urgent question is now on the floor for debate — or actually, on the floor more for fisticuffs than debate.
The urgent question is this: Which of the following is the politically correct “initialism”: 1. LGBT? 2. LGBTQ? or 3. LGBTQIA?
Pick carefully, Democrats, and be prepared to catch hell within your own party regardless which one you choose.
LGBT stands for Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transsexual. The issue here is whether Q — standing for Queer or Questioning — should be added.
And whether I/A — standing for Intersexual/ Asexual — might be added as well.
It’s a heavy cross today’s Democrat is asked to bear. Being a Democrat used to be so easy. If you were a working person, a union member and drove a Chevy, not a Buick, you were on good terms with the party.
All that was required of you was that you plump for the party’s candidates come election day. And that was easy enough to do. The party’s candidates were more or less regular folks. They were not ethnically/sexually hyphenated Jacobins bent on reordering America into balkanized grievance camps.
To validate your Democratic Party credentials, all you had to do was frown on wealth and associate it with Republicans.
But now, alongside the party’s star socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are such fabulously rich — “obscenely” rich, it used to be said — Daddy Warbucks gadzillionaire party movers and shakers as Tom Steyer, George Soros, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and others.
Not until recently was it demanded of Democrats that they address headache-inducing questions such as theologians once did with their quarrels over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Now, if you’re a Democrat, you must confront all sorts of excruciating conundrums. Such as:
May a person who has the sexual apparatus of a male, including, um, intromitten organ and testes, classify himself as a female and use the restrooms designated for that gender?
Or: May such a person compete in female sports and walk off with the firstplace trophies?
C’mon now, no dodging, Democrats. You gotta make the call. Your party ranks this stuff as urgent.
Filling out forms used to be a simple task. Male? Female? Check one. For Democrats, no longer.
Now Democrats have to furrow their brow and think deeply about it.
“Hmmm. Am I cisgender? Gender binary? Genderqueer? Am I agender? Boi? Dyadic?” Gotta decide. And then be prepared to defend your category unto the death.
These Democratic Party factional feuds call to mind the early church disputes over obscure doctrines such as Manicheanism,
Monophysitism and Nestorianism. Often they were settled by sword, dungeon or rack.
The Democratic Party’s disputes over fine points of dogma haven’t come to that quite yet. But they have attained a level of nastiness in which profanity-laced libels are hurled back and forth — the profanity typically featuring evocations of matriarchal incestuousness.
Take the aforementioned quarrel over who may be counted as a “real” black person in American and who may not. The media have labelled this feud a “diaspora war.”
In the view of #ADOS, black immigrants don’t share the unique heritage of slavery and Jim Crow that African-American blacks do. (ADOS also hints that black immigrants are treated better by whites and tend to get a little uppity.)
ADOS’ adversaries counter by raising the suspicion that ADOS actually consists mostly of vicious Russian bots infiltrating the Internet. That’s latterday Joe McCarthyism at its gutter-level lowest, replies ADOS. And so it goes, biff, bam, boom.
The stakes are hardly petty, though the arguments themselves may seem to be.
Will presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris be able to bill herself as a member in good standing of the black community? Or — given her JamaicanIndian heritage — will she be marked down, as ADOS insists she ought to be, as merely an Oreo “bourgeois liberal” pretender?
And, speaking of ra-
cial bona fides, what about that other presidential candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren? Is her 1/64th to 1/1,024th Native American DNA sufficient to gain her admittance to an aggrieved minority group and reap political gain from that status? Or is she to be written off as just another privilege-cosseted Caucasian?
Skirmishes on other Democratic ideological and taxonomic fronts seem even more bitterly contested. Take, for example, the showdown pitting something called TERF against LGBTQIA.
“TERF”? C’mon, Democrats! You gotta learn the lingo. TERF: Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists.
The standoff between LGBTQIA and TERF could make the 12th and 13th century Italian feuds between the Guelphs and Ghibellines seem like a Sunday school picnic beanbag toss.
TERF says LGBTQIA is undercutting lesbian identity by trying to erase biological distinctions, thereby rendering gender identity interchangeable.
TERF further states that LGBTQIA is encouraging stereotypes by equating gender identity with “gender-related appearance, mannerisms and characteristics of the designated sex at birth.”
Inside the party, them’s fightin’ words!
Writer Andrew Sullivan, a sort of secular theologian regarding complex sexuality issues, has ventured into the ring as a referee between the two
foes. (Warning: profound philosophical musings just ahead.)
“If the concept of a man is deconstructed, so that someone without a penis is a man, then homosexuality itself is deconstructed,” observes Sullivan.
He concludes, though, that Democrats ought to accept “gender dysphoria” (say what?) but also recognize that biology “is a distinction requiring a difference.”
The Solomonic Sullivan adds that Democrats can believe in both nature and in “the immense complexity of the human mind and sexuality.” Doesn’t sound easy, however.
Meanwhile, there’s yet one other tough call pending for Democrats to make. It’s a call on a question that’s bugged philosophers, theologians and scientists down through the ages. How much time does humankind have left on earth?
C’mon now, Democrats, you gotta decide.
Great minds have grappled with the question going way back in history. Some put the end days well off into the future.
For example, Bede the Venerable, the 8th Century theologian, picked 2076 as the deadline for humans. Sir Isaac Newton, possibly the smartest human ever, suggested 2060 as the end of the road.
But now a possibly even greater mind has upped the apocalyptic ante.
Freshman Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez says the time stamp on human existence expires in, like, wow, a mere 12 years if Washington, like, you know, fails to take, like, radical steps to, you know, like, stop climate change dead in its tracks.
So what’s it gonna be, Democrats? 2076, 2060, 2031? The pressure is on to go along with OcasioCortez’ end time, since the other predictions come from mere dead old white guys.
But going along with her, it’s true, may make you look a bit like the cartoon stereotype, like the sandal-clad kook with the long beard, wearing a robe, going about the neighborhood with a placard warning, “The end is nigh!”
Right-wing Republicans
— meanies that they are
— will say you’ve gone batguano nuts. But as stated at the outset, it’s no bed or roses being a Democrat these days. You simply have to deal with it.
If it helps, you may tell yourself that great visionaries have always been subjected to ridicule.