Once again, for the third time in recent months, the
Democrats have lost another special election, this time for the Montana House seat
vacated by new Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke Of course the usual suspects in the media are
once again trying their best to paint it as somehow positive for the Democrats –
arguing that they didn’t lose by as much as they expected, so the GOP must be
in deep trouble. It’s a pathetic argument,
and reflects how completely out of touch some of the media talking heads are
with the real world.
Meanwhile Democrats continue to flail away at the Trump administration,
outraged that Trump’s son-in-law might have been trying to establish a private back
channel to the Russians (a common practice in diplomacy used by all previous administrations,
including Obama’s), outraged that he fired FBI director Comey (even though they
themselves wanted to fire him), outraged that he proposes to cut the budget and
downsize the government (even though we are going half a trillion dollars a
year more into debt with the present budget and government size). Mostly it looks to me like spoiled children
acting out.
We badly need an effective opposition party – there are
things the Republicans want to do that ought to be effectively opposed; there
are issues that need a serious and honest public debate. But the current Democratic
Party isn’t that effective opposition party, which is why they have been losing
elections all across the country for the past decade. I am beginning to see
serious speculation in the press that the Democratic Party is on its way to
extinction, and considering how inept, corrupt, and out of touch the party
machinery has been recently I think it is a real possibility. Political parties have gone extinct before when
they simply no longer had a message that appealed to enough voters. It might be
happening again.
There are certainly enough opportunities for a new political
party to gain traction – one that paid attention to the health of the economy
as the engine that drives everything else, one that attended to the displacement
of workers by automation, one that attended to income inequality and the economic
plight of the working middle class, one that got real about government spending
and reducing – or at least not further increasing - the national debt. These used to be the sorts of down home things
(except perhaps for the debt issue) that Democrats worried about, before they
got lost in the trendy cultural issues of the wealthy coastal liberal elites.
If Democrats don’t get real sometime soon, and face up to an
honest reassessment of their messages and policy proposals, and try to reach
out to those “deplorables” who used to be a reliable base for them, I think
they will continue to lose elections and soon be largely irrelevant on the American
political scene. And that would be
dangerous for the country – we badly need an effective and realistic opposition
party.
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