Is it just me? Surely not. I can’t be the only person in America who has noticed that since the election of President Trump, huge numbers of both Democrats and Republicans have turned into raving twits. There must be something in the water that makes people forget everything that happened politically in this country longer ago than, say, six weeks.
George W. Bush was absolutely godawful for freedom. Then Barack Obama actually made the situation worse. Now along comes Donald Trump, going authoritarian like gangbusters, and many of the same conservatives who only a couple of months ago were complaining about the Stalinist direction of the federal government are euphoric about how masterfully he is steering the ship of state. And the “progressives” (sorry, I cannot bring myself to write that word without scare quotes), who so recently worshiped at the altar of the previous president’s might, have actually begun to lament the authoritarianism of the presidency.
Since the election of President Trump, huge numbers of both Democrats and Republicans have turned into raving twits.
If Rip Van Winkle were to awaken today, having fallen asleep just before November of 2016, he’d be so confused that he’d go right back to sleep again. Libertarians could explain it all to him, since we’re the only ones who understand what’s going on. I can only speak for one libertarian, but the whole mess makes me want to take a nap and not wake up ’til at least a few among my countrymen who’ve lost their minds come to their senses again. I’m being exceedingly optimistic, of course, in assuming that this will happen.
From the long perspective of history, that pendulum of power we always talk about is swinging to and fro like the bell-pull in the tower at Notre Dame. Poor Quasimodo is hanging on for dear life. And those of us who’ve managed to retain our sanity are hanging on with him.
What the Democrats are experiencing at the moment is karma. Not the good kind, which results from doing unto others as you would like to be done unto you. To paraphrase an old country song, they’re getting slam-dunked by karma through the basketball hoop of life. They care about nothing but winning the political game. But they’re getting trounced, and their Republican opponents are gleefully running up the score.
Democrats' hypocrisy has all but destroyed what little remained of their credibility.
It never occurs to the Democratic leaders that they’re losing precisely because they’ve turned politics into a game. Or that they’re being beaten so savagely because they’ve been playing so dirty. They’ve been doing dirt unto others, so now dirt is being done unto them.
They are currently beclowning themselves with artificially manufactured outrage over President Trump’s temporary ban on travel to the US from seven predominantly-Muslim countries. They uttered not a peep while President Obama dropped thousands of bombs on Muslim countries and instituted his own immigration ban on Iraqi refugees (see paragraph 5 here). Their hypocrisy has all but completely destroyed what little remained of their credibility.
And they keep coming at us with fresh outrages: Trump’s plan to deport known criminals who are here illegally was morphed into a pogrom against all brown people, his pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, was accused of plotting the end of all education everywhere in America, and New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was thrust into the media hot seat because a “Make America Great Again” cap was spotted in his locker. I could go on with the examples, but why? Our nation reels from them, like a punch-drunk boxer on the ropes. Because we can absorb only so much outrage, the cumulative effect is that many of us are merely numb. The Democrats hunger for relevance, but the cruelest blow that karma is inflicting is that they have made themselves irrelevant.
The Democratic Party may have entered a death spiral. Its moment of defeat may, this time, prove to be permanent. It very possibly may not be able to rescue itself, because it can’t stop being itself. What is perhaps most gruesome about the whole spectacle is that America’s oldest political party has locked itself into its follies. It can’t admit them, and to desist from them would be to tacitly admit that they are foolish. So it sees no choice except to double down on them,even though these tactics may reduce the Democrats’ vote beyond the point of national electability.
The Democrats hunger for relevance, but the cruelest blow that karma is inflicting is that they have made themselves irrelevant.
Libertarians have been wondering if our own party might possibly move into such prominence that a three-party system might be established. What just might happen, instead, is that the Dems will go the way of their ancient enemies, the Whigs. In that case, Libertarians might be the ones squaring up against the GOP in the two-party head-to-head conflict that has almost always characterized US politics.
I don’t know if this will happen, but I believe that such a development would be good for our country. It would certainly be better than the likely alternative, which is a continuous Republican ascendancy. Liberty loses when one party always wins.
