Booman wrote a piece titled Diagnosing the Real Problem recently. It was a both complaint about what has become of the Republican Party and a sort of paean to the Democratic Party.
He wrote:
…virtually every asshole in the country is now a Republican.
—snip—
One party has absorbed nearly 100% of the greedhead, religious wacko, and racist vote.
—snip—
…they do what greedy, magical-thinking, assholes do. They break things, steal everything that isn’t nailed down, and act like jerks on principle.
He also wrote:
…all the people you see in the Democratic Party today: union workers, Jews, racial minorities, and the intelligentsia.
I guess half-right is better than all wrong.
Read on for more if you so desire.
…[Republicans] do what greedy, magical-thinking, assholes do. They break things, steal everything that isn’t nailed down, and act like jerks on principle?
Yes they do. Nothing new there. It’s almost a universal tendency on the right. William Butler Yeats pinned this syndrome rather more completely…and much more elegantly…way back in 1919.
From The Second Coming:
…and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
And there it is.
Y’see Booman, the problem lies at least as much with the makeup of your beloved Democratic Party as it does with the Republicans.
You say:
…the people you see in the Democratic Party today: union workers, Jews, racial minorities, and the intelligentsia.
Do you know who I see in the Democratic Party today?
“The best, lacking all convictions” just about sums it up. Well meaning, middle class, weak people. Marx’s useless bourgeoisie, in a nutshell. The same class that Hitler thoroughly chewed up and then spat out during his rise to power in Germany.
“Union workers, Jews, racial minorities, and the intelligentsia?”
I didn’t see precisely that makeup at the last eight or so Dem conventions. I saw mostly middle class and upper middle class city dwellers and suburbanites. The gentrifiers.
Union workers? Hell no!!! Real, walking-the-street members of many working unions are at least as likely to favor Tea Party memes as anything else these days. Think your average Teamster member for all you need to know regarding that idea. It’s still worth a black person’s mortal ass to walk the streets of white working class neighborhoods past about 9PM in the megalopolis that stretches from Washington DC to Boston. Bet on it. Southie? Bay Ridge? Fuggedaboudit!
Minorities? Dem conventions have looked like a sea of white faces to me for decades. White faces predominating, for sure. Not as white as the Ratpub conventions, but certainly not accurately reflecting the real racial makeup of the U.S. Where are the Central and Caribbean Americans in the Democratic Party? No fucking where, to be blunt, but they are doing the lion’s share of “working class” labor in this country. And where are the African, Indian, Pacific Rim, Central European and Muslim immigrants? They’re working too, aren’t they? Working their asses off.
The so-called intelligentsia? How many votes do they hold? A drop in the bucket. A pretty weak-kneed drop at that with very few exceptions.
Jews? I dunno. I suppose. But actively working for equality across the board in America? For freedom from the Israeli lobby’s immense power in DC? I don’t see it. Most “Jews” in the Democratic Party now seem to me to more part of an upper middle class caucus than anything else. The classic Jewish working class leftists? They seem to have pretty much disappeared to me. Many of my friends in high school and college during the ’60s were the sons and daughters of old-line Jewish lefties, and I loved their parents’ whole act. I only know two or three people now who are real left-wing Jews in that classic mold. The rest? They either got old or…in the case of the next generations…one way or another copped out. Emma Goldman and Bella Abzug they are not.
Your view of the Democratic Party is suspect to me, Booman. Sorry. It seems to me to be mostly a product of the same sort of “magical thinking” that you ascribe to the RatPubs.
Magical nostalgia.
The good old days of FDR’s coalition, not today’s wimpy Dem party.
Sorry, Booman. The “Dems” are now the party of lacked convictions and no effective working class coalitions while the Rats are certainly the worst of us but equally certainly full of passionate intensity. The lambent insanity shining out of the eyes of Michelle Bachmann and (especially) Rick Santorum in that Ames farce last week is all we need to know on the latter account, while the total Reid/Pelosi/Obama collapse in the debt debacle was the essence of lacked convictions.
Sorry, Booman.
That good ol’ Dem bubble done popped long ago.
Sorry.
WTFU.
It’s almost 2012.
Not 1938.
AG
