The Debate and the Direction of the Democratic Party Right Now Leaves No Room for People Like Me
by Sasha Stone and Ryan Adams
I don’t recognize the Democrats anymore. The same hostile forces that shrieked at me to get out of the party in 2016 are now leading the party. The far left puritanical fundamentalists have not only taken over the party but the other candidates simply can’t get through the noise because social media and MSM favors the brands that bring the clicks and right now those are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
While Republican operatives are spreading a “walk away” movement designed to peel off Democrats to join Trump, I will never go that far. But I do wonder if the Democrats will ever be the party I remember, the party I have believed in all my life, the party I have always supported. Right now, it doesn’t look like it. That’s because Bernie Sanders crashed the party and, since he leads in the contests so far, his faction of the party has all but completely shifted the conversation to his platform. And in just three short years, the Democrats that most voters hear the most about are the Democratic Socialists, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the co-leader alongside Bernie.
That squeezes out tens of millions of people like me. So his supporters, and her supporters would say “Good riddance. We don’t want you anyway.” Because they’re swept up in their perfect strident Utopian vision of American life. “You’re OLD,” they would say (and have said).
This country has always had a blind spot when it comes to youth-led movements. Young voters won’t listen to those of us who have lived through the pendulum shifts. Right now, the pendulum is not shifting left, it’s shifting right, and our warnings are being ignored.
So those of us faithful party loyalists are expected to just sit down and shut up and let the loudest most aggressive 25% destroy the progress made by Barack Obama? Will Biden be able to break through in states that aren’t so predominately white? Can any moderate? There are too many moderate candidates running so they split the vote in 3 or 4 slices, while Bernie consistently collects delegates.
Low hanging fruit nails Mike Bloomberg, whose unforgivable sin, according to them, is wealth. Determined to make something of his life, he rose from typical middle-class neighborhood, and took all the right steps to success. An Eagle Scout who studied hard, got into Johns Hopkins and then on to Harvard. All on his own, without a rich family to make it easy. Among the first to see how technology and finance could merge, he got rich doing it, and by dint of his own creative intelligence he attained the dream that most America aspire to — just like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. But the brand new Democratic Party doesn’t like that type of background. Perhaps because so few of us have the brains to do it that way, it’s easier to identify with the bartender-turned-congresswoman AOC, and the formerly unemployable dreamer Bernie to land in the Senate with no discernible skill except for angry speechifying. Smart, innovative individuals need not apply if they make the fatal mistake of getting rich before they go to Washington.
Do repulsive billionaires exist? Obviously. But are people really simpleminded enough to think all billionaires are created equal? Seems that way, since being a billionaire is disqualifying in the eyes of all the millionaires on the debate stage in Las Vegas, as Elizabeth Warren and all the other millionaire Democrats emphatically stated .
Share photos of outrageous mansions all you want, but just know this: the further left the Democrats shift, the easier Trump sleeps at night. Why? Because he’s a hateful uneducated weasel and he understands the millions of Americans who are just like him. They outnumber Idealist Democrats by a wide margin. Seems unnecessary to explain math, but let’s do it anyway: the 25% of primary voters who are Berniecrats are not the majority. They only seem to be so prevalent since Warren faltered and Sanders rose by collecting her deserters. But moderate voters still constitute the majority overall and if one of the moderate candidates would drop out, we could sure use their help to mount a challenge to Bernie. But which candidate is willing to take one for the team? Seems that none of them are right now, and right now is when it needs to happen.
Debate night showed me a party that scolds and shames anyone who has built a business from the ground up and succeeded at it. It was Twitter on Broadway, blasted coast to coast into 20 million households in real time. Warren’s strategy of wreaking unsparing revenge on her rivals because she’s lagging behind appears to be a move out of the Trump playbook. But it won’t work for her. America can’t handle it when a woman behaves that way. That’s the tactic reserved for irascible old men, so It will only work for Bernie.
The press is lazy so it feeds off of Twitter which feeds off the fringe. While it’s true that Bernie Sanders has a sturdy ground game he is still aiming to instigate a hard left revolution immediately after the electoral college certified a revolution that veered hard right. The ship of state is not build to withstand U-turns. That trick has already been tried in the UK, and it failed. In order to reverse course, you must steer the country back to the middle.
The Bernie left has chosen to wage war against successful people and in essence they’re making the case that there’s no point in even bothering to try to make something of yourself. The system is rigged. No one can ever get ahead (apparently not even Susan Sarandon?) so let’s just raid the bank accounts of the super-rich, sap all of the money we need from the Forbes 400 and even things out a little bit. It is hatred of the rich, which was made abundantly clear when they all showed that Bloomberg, despite his popularity with actual voters, was not welcome on that stage. The ratings for the Nevada debate were the highest ever. That’s not just because viewers they expected to see Cirque du Soleil. As someone who supports anyone who can beat Trump (reminder: Bernie can’t) I was horrified at the behavior of our candidates. It was the first time in my entire life that I thought, “this show is not for me.”
Elizabeth Warren glared at Mike Bloomerg like he was a piece of trash. For whatever reason, Twitter loved it. Partly because Twitter is the playground where bullies reign supreme, with an addiction to crude zingers, blood sport, and ripped flesh. but partly because many Democratic voters are buying what Bernie is selling. Right now? Right after half the country elected a guy who shits on a golden toilet?
They loved seeing their plucky Frank Capra heroine attack her presumed allies. But imagine if any man had done that instead. Imagine the gasping pundits if Pete had gone that far, or Biden, or god forbid, Bloomberg? Even if America’s Sweetheart Amy Klobuchar had tried that, she wouldn’t have gotten away with it. But Warren somehow is the embodiment of white virtue. She’s the spunky but patient school teacher that so many aspirational teenagers once wanted to please. She makes them feel how they want to feel. No one else really seems to be able to carry that off. But for all it’s undeniable onstage drama, it isn’t translating to a successful coalition. And much of that is because she does tend to flip-flop around — on PACs, on health care. Bernie doesn’t do that, he’s too stubbornly cocksure of his own infallibility (although there are PAC backing Bernie, he’ll just never admit it).
But the question remains, is this what America is actually really want? Is this what we’re really like? Are the bizarre insular online dreams of Utopia leaking out of tweets through the teevee and infecting the country at large? The answer to that, of course, is no. Veteran Democrats in Washington are never going to crawl up Bernie’s ass the way the GOP has done with Trump. There is no way they are going to go for “it’s my way or the highway,” and I don’t blame them. I am not a Democrat who takes my marching orders from Bernie Sanders and his bullying, hostile, crybaby tribe. No thanks.
How can this contagion be halted? Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren both need to drop out. That will leave Sanders, Biden, Buttigieg and Bloomberg. Then we can get a more realistic view of how far left Democratic voters truly want to go. Buttigieg is leading in delegates so he shouldn’t drop out, Bloomberg is rising in the polls, and he’s clearly got the attention of many voters that were losing interest, so he shouldn’t drop out. Biden still seems like the safe choice. But after a few more primary states, if Bernie runs the table, I fear we are screwed.
If I’m on the fence, a lifelong Democrat who puts climate change at the top of my list of concerns, I can’t imagine what anyone to the right of me is going to think. No matter what you hear from celebrity analysts on MSNBC, progressives are not the majority in this country. They’re not the majority of Democrats. Moderates are.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out how this ends. It’s as though none of the brutal lessons have been learned, not from 2016, not from the Kavanaugh hearings, not from impeachment. Too many Democrats simply do not understand what we’re up against. If a lifelong Democrat like me is considering truly leaving the party, going my own way as an Independent, then I can only imagine what people even more centrist than I am must be feeling.
