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Cathedral City, October 1, 2019 – as the hypertrophied 2020 Democratic campaign continues its endless, agonizing march to the election, we are starting to see the Democrats live down to the traditional stereotype of the Democratic Party as being a group of people with an amazing propensity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Notwithstanding the unexpectedly strong performance of the Party in the midterm elections of 2018, observers have already begun to note signs of fission within the Democratic body politic. We seem to be setting ourselves up for electoral defeat; we seem to be living down to the stereotype of Democrats as being weak kneed ideologues who would prefer to accept defeat with our “principles” intact, rather than achieve victory with dirt on our faces, having arrived first at the finish line hot, stinking, and bathed in sweat. In other words, Democrats aren’t willing to get dirty to win, and that is a serious problem for this Party.
Pragmatic Democrats (and there are more of us then is generally realized,) understand that this nation stands at the brink of an irrepressible conflict. Will this nation redeem once again the solemn promise made by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth?” If we are to preserve the American project in democracy, this great experiment in representative self-government, this living political proof of Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s observation that “Nothing great or living can be done except where [people] are self-governed and independent,” quoted in W. Ward, Life of John Henry, Cardinal Newman 367, (London, 1912) we must be prepared to do more than clutch our beads at the crimes and misdemeanors of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization that the Republican Party has become.
What, then, must we of The Democracy do to save our darkened and desecrated country? We cannot content ourselves with polite discussions or debates with the party opposite. We must be prepared to wage all out political war to ensure that our view, our correct view, of what America is, can be, and should be, prevails. Yet, by the same token, we must also understand the importance of maintaining what Kaiser Wilhelm II described as eine Burgfrieden, a “truce within [our own] fortress.” Unfortunately, Democrats are piss poor at maintaining anything resembling Burgfrieden.
Instead of embracing Burgfrieden, Democrats turn and embrace the Chinese concept of luan, or chaos, indulging in all manner of internecine battles, including purity testing, virtue signaling, and vicious heresy hunting within the Party. Not only do Democrats want to fall in love, placing their candidates on pedestals and reacting like jilted lovers when their candidates prove to be human beings with feet of clay, (as opposed to Republicans, who are content to fall in line), but Democrats have an unfortunate tendency to take a pugnacious, censorious, condescending, and confrontational tone toward allies deemed guilty of demonstrating insufficient fealty.
During the 2016 campaign, I fell out with a substantial number of erstwhile friends who had declared their undying fealty and allegiance to Bernard Sanders. I, on the other hand, was a strong supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton. As the 2016 Democratic primary moved toward its ineluctable conclusion, i.e., as Hillary racked up a prohibitive advantage in delegates, the followers of Bernie Sanders reacted with the same kind of desperate, Saipan/Iwo Jima/Okinawa anger that had animated the desperate, doomed, Japanese defenders of those island outposts.
For example, I participated in an unbelievably acrimonious exchange of emails with someone who had been a friend of mine for 25 years. His emails became so misogynistic, so conspiracy-theory-driven, and so borderline racist that I finally stopped responding to them.
Unfortunately, I wish I could say that this phenomenon was limited to the 2016 campaign. It is not. Fellow activists tell me that they have fallen out with old, much cherished friends, not merely over differences of opinion about whom to support among the Democratic candidates in 2020, but also over how Democrats ought to wage and prosecute a successful campaign against That Fascist Donald Trump.
Of course, let me throw my own bomb in this discussion. I believe that the 2020 presidential campaign is an existential test and turning point for the American experiment in representative democracy. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in his Message to Congress of December 1, 1862,
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.
Lincoln wrote those words against the background of the greatest existential struggle in our history. The unwillingness of the American South to accept the legitimacy of Lincoln’s election had led to the worst act of organized treason ever perpetrated in American history. And not satisfied with throwing down the gauntlet, the South had decided to appeal to violence to make its case, and the nation was riven in twain by the Civil War the “Confederacy” had inflicted upon it.
Now, nearly 160 years later, we find ourselves trembling on the brink of an irrepressible conflict, in which it is reasonable to believe that the incumbent president of the United States and his followers, who have seen fit to break every rule of civilized political behavior, are meditating the use of violence to ensure their continued political power.
In short, America is sliding toward fascism. It is not necessary to believe that Donald Trump will, himself, be the Fascist dictator who emerges at the end of the process. Some disciple of Donald Trump, some younger man, may very well be preparing himself in the wings against the day when Donald Trump suffers a stroke or coronary episode.
Democrats need to stop chiding one another for being willing to say such things. We must stop pooh-poohing one another for believing that fascism is a real possibility in this country and being determined to resist it by Any. Means. Necessary.
Therefore, when I suggest that Democrats need to start fighting dirty, like street fighters, I’m not suggesting such a thing simply to be provocative or to cause some of my timorous Democrats to clutch their pearls and emit manifest signs of the vapors.
We Democrats need to stop accepting uncritically the well-intentioned, but dangerous counsel of Michelle Obama, a woman whom I otherwise admire tremendously.
When Michelle said “when they go low, we go high,” I don’t think she intended her statement as anything more than an aspirational call to Democrats to seek to make America a better place. Unfortunately, it has become a formula for abject and unconditional surrender. We can go as high as we would like once we have achieved a victory that can only be won through fighting dirty.
We did not secure victory in the Second World War by negotiating politely with the Axis Powers. We defeated Japan, Germany, and Italy the old-fashioned way; we kicked their ass, nuked the Japanese, and kept on kicking their asses until they begged us to stop. We met them in the gutter, we fought them there, and then, in an act of magnanimity without parallel in the history of the world, we raised them up, we gave them the gift of freedom, democracy, and prosperity, and yes, we went low to make it possible for the entire world to go high.
But before we can go high, we have to win the political war we are prosecuting. Nothing makes me madder then to be remonstrated by Democrats for being “tiresome” when I repeat a mantra for victory riffed from the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: they pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!
The Republicans fight this way. And when they do, and we insist on some kind of schoolmarmish purity, we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as ineluctably as Judas opening the gates of the garden of Gethsemane to the Temple guards, before Judas betrayed his Lord with a kiss. We must adopt the Republican style of combat, the way Patton and Montgomery adopted the fighting style of Erwin Rommel, the way Chester Nimitz adopted the wolf pack submarine tactics of Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz to break the Japanese Navy and merchant marine throughout the Pacific.
For Democrats to fall into squabbling with one another, reproving one another, remonstrating with one another, or attacking each other in vicious heresy hunts over who is more pure, who is more progressive, who is a better Democrat, is an assured recipe not only for the destruction of our own party, but for the destruction of the American democratic project as well. We are in fact the oldest still-extant political party in the world. We have survived across 200 years because what we stand for is nothing less than democracy itself. And that is something worth fighting for.
So, straighten up and fly right, Democrats!
They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is a pugnacious, combative, "Yellow Dog" Democrat who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the neighboring Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He misses the days when the Party could discipline its officeholders and activists. The views set forth herein are his own, not the views of any timorous, self-sabotaging, Stockholm syndrome "Democrat."
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