Not that sin has much value in progressive-speak these days, but it’ll take more than three Hail Mary’s to save their party in the near term. At this national moment, Democrats and their noisemakers are attempting to mesmerize us with tales about the Russians’ lame attempt at presidential electioneering. What they should be doing, however, is engaging in a purge of bad ideas and stale leadership. They aren’t. While they distract us with, “The Russians did it,” what’s going on is a frantic search on bare pantry shelves for a fresh package of Twinkies—more sugar for another voting bloc. And that’s the Democrats’ second biggest sin. They still don’t get it.
As for the Russians, it appears that when they were unable to hack the RNC, they moved on to the DNC’s treasure trove. What were they up to? They were looking for dirt, of course, because leverage is power. Never mind that the Russians didn’t make the DNC dirt they exposed to sunlight. They just found it: the conspiracy to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders to the interesting tastes of the Podesta brothers. Exposed for all the world were ideas about re-making the Catholic church to suit the progressive pathology, the undue sensitivities of Latinos, the bad judgments about where to campaign—and where not to, and their over-arching arrogance about the voting blocs fortifying the fabled blue wall.
Never mind, too, that the good old US of A has been interfering in the national elections of other states since FDR days, from simple propaganda to vote manipulation to regime change. No virgins are we, so just how offended can we be by ham-handed Russian tricksters?
So, what’s new? Only, the supreme recklessness of the DNC in not protecting its secrets—yet a perfect mirroring of its 2016 standard bearer. If we’re foolish enough to accept the premise of the noisemakers, we’d also have to take the part of someone who’s left their keys in the car on the street in a not-so-great part of town, then wails to one and all when the car is stolen.
Then, there’s the progressive pathology which began, unwittingly, in those same FDR days with the dawn of Social Security. That and Medicare—perhaps noble efforts for the benefit of everyman everywhere—eventually morphed into today’s rampant entitlement mentality, then perverted further by full-bore identity politics. From the 1930s through the 1960s, then, being a Democrat meant being a broad populist struggling for the rights of commoners. LBJ’s Great Society turned government largesse toward poor and minority populations. While capstone initiatives emerged—like the Civil Rights Acts—what became entrenched was the notion of permanent entitlements in implied trade for bloc voting. And Democrats have been playing the sugar game ever since.
Like all panderers, the party needed to isolate one group, then another, telling each what they wanted to hear. Cynically, the rights of women in Roe v. Wade, and more recently, the surging of LGBTQ interests suited the party planners perfectly. The plights of the poor, minorities, and the middle class became less compelling when the challenges of illegals and the Latino population caused the party to toss still more candy to the newly deserving. Ordinarily, the strategy would have succeeded—people seem so easily bought, and fooled. What stopped the blocs?
Foremost, it was a flawed candidate, a manufactured icon who couldn’t replicate another “first” in election history, but because the party thought all their blocs held the wall, it listened little to the yearnings of the ignored masses. Worse, however, was the party’s biggest sin: not understanding the fatal flaw of identity politics. How so? Parents with children know they can’t tell each child they’re the favorite, because the others always figure it out, and then, there’s familial hell to pay. Yet, that’s what Democrats have been doing for decades, and some of “the kids” are beginning to get it. Truly, women, African Americans, gays, and Latinos aren’t children and will not be patronized any longer. They want the real dignity of jobs, education, and respect. For many Latinos, for example, the failure to remedy immigration woes when Democrats controlled the entire government from 2009 through the end of 2010—as they had been promised repeatedly—revealed the blue wall bloc had no value for them. Sweet milk gone sour.
Programs like Social Security and Medicare may have been instincts of a progressive party from another era, while mandated policies exempting some segments of the population from traditional American principles eventually lose their welcome. Like shills at the circus, progressives insisted upon full-term abortion on demand, sanctuary cities, a multi-lingual culture, and Petri dishes of Sharia law.
Policies of that kind are what really brought about the collapse of progressives this year because they meant shunning all-class white voters, popularizing family unit disintegration, hamstringing business and energy growth, promoting job export, tearing down traditional values, and disrespecting every religion but Islam. Deplorables of all colors and creeds who make this country work will not let Democrats tear it all down to bring about another USA—the Utopian States of Anarchy. Democrats can’t tell us they’re fighting for all the forgotten because no one believes it anymore. They fight for one thing only: power over all of us.
No, my friends in the party of my youth. It wasn’t the Russians. It was you.