The slow motion suicide of the Democratic Party is bad for everyone. Democrats, please put down the get-Trump crack pipe and do your job.
What do the never-ending get-Trump movement and last week’s debacle in Des Moines have to do with one another? At first glance, the two things may seem unrelated. President Trump cannot be blamed for the massive incompetence or corruption (or both) that led to the embarrassing mess in Iowa.
In reality, the get-Trump movement has everything to do with why the incompetence has infected so many corners of the once-great Democratic Party.
One thing about the get-Trump movement: It’s not a meritocracy. It’s the perfect vector for the amorphous angry political Left to vent its spleen. Donald Trump, for the past four years, has always been there. One need not inform oneself about any facts or expertise because snarky anti-Trump rhetoric works as a universal social passport within the elite circles of our country.
Imagine a modern college student who partied the night before an exam. When the professor hands back her paper with a big red “F” on it, she files a complaint stating that she is triggered by alleged microaggressions coming from the professor. The professor’s neoimperialistic privilege is to blame for the poor results, not her lack of effort or knowledge.
The trick works over and over again until the university hands her a worthless degree cum laude (with honors!). Then the new graduate lands an internship at a prestigious position in the Democratic Party. Little effort, if any, is invested in training her for her new job. The “training” seems to happen in the other direction as her new coworkers eagerly lap up the latest “woke” dogma, fresh from its academic font. She’s the perfect soldier in the war on Trump.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is an excellent example of this phenomenon. She graduated from Boston University with a degree in economics—fourth in her class! Yet with all of that really impressive credentialing, she lacks even a basic comprehension of how the branches of government work. If Ocasio-Cortez understands basic economic principles such as scarcity and opportunity cost, she’s keeping it well-hidden.
Anti-Trump Security Blanket
Comedians, actors, politicians, news anchors, journalists, government officials, FBI agents, and even members of the military use the get-Trump movement as a substitute for talent and accomplishment. Hatred of Trump works like the blanket did for Linus in Peanuts. Caressing it reassures the painfully insecure that they belong and “matter.”
If the conversation between two “woke” people stumbles on the inherent conflict between open borders and fighting income inequality, the polite conversation instantly can be rescued with outrage over the president’s latest tweet. A mayor of a failing city can nevertheless draw praise by blamingeverything on Trump.
“I would accuse my party at this point of having engaged in three years of fantasy football politics,” Van Jones recently said on CNN, ticking off the get-Trump efforts to subvert the electoral college, take down Trump with the Mueller investigation, and pursue impeachment and removal. Jones, you may remember, was one of the first public figures to admit that the Trump-Russia collusion hoax was a “nothingburger.” In a sort of walk back, he later added, “Democrats are fooling ourselves if we think that something is going to come out of this investigation that is somehow going to end the Trump presidency and make everything better.”
Jones also warned, in the summer of 2017 no less, that Democrats should not allow themselves to be sidetracked by the Trump-Russia collusion project. “Unless there is a real smoking gun, which there is probably not,” Jones said, “it’s just going to be a big old mess. Meanwhile, we are not talking about jobs, not talking about poverty, not talking about solutions, not talking about the addiction crisis. Let’s talk about our stuff.”
Now, almost three years later, we know that the Democrats failed to take his advice and just kept making bigger and bigger bets that enough Trump hatred could be whipped up and that they would never have to face their voters with uncomfortable conversations about issues.
When Ideology Trumps Sense
I recently wrote, “There’s a growing sense that the hatred of ‘that Man’ is the only thing holding the tent up. Without all corners straining against that central and uniting tent pole, Democrats unravel and deflate like a circus tent at the end of the Iowa State Fair. ‘That Man,’ is the only reason that billionaires, red socialists, and insider machine Democrats can coexist without turning their fire on each other.”
One is reminded of the state of the Egyptian military immediately before Israel’s stunning victory in 1967. On the surface, their forces vastly outnumbered the Israelis. But the Egyptians, like the modern Left, were totally corrupted by politics.
Senior positions were meted out on the basis of family or political ties, not merit, while subalterns were purposely chosen for their incompetence so as not to threaten their commanders…Ideology, rather than performance, was the yardstick for success. “We had great stacks of books and brochures on the glories of the July 23rd Revolution,” Gen. Abd al-Mun’im Khalil . . . complained, “The books, kept in perfect condition and inspected constantly, served as the basis for determining a unit’s fighting ability.”
This describes the modern Left perfectly. Familial and political ties are more important than talent. Ideology, the more radical the better, is seen as an indicator of the individual’s effectiveness. But eventually, somebody somewhere is going to expect the party machine to do its job (which is not complaining about Trump).
Iowa may be the first sign of the deep atrophy the Democrats have experienced while consumed with their get-Trump fever dreams. Worse yet (for the Democrats) they are inoculating Trump from any real scandal because of all the false cries of “wolf.”
Impeachment has strengthened the president’s popularity and distracted Americans from what the Democrats should be focused on during the 2020 election.
This would all be hilarious schadenfreude porn except that our democracy actually does depend on the existence of two competitive parties. Republicans are no different from Democrats in that they will succumb to corruption if they ever achieve absolute power.
The slow-motion suicide of the Democratic Party is bad for everyone. Democrats, please put down the get-Trump crack pipe and do your job.