[opinion]
Unconventional times Democrats create their own kind of dysfunction by Dan Brooks
There was a moment earlier this year when it looked like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich might divide the Republican Party among themselves. As a neutral observer of the political scene, I was definitely not rubbing my hands together in churlish glee at that possibility. Thanks to my unshakeable journalistic integrity, I almost never relished the thought of watching the party that spent eight years thwarting compromise get hoisted on its own petard. Anyway, that was spring. Pollen was in the air and all things seemed possible. The only thing that didn’t was the Republican Party unifying and the Democratic National Convention falling into fractious dissent. So, of course, that’s what happened. Last weekend, Wikileaks—the hacking-oriented whistleblower site and/or puppet of the Kremlin—released 20,000 private emails that showed officials on the Democratic National Committee conspiring against the Bernie Sanders campaign. The DNC is supposed to remain neutral in the nominating contest. The party faithful dismissed these emails as both inconsequential and the work of Vladimir Putin, a cracked-plate story that became even less convincing on Sunday, when DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned. Her party’s convention started the next day. Wasserman Schultz had promised to preside over it, but on Monday the delegation from her home state of Florida met her with boos at breakfast. She politely withdrew after that. A few hours later, Sanders addressed his own delegates and supporters outside the convention hall—the perhaps symbolically named Wells Fargo Arena—and told them to do everything possible to make Hillary Clinton president. They booed him. So the Democrats convened on an inauspicious note. After the weird and unsettling spectacle of the Republican convention the previous week, where Trump all but explicitly embraced white nationalism, it seemed all the Democrats
had to do to hold the White House was not screw up. And they screwed up immediately. For months, liberal pundits and nearly all persons in a position of power within the Democratic Party had shamed Sanders supporters for suggesting the DNC was biased. They made the failure to get behind Hillary a moral issue, treating it not as political disagreement but as misogyny, bullying or subversion of the Democratic cause. Hillary was the Democratic cause, as far as party leaders were concerned. At
“This country is not built on each person’s inalienable right to choose the least bad leader.”
times, the press seemed to think so, too. The suspicion that Sanders might be running against a rigged system became an apostasy—proof you were either a cryptomisogynist or a college sophomore, ignorant of how things really work. Then the DNC confirmed that suspicion. They got caught doing exactly the thing they mocked Sanders voters for suggesting, at exactly the moment they needed to unite those voters behind Clinton. In a way more concrete and damaging than any Bernie bros, the leaders of the party subverted the Democratic cause. All this disappointment put the convention speakers in a bad position Monday night. They had to sell a good idea
with a terrible pitch. It is imperative that Democrats unite against Trump, for their party and probably for the future of this country. But to do that, they must unite behind Clinton. The Republican nominee is a racist TV personality with no experience in government and no plan for the country beyond running it himself. He is the most unpopular candidate in the history of modern polling. But the Democrats nominated the second-most unpopular candidate in history, crookedly, then showed their delegates the fix was in. How are disillusioned Sanders voters—many of them young and participating in the nominating process for the first time—supposed to respond to that? Should they remain loyal to a party they just joined, immediately after discovering its leaders conspired against the candidate who brought them in? Yes they should, because otherwise Donald Trump is going to become president. But “vote for Hillary or we’re all in trouble” is not the sugar to make that medicine go down. The 2016 election has become a contest of incompetences. Both the Republican and Democratic parties botched their nominating processes. Explicitly, now, they call on their constituents to choose the lesser of two evils. That’s a betrayal of the democratic promise. This country is not built on each person’s inalienable right to choose the least bad leader. Americans should not go to the polls holding their noses. We should have gotten better. Shoulda but didn’ta, as the Appalachians say. This is the right moment in the column for a ray of hope, but that’s not coming. It won’t get better than this. The opportunity for the American voter, in the next dozen weeks, is to make sure it doesn’t get worse. That’s a bum deal. I think we should take it. Dan Brooks writes about politics, culture and hope’s false promise at combatblog.net.
missoulanews.com • July 28–August 4, 2016 [9]