#13 Stephen Green had a great take on the modern demoncrats:
Amie Parnes, the author of this piece, frames it as Young vs Old, Establishment vs Antiestablishment -- and she isn't wrong. But that framing also skips past the truth of it.
The real story is this: Believers vs the Cynics.
Youthful lefties still believe leftwing nonsense like "democratic" socialism, group identity, and all the rest. The Old Guard doesn't believe in much of anything other than lining their own pockets.
As the Old Guard ages and their numbers dwindle, the youthful believers demand to take over -- and the Left always-always-always devours its own.
Today's Old Guard came of age politically in the 1960s and '70s, after the more-moderate party elders got brushed aside by the radical Boomers and hippies. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a real radical left among them. The Clintons set the modern template: Say or do anything to win and keep power, then use the resulting influence to grow "rich beyond the dreams of avarice." Never before has America given so much to such otherwise unimpressive hustlers.
Even Barack Obama cashed out pretty much the moment he left the White House. Hell, considering Obama's net worth coming into the White House, having produced not one actual good or service aside from a couple of not-very-good books, it's a safe bet that Obama was never the radical he had played at being. It was always about the money, and about corrupting the law and the Constitution to get it.
But he sure did inspire a new wave of Believers, didn't he?
And now they've come to take what they feel is their due -- the cynical husk of the Democratic Party -- and re-radicalize it.
They'll do it, too, over the course of the next two, three, maybe four elections.
And make no mistake: This is a genuine grassroots radicalization. And they're angry, too, feeling robbed by the Clinton Machine of their rightful Bernie nomination two years ago.
I suspect that the party will become further marginalized during this period, until the Cynics take back over and drag it back towards moderation. But you never know. Maybe they'll find a hard lefty charismatic enough to create an illusion of centrism, and then take the country over the cliff.
What I do know is that no matter what George Will says, the Democrats in their current state absolutely cannot be trusted with power. On the off chance of another wave like 2006-08, legislatively and culturally they'll make Obama's first two years look like Reagan's.
So keep that in mind as you're weighing your votes over the next few elections. |
... the late Tip O'Neill's former gopher who has magazines with centerfolds of Barack Obama in his bathroom...