The Coming Struggle for the Soul of the Democratic Party

Beneath the folds of each of our two political parties, a hidden party struggles to emerge. It’s not the woke Democratic Party of open borders and Saint Jussie Smollett, and it’s not the Make America Great Again GOP of the January 6 rioters and Matt Gaetz. It’s the Make America Normal Again party. MANA.The MANA GOP is the party of Governor Youngkin and the traditional Republican voter. The experts told him that inflation is over, but it didn’t look that way at the checkout counter. They told him that crime rates are down, but then he read about unreported crimes on his Nextdoor app. He listened to everything the Democrats said about Trump, and replied that they were worse still.MANA Republicans are quiet patriots. They wouldn’t have responded to calls to Make American Great Again but for the anti-Americanism on the left. They reacted when they were told that their country’s history is a list of shameful things that should never have happened, and that George Washington was an amoral monster. That’s not my country, they said.The MANA Democrats are harder to find, but their party’s continued existence depends upon them. It’s not written in stone that a party must continue in existence. Where are the Federalists and where are the Whigs of yesteryear? The GOP has persuaded voters that the Democrats are the weird party, and if they can’t change that they’ll go the way of the Whigs.That’s not going to be easy. The Democrats would have to become the party of the people it cast out, the Senator Manchins and Joe Liebermans. They’d have to compete for the votes of people with whom they lost touch, the Catholics, the union workers, the parents with school age kids. They’d have to recognize that some of the loudest voices in their party, the pro-Hamas protesters on college campuses, the racists and the zealots who want to sexualize children, are objectively their enemy.Can the Democrats do this? The party would have to abandon the conceit that their opponents are either bigots or stupid. And they’d have to do so without adopting the socialist agenda of a Senator Sanders. They’d have to recognize that a generous welfare state cannot exist without the economic prosperity to pay for it.None of that would be easy. What would be harder still would be the abandonment of the party’s Messianism. They’d have to wean themselves from the serotonin rush that comes from thinking that they’re the anointed ones. Rejected by the voters, they’d have to give up on the idea that they alone defend democracy. They’d have to say goodbye to the haters in the party.Instead of dividing Americans, they’d have to appeal to the common good and to things the Trump GOP is apt to miss, such as a decent health care system. They’d have to recall the nobility of an older Democratic party that was the party of kindness. They’d have to think that the Founders got it right and that that which is not liberal is not American. They’d have to become the party of normies, because normies are the adults who cast the median vote in a democracy.What will make it harder is the way in which the GOP has reinvented itself as a working-class party. An older white-shoe party now welcomes people whose last names begin or end with a vowel. A Trump GOP that is middle of the road on economic issues has pushed aside the free-market zealots who could be relied on to lose elections.Then again one can always count on hubris, the fatal willingness to think oneself in sole possession of the truth. It nearly destroyed the Democratic Party, and its symptoms can be seen in the Trump GOP. It also has its haters and perfect anti-liberal idiots who want to repeal the Enlightenment.What we’re about to observe is a struggle for the soul of the Democratic party, and the American patriot cannot be neutral in the contest. He will want MANA Democrats to succeed, because the alternative of a one-party state cannot be good for the country.

The Coming Struggle for the Soul of the Democratic Party

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