My title is my subject: What happened to the Democratic Party?
Well, nothing good.
That isn’t a full answer, but it’s an accurate one.
The party of Scoop Jackson, of JFK and FDR and Harry Truman, the party, that is to say, whose patriotism and seriousness no one could dispute, is gone.
Sometime in the 1960s, hitching its star to the welfare industrial complex and various public sector unions, it became the regime party.
Gradually, its only interests were special interests.
Then, in the Obama and post-Obama years, it went mad.
No longer was it a party of politics.
It was transmuted into a party of identity politics.
The imprecations of “The Squad”—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and the others—make headlines but, like the mutterings of the weird sisters in “Macbeth,” portend only chaos and evil.
Following that seemingly ineluctable logic that Marx described in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” what had been a party of politics became a party of identity politics: Tragedy had degenerated into a species of farce.
The final stage came with the emergence of Donald Trump on the political stage.
For reasons I don’t completely understand, this brash, unclubbable populist exploded like an EMP attack, disrupting the symbiotic consensus that had knitted together the regime party and suckling pseudopods into an engorging unity.
Since 2016, it’s been constant screaming at the sky, special counsels, and fantasies of impeachment, indictment, and destruction.
As anyone who can utter the syllables “Liz Cheney” knows, this pathology has infected the GOP wing of the establishment consensus just as much as it has infected the Democratic Party.
But providing an explication of that part of our national nightmare is a task for another day.
For now, I want to detail some of the things that have happened to the Democratic Party.
I write, by the way, not as a partisan but as a documentarian.
For an assist, I turn to Tulsi Gabbard, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, former U.S. representative from Hawaii, former presidential candidate, and, as of last week, former Democrat.
Gabbard was always an outlier in the contemporary Democratic Party.
It isn’t that she’s conservative. She isn’t.
But she is sane. And in the context of the rampant psychopathology of our politics, that gives her the sheen if not of conservatism, then at least of reasonableness.
On Oct. 11, Gabbard announced in a video clip on Twitter that she was leaving the Democratic Party and would henceforth style herself an independent.
Were I a Democratic strategist, her performance and bill of indictment would make me nervous.
As a citizen who’s more worried about the direction of our country than I have ever been, Gabbard’s indictment impressed me with its plainspoken accuracy.
That accuracy also gave me hope, for the first step on the road to recovery is a candid recognition that one is lost.
Gabbard showed just how lost the Democratic Party had become.
Moreover, she said, this cabal divides us by “racializing every issue and stoking anti-white racism, ... actively [works] to undermine our God-given freedoms, ... [and] are hostile to people of faith and spirituality.”
Any dissenters?
Then, there are some particulars. The Democratic clique that Gabbard apostrophizes “demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, ... weaponize the national security state to go after their political opponents, and above all, ... are dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.”
True, all true.
Far from supporting Lincoln’s (and the Founders’) vision of government “of, by, and for the people,” she said, the Democratic Party shows daily that it stands for government “of, by, and for the powerful elite.”
Gabbard ends by calling on any “common sense independent-minded Democrats” to join her in leaving the party that has become a wicked caricature of its former self.
The inveterate addiction to power will probably stanch the flow of recruits to her defection.
But that doesn’t mean partisans of common sense shouldn’t applaud Gabbard’s message.
For myself, I respond to her courageous and heartfelt testimony with an enthusiastic “Amen,” our version of the Hebrew word meaning “So be it.”
