The Democrats Have Become Unacceptable, but Republicans Remain Intolerable
The country badly needs new governance
I believe that many Americans, perhaps a plurality, resent having to choose either a Democrat or a Republican in all statewide and national elections of importance.
On this point, my own case is instructive. I became an ardent supporter of President William Clinton in the 1990s, believing that his Administration’s policies and aims largely helped to guide the country in the right direction on a wide range of issues. My only significant disagreement was my objection to the Clinton Administration’s doubling down on the misguided “War against Drugs,” which in my view has been an obvious, colossal failure.
More generally, from the time I attained the right to vote in 1980 I invariably voted for Democrats and rooted for them even if along the way I learned to respect some eminent Republicans, such as G.H.W. Bush (during his one term as President), Jack Kemp (for his principled conservatism), and Mitt Romney (during his campaign against Obama and during Trump’s tenure). I almost never voted for any Republican, however, because it seemed that all Republicans, including the above three, were beholden to that party’s base, whose views on guns, the environment, civil liberties, and a number of other issues were and remain wholly unacceptable to me.
Much more recently, Democrats have become almost equally unacceptable. In 2021, I ceased to be affiliated with the party and instead registered as an independent after voting for Biden and repeatedly contributing to his campaign in 2020.
Before I explain this point further, I should briefly express my views on race and immutable demographic traits, since that is the topic on which the Democrats have adopted policies and a perspective that are most obviously antagonistic to my own.
My View on Race Discrimination. Past racism can have present consequences. In particular, the legacy of American slavery afflicts the country to this day. In the slave-holding States, Blacks were forbidden by law to receive any kind of formal instruction or learn any skilled trade. They were otherwise subjected to the worst kinds of physical, emotional, and psychological abuse and endured unimaginable hardships and a lifetime of hard labor and drudgery in exchange for bare survival. It was an evil regime, one conceived during a different era not so far removed from the ancient, universally human practice of enslaving vanquished tribes. It caused immense suffering to the immediate victims and remains the root cause of many problems that peculiarly beset Blacks today.
For all that, the current Democratic policies on this matter are hare-brained antidotes -- the product of muddled groupthink, misguided if well-intentioned academic theory, special pleading, the DEI mafia, and popular fads espoused by well-paid charlatans.
Their favored policies are profoundly illiberal, anti-meritocratic, and unfair to individuals who do not qualify as oppressed minorities. These policies predictably result in unedifying, zero-sum struggles between competing blocks of demographic groups. One jarring example was the recent public rift between Latino and Black members of the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors.
Chief Justice Roberts was right when he wrote that “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
I add, however, that a country as wealthy as our own must find ways to afford meaningful opportunities to everyone who is willing to “work hard and play by the rules,” as President Clinton used to say.
That means truly generous funding of early schooling, trade school, apprenticeships, university for qualified scholars, and more. That way, everyone willing to roll up his or her sleeves and work hard at something useful can make a meaningful contribution and be rewarded accordingly.
My Bill of Particulars Against Modern-Day Democrats. Here is my bill of particulars against my former party, which in its current form has become the very caricature that Republicans used to portray it to be:
1. Democrats have devolved into the party of “race-essentialists.” They managed to transform one of their strongest issues, anti-racism, into perhaps their most offensive, worrisome failing. Democrats used to decry and oppose discrimination against individuals because of immutable demographic traits. I supported that approach with all my heart. Now they positively discriminate in favor of specified demographic groups, giving them rewards, positions, adulation, and a free-pass because of historic injustices. That is a new kind of racism, which entails new double-standards and new instances of unfairness to groups excluded from favored status.
2. Most Democrats seem to support this policy or have been intimidated into acquiescence by intolerant progressives. The Biden Administration’s appointees, no matter how accomplished, are usually praised foremost for their demographic identity. The most ardent proponents of this worldview dominate local politics in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. A core Democratic group, DEI professionals, are handsomely paid by universities, schools, and companies to dole out benefits to recipients who have the right genetics and espouse the right groupthink. This trend is most pronounced in California.
3. Many Democrats in California have gone one step further by attacking the most important advances of the Great Enlightenment, such as “logical discourse,” “intellectual rigor,” and “self-discipline,” which they deride as mere “tools” that white men have used to justify their naked, evil oppression of others. That kind of ill-informed, reductionist thinking has led another core Democratic constituency, California’s public-education establishment, to conclude that math is racist because Blacks and Latinos tend to receive lower grades in math than do Asians and Whites. They have therefore revised the math curriculum, making it much less demanding. On the same ground, they have ended standard testing for admission to university and tried to abolish the standards for admission to elite, low-cost public high-schools.
4. Rather than look for ways to help Blacks and Latinos to excel in academics, California public educators have lowered academic standards, stopped recognizing the best students as “gifted,” ended “accelerated classes” for gifted students, and even limited the teaching of algebra to eight-graders and calculus to high-school students while casting doubt on the value of these courses. Google it if you don’t believe me.
5. More generally, too many educators in California seem to prefer teaching our children social-justice jargon rather than the basics, which are reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and geography. The many examples of this approach are astonishing and stupefying.
6. During the pandemic, the California teachers’ union (again, a core Democratic constituency) played an instrumental role in ensuring that California’s public schools shut down for unconscionably long periods.
7. Preposterously, Democrats in California now oblige schoolgirls to compete in sports against naturally stronger transgender girls and to accept their presence in girls’ bathrooms at school. They deride any opposition to this practice as an infringement of the rights of trans-people. They also insist on teaching little schoolchildren about the rights and sexual preferences of LGBTQ+ people. They condemn any effort to restrict this teaching as a restriction of those rights. Many, myself included, reasonably believe that little children should not receive any instruction at all about adults’ sexuality or sexual preferences.
8. During the primaries in 2020, one Democrat after another exhibited “soak-the rich populism” and memorably ganged up on the brightest, most original candidate to run, Michael Bloomberg, subjecting him to insults and unfair aspersions. He was impugned for his business success, which seemed to be a suspect circumstance for many Democrats. More generally, in 2020 the leading Democratic candidates and primary activists largely seemed unaware if not contemptuous of the concerns of businesspeople and their businesses.
9. Recently, President Biden dismissed as “wacko” the suggestion that recipients of federal aid meet a work or study requirement. True to form, he offered no elaboration or explanation of this offhand comment. Many, myself included, reasonably believe that it is poor policy to confer certain kinds of government benefits on able-bodied adults without requiring them to engage in productive behavior (e.g., working, studying, receiving vocational training, etc.). We should make it easy to do so and thereby avoid a stultifying bureaucratic process: there is so much useful work to be done in every direction, and so much work in the private sector, that those who take public benefits should be expected to work, study or learn a trade (excluding those who are genuinely disabled or incapable of doing so).
10. More broadly, too many core constituents of the modern-day Democratic Party seem unwilling to recognize the value of hard work, private effort, individual accomplishment, and business success. They do so at their peril, since those are the very values that likely matter the most to a broad majority of Americans. It is in our DNA. Those values are the very ones that should be encouraged and rewarded by our public policies.
11. The Democratic zeitgeist seems to favor full-throated, enthusiastic support of abortion rather than treat it as a regrettable, necessary tool sometimes needed to prevent unwanted pregnancies early in the term. Many, myself included, reject Republicans’ extreme efforts to make nearly all abortions criminally illegal, but also look askance at the way Democrats treat the topic.
12. Ancient Democratic leaders rarely step aside gracefully or in time, but instead cling to their offices and prerogatives long after they should have retired. On the whole, they have been a remarkably inarticulate, unpersuasive group of fading, mediocre octogenarians, unable even to make a strong case against Trumpist Republicans. What happens when they must oppose an articulate, decent, fair-minded electoral adversary? The party seems to have run out of Bill Clintons, Barack Obamas, Jerry Browns, Harry Reids, Al Gores, or any other leading light to make a strong case for anything. (In fairness, Bernie Sanders was an eloquent champion of an American version of social democracy, however much I might disagree with him on policy.)
13. Rather than improve themselves, Democrats now look for ways to improve the chances of Trumpist Republicans during Republican primaries in order to run against them in general elections. That is cynical, short-sighted, and contemptible, if not as awful as the open treason committed by Trump and the insurrectionists after the last Presidential election.
14. Lastly, I discovered after leaving the Democratic Party how condescending and demeaning its modern-day adherents can be towards those who do not bleat the party line on all major topics: to avoid their derision, one must either chime in, or offer a long-winded, prefatory nod to their different shibboleths before announcing an independent view on any important topic. That attitude repels many independents. The party to which I once belonged was not like that.
Democrat vs. Republican: a Miserable Choice. Despite all of these problems, which seem hopeless, the Democrats have one enormous advantage, which so far has spared them from a gigantic electoral rout. Namely, they are not MAGA Republicans, who now embrace an incomprehensible cult of guns and either deny that climate change is occurring or take potshots at every attempt that anyone takes to address the matter, even though addressing it is not only necessary to our long-term survival, but also offers our country its best opportunity for long-term, broad prosperity since the Second Industrial Revolution (c. 1865-1914), when the US pioneered the development of new industrial technologies during an earlier era of comparatively free trade and liberal immigration policies.
More generally, Republicans’ policies on immigrants, guns, and climate-change are absolute deal-breakers for many Americans, myself included.
Equally bad, Republicans’ misuse of the debt-ceiling law was spectacularly irresponsible and threatened to involve the country and all Americans in an unforced economic catastrophe, even if Democrats seemed incapable of explaining this matter convincingly to the public (e.g., “Under Trump, Republicans ran up the national debt and in particular voted for the very debt that they now refuse to pay unless they obtain severe concessions on industrial and climate-change investment – concessions that they cannot obtain by winning majority mandates in Congress. Apart from being ruinous and profoundly immoral for them to refuse to pay their own debts, it is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment.”).
Even worse, too many Republicans seem willing to embrace insurrection or election fraud when their candidates lose. That way lies the end of our Republic.
I suppose that I must make my position clear on immigrants, given the current furor over the matter. I do so briefly. Their arrival has renewed the country every generation and contributed immeasurably to its wealth, progress, culture, and vitality. Most immigrants are strivers who seek to make better lives for themselves and their families by coming here to work hard, invest in businesses, raise families, and plant new roots. We cannot welcome every last straggler, but we need much better policies than those that we have.
The key criteria for entry must be work qualifications, skills, and investment in the country. Gifted and accomplished students should find it easy to study here and remain here afterwards if they land jobs in fields where we lack workers. Workers in shunned occupations should enjoy similar treatment.
Republicans, however, seem to have become hostile to all immigrants who look different from their own ancestors. It certainly seemed that way during Trump’s tenure.
That then is the lay of the land. We must choose between unacceptable Democrats and Republicans who are even worse. It is a sorry spectacle and wholly unnecessary in a nation teeming with talent and energy.
Many Americans, I believe, yearn for a political party whose candidates openly debate these issues and others, and who can propose imaginative, constructive policies and approaches without fear of immediate, rancorous censure from puritanical, soak-the-rich progressives or conspiracy-peddling right-wing zealots.