Today I’ve been talking about two ways in which the system is broken — the fact that Michigan has far too many homeless children, and the dysfunction gripping the Democratic Party.
You might think those were virtually unrelated topics – but they aren’t. You might also expect the Democratic Party, the so-called “party of the people,” to be screaming about the fact that in this supposedly modern industrial state, tens of thousands of children don’t have a home.
But, mostly, they aren’t. They are denouncing Donald Trump’s lies and his gross behavior. They are talking about fixing the damn roads and middle-class tax cuts.
Democratic leaders are doing, in other words, pretty much what they did two years ago. How did that work out for them? True, they do have an advantage this year in that they can kick around a mostly unpopular incumbent President,
But apart from that, have Democrats learned anything?
Jeff Cohen doesn’t see much sign of it. Cohen is a man who has worn many hats throughout his political career, sometimes several at once. He’s been a professor, a media watchdog, a writer, a TV commentator, and was the senior producer of Phil Donahue’s last prime time show. He’s also the co-author of a new, updated “Autopsy report” for the Democrats.
Frankly, you don’t have to be a pathologist to see that many of the wounds are self-inflicted, and too many Democrats not only lack the courage of their convictions… they sometimes seem to lack convictions. For example, our endless wars, as Cohen noted yesterday in an incisive piece published online by Common Dreams.
Half a century ago, progressive Democrats like Robert F. Kennedy and Gene McCarthy challenged the President of the United States, the commander in chief, and told him and the nation that we were waging an unjust war.
We’re bogged down in another war now, this time in Afghanistan. Everyone I’ve ever talked to on the subject agrees that whenever American forces finally leave, the Taliban will come back. And yet, after 15 years of invasion and partial occupation, we’re still there.
And with a few exceptions, Democrats seem unwilling to challenge the Pentagon and say, for example, that fifteen years are enough, it’s time to, as a bright Republican senator said during the Vietnam War, “declare a victory and come home.”
Nor are many Democrats saying we should slash the hopelessly bloated Pentagon budget.
Few Democrats are complaining much about homeless kids either, or the hungry. Their message to the poor largely seems to be “you better vote for us. Republicans are worse.”
Somehow, that is less than inspiring.
Can you imagine a Gretchen Whitmer or a Joe Biden saying of the far right, “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first (term) that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second (term) that in it these forces met their master.”
Why, that sounds too radical for Bernie Sanders. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt really did say those words to a national audience three days before a presidential election, one in which he won the greatest popular and electoral vote landslide in history.
There may be a lesson in that story. I wonder if many Democrats will get it.
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