The Dismal Condition of the Democratic Party Isn't Inevitable

I propose an experiment that you can do yourself, with your own results that will allow you to test a premise.

This is becoming a notorious image, after a man on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina pulled out a knife and — allegedly, but also pretty obviously — killed the stranger who was sitting in front of him:

In a development as predictable as the sunrise, the Democratic mayor of Charlotte issued a statement that poured out her sorrow and sympathy for…the unfortunate unhoused soul who slashed that woman’s throat. You can read the statement here, if you feel the need, but it’s absolute dogshit from a gibbering moron. Arresting people isn’t the answer, we need to provide more services to these poor suffering people, blah blah blah. That poor man was forced to cut a stranger’s throat because we didn’t give him enough free shit. How he must have suffered!

The Democratic Party pours out this woketard mouth slop like an uncapped sewer, insane and stupid in apparently equal measure, while their instinct for political theater embarrasses the hypothetical toddlers at the fictional home for children with severe brain injuries:

@ed_markeyThank you for teaching me about the seasons @Jack Schlossberg #dnc #brat #democrat

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Democratic politicians are just sickening and repulsive, all the time. I find myself baffled by the endlessness of it, and wondering how someone like an Ed Markey still finds himself in public office. Are we just addicted to the degradation? Should people who vote for that be forced to wear that leather bondage hood thing to signal their political fetish?

However.

The miserable state of the Democratic Party isn’t normal. The proud course into nose dive decline, wholly avoidable squalor, and mindless symbol-performance completely disconnected from physical reality is a historically recent development, maybe Jimmy Carter aside. Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom are a sign of illness, not the normal condition of the party. Earlier generations of Democratic leaders were much less stupid than the ones we endure now.

Places that are being destroyed by Democrats were in many cases built by Democrats. The California Governor Pat Brown left the state far better than he found it, in a creative explosion of infrastructure construction: better transportation, better water supply for agriculture, better (and highly affordable) access to higher education for the middle class. Back up to the pre-Obama party, or better yet to the pre-Clinton party, but stop traveling back before the New Deal, and everybody but Jimmy Carter sucks a lot less. Karen Bass is so astonishingly stupid and destructive it’s almost miraculous, but the pivotal post-1960s first liberal mayor of Los Angeles was a famously deliberative and gracious leader who served five terms in the office. Compare the way Mayor Tom Bradley spoke and thought to the way his dim bulb successor speaks, or goes catatonic and doesn’t speak:

Bradley certainly had failures on his record — no one could lead a major city for twenty years without failing at something — but he was concerned down to his bones with the health and good working order of the city. He was unmistakably liberal, an ex-cop police reformer who also signed one of the first ordinances in the country to forbid employment discrimination against gay and lesbian workers. But he also fought disorder in the daily reality of the city, or tried to, and he talked like an adult. Really. Watch the man speak. It’s like watching footage from another planet.

Or, to watch something so baffling it gives me a headache, watch Pat Brown’s son, the governor Jerry Brown, who was at the time mocked as the whacko “Governor Moonbeam” but who sounds like…well, watch:

Here’s a 45-second excerpt from that, in footage I basically recorded off the computer screen with a potato and it looks like garbage, but FOR CRYING OUT LOUD JUST LISTEN TO WHAT HE SAID, as a famously liberal Democratic governor:

The state is performing a bunch of roles that used to belong to the family, and it’s clear we can’t afford it. That clip is just under fifty years old, chronologically, but it’s culturally closer to the moment Eve started eyeing the apple.

So the experiment is this:

Pick a prominent pre-Obama / post-FDR Democrat and search up some online footage of them, then just listen to what they said. Listen to the way they spoke, and listen to the substance of their arguments. Go back to anywhere that was seventeen years ago or earlier, and hear the difference. A bunch of footage that was shot on film has been digitized, so you have a wide range of choices. A personal favorite is the group that ran against Bill Clinton, back in 1992: Paul Tsongas, Bob Kerrey. Spend ten minutes listening to prior generations of Democratic politicians. I’ve spent my entire adult life thinking of Lyndon Johnson as a fool and a vampire, but listen to LBJ, if you want. It’s still night-and-day. They were wrong, but they were recognizably American.

The decline is much more stark than we’re allowing ourselves to notice. As the hearings with RFK, Jr. just suggested, the Democratic Party has simply gone bitten-by-a-rabid-dog insane. Here, let’s use this picture again:

Our political culture lost its floor. We can debate the particulars — how, when, why — but the outlines of the implosion seem extremely clear.

The obvious response is going to be that OH YOU THINK YOUR ORANGE HITLER SOUNDS LIKE EARLIER REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTS, and no, I don’t. I think he sounds like a slightly more colorful 1960s centrist Democrat, and he’s far closer to a very recent political mainstream than, say, Elizabeth Warren. The political culture lurched under our feet in ways that we have not yet fully recognized. Think what you want about Trump, but notice that the context for the Trump presidency is a hard cultural implosion before and around him. We can go from there, but that’s my starting point.

Go listen to some old Democrats.