The Democrats’ Dilemma, Not Ours

These are the times that try our traditional Republican souls, but we suppose it’s even harder on a Democratic.

A mere eight years ago the Democrats won the White House back with the most hyped candidate in the history of presidential, along with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, clear control of the House of Representatives, and had enough votes on the Supreme Court to get away with its most grandiose ambitions. Those congressional majorities quickly vanished, now the White House has also been lost, and it seems likely that a conservative Supreme Court will be getting in the way of Democrats for another ten to twenty years no matter how future elections play out. Republicans control most of the state and local governments, too, with the Democrats’ dominance confined to the west coast and the upper northeast and a few big but shrinking cities in between.

The latest election results don’t represent a clear victory for the Republican party we once knew or the conservatism it once represented, but there’s no way to read them but as a resounding defeat for the Democrats and the liberalism is has come to represent. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won the popular vote due to running up the score in the west coast and the upper northeast and those few big but shrinking cities in between, and her party also won most of the Senate votes thanks to two Democratic candidates in California and no one running in Texas, but pretty much everywhere else the Democrats and their ideology were overwhelmingly rejected. Obamacare and the Iran deal and all those executive actions on immigration and everything else the Democrats have accomplished in the past years has been found wanting and will soon be erased, the noisy and angry race-class-gender sort of identity politics that the Democrats have peddled to ascendant minority-majority for the past many years has been beaten by an equally noisy and angry identity politics among a still mostly white and working class and almost entirely male or female population that doesn’t feel the need apologize for its race or class or gender, and at the moment the Democrats seem out of any other ideas. Whatever they get in the way of infrastructure spending or protectionist trade barriers or isolationist foreign policy will come courtesy of the reviled Republican president-elect Donald Trump, and none of it is likely to help the Democrats’ future electoral prospects, or anything else for that matter.

This has prompted some long overdue soul-searching within the Democratic Party, along with the usual finger-pointing and squabbling, but so far the results have not been promising. Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, who was Speaker of the House back in the good old days of six years ago but has been consigned to minority leader status ever since, has somehow retained her leadership position despite losing 63 of her caucus’ votes to challenger Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, and think the Democrats missed a chance there. Seventy-six-year-old Pelosi represents a district in San Francisco, a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants and every sort of race and class and gender identity refugee you can think of, and was the one who made sure that Obamacare passed so that we could as see what was in it and pushed that trillion dollar infrastructure spending “stimulus” boondoggle and pretty much everything else that voters have now soundly rejected. Ryan seems a rather middle-of-the-road to Democrat to our old-fashioned Republican eyes, but he’s only 43 years old and represents a district in Youngstown, a hard luck town chock full of the sorts of disgruntled white folks who used to vote for Democrats but are lately responsible for the Republicans’ monopoly of political power, so he might have been able to drag the party at least slightly closer to where most of the country is.

The Democrats are also forced to choose a new National Chairman or Chairwoman or Chairperson of Indeterminate Gender, the last two women who held the post having been forced out by scandals of collusion with Clinton, and thus far the leading contender seems to be Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota. He’s also gone by Keith Hakim, Keith X, Keith X Ellison, Keith Muhammad and other variations during his long career from the virulently anti-white Nation of Islam to a more mainstream form of Islam that is merely anti-western to his current status as America’s first Muslim congressman, and although his views on all those newfangled gender issues seems more in keeping with Democratic scripture than the Koran and he’s right on all the minimum wage and corporate taxes stuff he’s got all sorts of ties to some some unsavory segments of the Muslim world. At a time when a relatively recent Republican is winning a majority of the electoral votes by stoking the public’s very rational fears of radical Islamist terrorists, Ellison seems an odd choice as the chairman of a major American political party.

Both Pelosi’s and Ellison’s races are a result of the predictable divide in the party between those who feel that its liberalism is at fault for their predicament and those who blame it for not being liberal enough. There’s a sizable segment of the party that believes that should have gone with the self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and although that’s based on some polling from ages ago and doesn’t take into consideration that incredible amount of opposition research any Republican could have unleashed on that unkempt nutcase it’s at least theoretically possible. Another segment blames Sanders’ insurgent primary challenge to Clinton for making her unpopular among the most idealistic sorts of Democrats who’d prefer someone less indebted to Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, as if Clinton’s appalling record of dishonesty and corruption was already obvious, and as if such idealistic Democrats were a significant voting bloc, but we suppose that’s also theoretically possible. The 70-year-old Clinton will probably still have some sway in the party, although she not only but she lost to the reviled Trump, and 67 year old Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is probably the most prominent high-cheekboned face of the Democrats, but a party of scolding old white women will have a hard time going up against a party of angry old white men, and we’ve seen enough of those arguments to know that it won’t do anyone any good.

Not being Democrats, we’ll leave to them to sort it out. We used to be Republicans, and we’ve got our own worries.

— Bud Norman