When One Party Collapses, Nobody Wins
We need to help rebuild the Democrat Party
If you read my material, then you know that I grew up in a media family. My father wrote for the Boston Globe. That was when the Taylor family owned the newspaper and long before the New York Times bought it.
The competing newspapers at the time were the Boston Herald Traveler and the Record American. We always wanted to win the newspaper wars and wanted to see the day the Boston Globe was the only newspaper in the city. We were young and naive.
My father warned this would be a disaster. He said you never want to see a one newspaper town because then the news is controlled by one viewpoint. Competition was good for the consumer of news and it was important.
This was long before the Clinton Administration relaxed laws allowing corporations to own more than one radio or TV station and now whole swaths of stations in any one city can be owned by one corporation. George Soros recently bought Audacy with the interest of expanding his leftist vision to the media. The Murdochs own Fox News and then of course there are conglomerates that own Cumulus, IHeart to say nothing of ABC, NBC, CBS, etc.
However, we only have two viable parties and one just collapsed. As my father taught, this is disastrous if we do not shore up the now collapsed party.
Two Viable Parties Are Key
There is a great need in this country for a minimum of two viable parties. Lee Drutman explains in Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (Oxford 2020) that our current system of tri-partite government does not lend well to a coalition style of governing found in a parliamentary system. Therefore, if we are going to maintain a two-party system, we need to make sure both parties are viable.
It is in the interest of all to understand why the democratic party cratered earlier this month and what we can do to shore up both parties.
I would lay most of the blame on the fall of the democratic party on the elitism of its members. During COVID we learned of insulated expensive elementary schools which were havens for the elite. Tuition is in excess of fifty thousand dollars a year for a first grade. This is so students can have what it takes to get into the Ivy League school. They then enter the corporate or public world and become the movers and shakers of the country. The problem is this seems to be the make-up of the elite in one form or another who have no concept of the real world. This system produces a world of Maria Antoinettes who even though apparently did not wonder why people could not just eat cake, her mythical counterpart remains a warning.
The problem with the Democratic Party, which you can hear every day on National Public Radio is these elitists have a concept of the world that is not real and tried to enforce it on people who live in the real world. The result was disaster.
Meanwhile, the Republicans became the party that listened to the masses who live in the real world and could see nothing compatible with what was forced on them through the elitist democrats.
You may remember some pundits saying the Democrats were the party of the workers and the Republicans the party of the elites and now it is the opposite.
Trans Issue Killed the Democrats
The trans issue, in a recent study, was the number one reason why the majority of Americans in swing states rejected the Democrats. The gay community sees the trans issue as erasing their standing in the nation. Women feel undermined by the same trans issue in sports. So, the Democrats actually alienated two groups that they seemed to have firmly in their party—women and gays. Both groups disagreed with their position on trans issues and how to handle them.
Some teachers became the key in the trans issue to help students keep secrets from their parents. Adults cannot teach children to keep secrets from their parents—that is dangerous.
The media, filled with these same elitists from similar backgrounds could not stomach the thought of humans not seeing things their way. Switch to the now famous shot of the CNN pundit who refused to hear transphobia. This is precisely why the Democrats lost. They could not connect with the average people and they cannot still. Not only did they not understand the effect of inflation in the life of the average Americans, they could not understand the average Americans.
You can say anything to anyone without turning them into enemies; you just have to know how to do it. The Democrats obviously have no grasp of that skill and it cost them the election.
David Brooks writing in The Atlantic explains the admission process for Ivy League Universities for decades focused on intelligence and created a self-defined group of elites. Their viewpoint was too myopic to understand the issues affecting everyone. I am reminded of those people who can understand the theory of something and the way things should be and become confused about the way things are.
The world should work a certain way in the world of the elites and in their bubble it does but it does not conform outside of their groups. Many of the elites cannot understand this. Angry democrats complain the reason why Trump won is because too many people are racist. This Alinskyesque dismissal reveals the myopic vision of the elites. According to their observations people must have voted for Trump because they are racist, etc. However, the real truth is the educated class built their case on limited myopic observations complimented by less than accurate information. Going by what information they have, they draw an inaccurate conclusion because garbage in/garbage out. However, if they do not know they are working with incomplete data to begin with then they do not understand why their conclusion failed.
One of the most fascinating conclusions and probably one of the most accurate comes from Chris Hedges who explains the movement that brought forth Trump includes the Democratic Party.
“I blame the democratic party for the creation of Trump and we should have opposed the Democratic Party a long time ago.” Citing his conversations with Ralph Nader for whom he was his speech writer, he explains that corporate world had taken over the congress and this was part of what led to election of Trump.
Losing the audience
The media lost their audience. This is even more true today as we watch Morning Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski-Scarborough backed off their rhetoric and met with President-elect Trump in Mar-a-Lago. This was so startling that John Stewart explained that their actions were absurb because they referred to the president-elect as Hitler.
The Democrats lost the election because too many political and media leaders never associate with real people. They live in elitist compounds far from real men and women. Bizarre looking women and men refuse to associate with anyone who voted for Trump while those who see them say, “This is why we did not vote Democrat.” Some of those Trumpers are die hard members of the gay community who reject the trans issues.
The Democrat party did not just lose an election, their leadership failed America. America must work to rebuild them because Democrat or Republican we cannot live in a one-party state. We need both parties for the health of our country. Catholics have a call to be good citizens. We can work with both parties to make them healthy again. However, a warning to Catholics: I am not talking about the bishops but you. You have the ability to bring the Catholic vision into your communities. This is the vision to love and act in charity.
Meanwhile, James Carville said it well to his party: “Get your ass out of Washington.”
Fr. Robert J Carr is pastor of St. Anthony Parish in Allston, MA
The parish podcast is at CatholicAudioMedia.com