An ongoing conversation with in another thread brings home some hard-edged realities.
The Democrats lost this election, not in a little way, but in a big way. The Republicans gained control of Congress and the Presidency, and there will be a solid conservative majority on the Supreme Court before two years are up.
So.
What do Democrats stand for?
I don’t mean what government programs the Democrats want, or what projects they intend to support. I mean, what does it really mean to be a Democrat?
I am setting this post as “Screen all comments.” I am going to collect blind responses to this question until Monday, and then on Monday sometime I will unscreen all the comments, and then let the debate begin. But I figure, giving people a chance to say what they think it means in a secret ballot, we have a chance to state our sense of things before getting sucked into argument.
I don’t think it really means anything, right now, other than being anti-Republican. Not that being a Republican really means all that particularly much, as they’ve forfeited most of their policy advantages, but they manage to keep cohesions because the Democrats are so adamant about attacking them. In theory, they stand for the exact same thing as always — social and economic inclusion and justice. In reality, those things as originally framed are now achieved, but as always, the mission creep continues because of the reasons that scope creep always continues. Now they stand for forced inclusiveness and a stifling morality that doesn’t hesitate to paint itself as the natural order and claim anyone who opposes it is a reactionary bigot. They threw away their championship of civil liberties during the Clinton administration to pander to the law and order crowd, they continued to service their constituents by brute force of political machination, and when 9/11 happened, they rolled over like pack omegas. Now they have no political capital and no real ideals they can demonstrably have stood for since some time late in the 80s except bringing home the bacon to a plethora of minority constituencies.
The Republicans are not too far from this themselves, but that’s not the point of this essay.