By Bob Dorn / San Diego Free Press
The Democratic Party, not the Republicans, died Tuesday night. It took with it to the grave a functional middle class.
From now on smart people will have to find some new ways to avoid the hoi polloi, the downward bound still clinging to their weekend Harleys and storing their AK 47’s in whatever closet they can afford to rent. We’ve watched our tepid and bland Democrats—the Susan Davis’s and Scott Peters—clapping and wiggling their asses to the tunes of corporate advisers for so long that we’ve failed to notice they look and sound just like Republicans.
They just wouldn’t go away, would they? They kept cloning themselves, and droning the same songs of the party of Jefferson. They were forced by political law to live in their districts but we didn’t know where they were, and we knew it wouldn’t be in their local offices. How many pieces of our minds were we unable to give them?
Who’d a thunk the Dems would die first? The Tea Party and the White Nationalists and the End Time Evangelicals were making war on The Blue-Suited Wall Streeters and Corporate Media, and so we thought the Republicans were killing themselves.
We told ourselves everything would be okay, that Orange would not be the new red, white and blue. That if we just kept swallowing the shit we were being handed by our betters we could trade the apartment for a condo for a bungalow for a two-story near La Jolla, from where our kids could eventually make it to Rancho Santa Fe.
Those tastefully dressed battalions of ladies and gentlemen who were our ceremonial Representatives now stand embarrassed and run over by Monster Trucks with energy drinks dripping icy daggers snugly fitted into the cup holders, and 70 year-olds still listening to 60-year-old guitar shredders. Revolution is Ted Nugent’s alt-name. The Democrats don’t have one. What would it be? Not Socialist. Not Social Democrats.
For a long time the Democrats have tried to define themselves as what they were not.
They lost because they were phony. They no longer believed in their heroes. Wasn’t there once a War on Poverty? Now we’re homeless. They never mention LBJ, the assassinated Kennedys, the assassinated Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers. They never thought back to Eugene McCarthy. Howard Dean was dumped for a scream he made. And what became of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and The New Deal that rescued this country from conditions somewhat worse than we face now?
That was only history, though. Only.
Now we trust nasty political scientists (politics is scientific?) who write about impenetrable devilments with names like Chaos Theory and Creative Disruption and Zero Sums. Our favorite holiday is Halloween, which now lasts the whole month of October and verges on Thanksgiving. We’ll be thanking god we’re alive, right?
A friend wrote the morning after The Debacle a 3-word Zen advisory: “Nothing is Permanent.” It turns out not even the United States.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
The Nation has survived the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Bin Laden, and George W. Bush, and we will survive this. We just need to get organized.
I wouldn’t say it died, I would say it lost this election due to undemocratic factors such as congressional gerrymandering, voter suppression and electoral college. This can be reversed quickly. However, the Republicans are going to continue their dirty politics and do their worst for as long as they can, so we’ll see what happens.
The Dems are sclerotic, denied us (along with the “mainstream media”) the chance to be re-made as a party of the people with Bernie Sanders, and chose an extremely flawed candidate- Clinton. So – nowhere to go but up – but if the party continues to take the corporate payola, we are doomed not to have a real voice.
Start by working locally and dump the Peters-type wishy washy corporate Democrast for real ones.