TEXT JOIN TO 77022

Do Even Democrats Believe What They’re Selling?

Donna Brazile was 9-years-old when she cut her political teeth. After hearing that a local candidate for New Orleans city council pledged to build a playground in her hardscrabble working-class neighborhood, Brazile joined the campaign and pamphleted every block. The candidate won. Brazile’s neighborhood got the playground.  

Impressive, but the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee came to Hay Festival in Wales last week as a loser. Meeting long-time friend Helena Kennedy, the bolshie Brazile discussed her tell-little book Hacks to an audience of Guardian readers, and one perma-grinned, tweedy deplorable.   

“How did you let him win?!” asked Kennedy. “We were counting on you guys! Democracy was counting on you guys!” prattled “Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws,” an unelected member of Great Britain’s unelected House of Lords. Indeed.

Brazile deflected the charge. “There’s just 962 days until Donald Trump is removed from office!” she boomed, rising from her seat. A barely audible murmur lengthened, before an onset of sickly skin-creep one gets when vicariously embarrassed. Tough crowd. After all, isn’t the blue wave just a few months away?  

What struck about that moment was the comparison with Senator Bernie Sander’s appearance exactly one year previous. When the Vermont socialist proclaimed this year’s midterms would prematurely sever the president’s umbilical cord, the reaction was riotous, and chilling.  

Brazile soft-soaped for an hour. Her mellifluous New Orleans lilt the highlight of a political menu serving freeze-dried tofu to those clawing for bleeding Wagyu, or at least confirmation that Russia elected President Trump. She doesn’t believe it herself. The audience neither.

Because that is what liberals do these days, isn’t it? Play along? Make-believe? Disneyfy and sanitize until the narrative salves and soothes.  

After all, there was little mention of President Trump’s economic achievements. Brazile could and should have celebrated the fact that black unemployment is at its lowest point ever. The old Democratic Party would have.  

Of course, such a ruthless truth only proves noisome if one’s political interests are invested in keeping black Americans beholden to your leadership for all advancement. The Democratic Party is dependent on the placentas of misery, resentment, and poverty to feed its host body—the neglect of those voting blocs ensures the umbilical cord remains intact.

But this isn’t the old party. Brazile’s flaccid insistence that Russia has taken over the GOP belies the insurgency raging in her own.

The daily convulsions of liberal angst played out so helpfully in the sympathetic media aren’t just the spasms of the unhinged, but the tactics of radical Saul Alinsky.

Alinsky’s succès de scandale, Rules for Radicals is the battle manual for the Democratic Party’s burgeoning hard-left championed by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—likely frontrunners for 2020.

Alinsky commands his followers to “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it,” and disregard anything the target—in this case, President Trump—does that could be conceived as positive. Working-class Americans with more money in their paychecks? “Crumbs.” Record-low unemployment for blacks? Meh.

It is this cognitive dissonance motoring the modern Democratic Party. The rich irony being that those most concerned with inequality and “social justice” are often the high priests of a system which entrenches the former and negates the latter.

Far from upturning that system, they seek to cement its unquestioned permanence, the radiant privilege which deprives them being foisted upon those charged with possession of the Y chromosome and a lack of melanin.

As Patrick J. Deneen put in a fearsome essay for First Things:

The ruling class denies that they really are a self-perpetuating elite that has not only inherited certain advantages but also seeks to pass them on. To mask this fact, they describe themselves as the vanguard of equality, in effect denying the very fact of their elevated status and the deleterious consequences of their perpetuation of a class divide that has left their less fortunate countrymen in a dire and perilous condition.

Deneen then underlines the abandonment of noblesse oblige—“obligations of the nobility”—which offered some tone of legitimacy to the ruling class of old. Today’s elite, despite paying lip service to such a notion, treats the idea of the unfashionable voter breaking rank with unmuted disdain.

This is evident in the Democratic Party’s makeup. After all, Bernie Sanders was bilked of the party’s presidential nomination. The game was indeed “rigged” in favor of Hillary Clinton—anyone unafflicted with the Democratic malady can see that.

Of course, Brazile didn’t indulge. The “correct” reason why Donald Trump is president is that Vladimir Putin rigged the election, and, strangely, forgot to massage the popular vote which Trump lost—just for laughs.

So, the president’s many detractors saunter off to the midterms utterly convinced of a blue wave and of his looming impeachment. Meanwhile, if the California primaries are anything to go by, #TheResistance is indeed futile.

Photo credit: Kamil Krzaczynski/Getty Images

Get the news corporate media won't tell you.

Get caught up on today's must read stores!

By submitting your information, you agree to receive exclusive AG+ content, including special promotions, and agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms. By providing your phone number and checking the box to opt in, you are consenting to receive recurring SMS/MMS messages, including automated texts, to that number from my short code. Msg & data rates may apply. Reply HELP for help, STOP to end. SMS opt-in will not be sold, rented, or shared.

About Christopher Gage

Christopher Gage is a British political journalist and a founding member of the Gentlemen of the Swig. Subscribe to his Substack, "Oxford Sour."

Photo: CHICAGO, IL - NOVEMBER 13: Former DNC Chair Donna Brazile speaks at The University of Chicago on November 13, 2017 in Chicago, Illinois. Brazile recently released her book 'Hacks: The Inside Story,' an account of her time as the interim chairperson of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign. (Photo by Kamil Krzaczynski/Getty Images)