By Robert E.L. Walters
Image By Stable Diffusion Online
Tuesday 05 November 2024 was a pretty grim day for the Democratic Party of the United States. Not only did they lose the U.S. Presidency, but the Senate, and if current trends hold, will fail to regain the House of Representatives. This coupled with a strict constructionist Supreme Court will spell a stay in the political wilderness for at least two years to come if not longer, since the country moved measurably right this cycle. How far to the right? This interactive map from Fast Company illustrates the full depth and force of the so called "Red Wave" of 2024 and it is pretty compelling.
This essay however is not going to talk about the "Red Wave" per se, or the President elect, because after a decade in politics and a score of decades in the public eye, there's not much left to say about him, or his relative benefit or detriment as a candidate, because after this win, he is the president elect, and will never be a candidate again. Rather this essay is going to talk about delusion and sanctimony, and the role it played in this and other recent elections.
The Democratic party has some serious issues (which is why I have never supported them as a party) but one of the worst that perennially percolates up, and the one that I believe sunk the Democrats' chances most, is sanctimony. The party just can't seem to help itself from assuming a puritanical position of virtue that is not only wrong-headed and shrill, but off-putting and divisive. When a party tells half the electorate they're mean, selfish, dolts, it is highly unlikely anyone is going to vote for them.
This sanctimony is coupled with another perennial tendency among the Democrats, hypocrisy. Being lectured about financial sacrifice or global warming and environmentalism by the Obama family for example, would resonate far better if they didn't live in a $14,800,000.00 mansion on the water in Martha's Vineyard, as observed in this 08 September 2019 editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal . And I don't mean to pick on the Obamas. Go through the rolls of the many celebrity Democrats who have no shortage of advice for the American people with regard to how they should live their lives, and you'll see what I mean.
Wealthy, well-educated elites are forming a very noticeable aristocracy in the United States, and it's not going unnoticed by the serfs and tradesmen. What the last few elections have shown is that these wealthy, well-educated aristocrats have converted the Democratic Party into their own American version of the British Tory party, and that as a result, Labor and Liberals are being driven in droves to the Republicans. Democratic "noblesse oblige" notwithstanding, the success-guilt presumably driving these Democratic politics needs to be squelched if the Democratic Party has any hope of recovering power.
Something that is often over-looked by the Left in the United States is why their pursuit of European-style social democracy here has a limited appeal. For European countries that lived for centuries under feudalism, the transition to the nanny state seemed an almost natural extension of that system. In the United States however, where our country was founded by people escaping the remains of feudalism, and dedicated (of a necessity) to self-reliance, a structured elite doling out cash and pontification is a difficult sell, especially when we have a federal system specifically designed to thwart it at a national level. Divorcing their politics and philosophies from these realities,and then getting indigent about it when the electorate rebels, only exacerbates their problems.
Franky I don't know where the Democrats will go after this. I have long maintained that the Democratic Party is not so much a party as it is a mutually dis-inclusive coalition. Perhaps it will splinter. Perhaps it will move right. Perhaps it will stay in the wilderness for the foreseeable future. Wherever it may go, the health of a two-party system in the United States requires two healthy parties. I hope the Democrats will take inventory of their loss this year and correct. Not only for their sake, but for the sake of America's system of two-party government.
Comments