I hate what my Democratic Party has become: a woke, intolerant monstrosity of the far left. A party that cancels people it doesn’t agree with, that virtue signals, that wants to defund the police, that coddles criminals, that is addicted to identity politics and, especially, to its misguided sense of “social justice.”
This is not a party my parents would have recognized. They were lifelong Democrats who idolized Franklin D. Roosevelt, just as I idolized John F. Kennedy. The Democratic Party back then was a moderately liberal party that stood for incremental change, and because it was a “big tent” party, it refused to promote any one of its constituent base groups over all the others. That was a party that could bring Americans together.
But something happened. I can’t define exactly when, or how. But over the last 20 years or so, the party has fled to the left, just as Republicans have fled to the right. And it’s become increasingly hard for me, and for people like me, to remain in the Democratic camp. I know that it’s common today to say that Black women are the Democratic base, bless them, but once upon a time, it was educated, urban White Jews, like me and my family. Now, it’s shocking how many members of my family have either shifted Republican or are considering doing so this November. Democrats may lose the Jews as a core constituency. That in itself should shock the Party into an historic reappraisal of its orientation, but the fact is that the Democratic Party has just become too extreme, too intolerant, too obsessed with race. It no longer has the ability to speak to all Americans, but only to an increasingly shrinking core of so-called Progressives.
And yet! As I always point out to my family and friends, what is the alternative? Yes, the Democratic Party has wandered far from its traditional moorings, into unpleasant, unsavory territory. But compared with the Republican Party, Democrats are all sweetness and light. It’s the Republicans, in their bizarre allegiance to Trump, that threaten to turn America into a right-wing Christian theocracy, a clerical-fascist authoritarian dictatorship of the neo-nazi variety in which diversity is expunged, science is dismissed as lies, the rich are protected, and voting rights eradicated. As a gay man, I’m particularly sensitive to the homophobia that infects the Republican Party, courtesy of its Christian base. To paraphrase Pastor Niemoller, first they came for the trans people, then they came for the queers, then they came for the Moslems, then they came for the Jews, then they came for the liberals and the media, then they came for the unions, and then they came for…who’s next on their kill list?
I wish we weren’t confronted with this binary choice, but we are. Of course, you can always vote for a third party, if you want to flush your vote down the toilet. And you can choose not to vote, which is the way of the cynic and coward. I could never, will never vote for a Republican as long as they’re enthralled by Trump, Trumpism, and the worst of deluded, dangerous evangelicals. That leaves the Democratic Party; hence, the title of today’s post, “Why I’m still a Democrat.”
I firmly believe—in fact, I know that it’s possible to rescue the Democratic Party from the wokes, from the likes of Carroll Fife and Cat Brooks (to use local examples). These people are not true Democrats; they do not represent the historical values of Democrats. They are fascists of the left, just as Trump and his cult are fascists of the right. If you want to know the names of some Democrats who, in my opinion, remain moderately liberal, they are Gavin Newsom, Joe Biden, and, in the Senate, Tim Kaine, Jon Tester and Mark Warner. I wish—oh, how I wish the Democratic Party would move toward the center, away from the horrors of wokeism. If Democrats are annihilated this November, as now appears likely, maybe the party will change its tune, and realize it must expunge the far left, like a tumor, in order to survive. At any rate, the struggle of our time in America is to resist the insanity of the Republican Party and restore the traditional values of the party of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, JFK, LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, the great Barack Obama and, yes, for all his infirmities, Joe Biden.
Steve Heimoff