By the time this piece appears, the 2020 Democratic National Convention will be nearly over—and thankfully, I'll have missed it.
Don't get me wrong—it was a huge struggle choosing between wasting four days of my life watching pre-recorded Orwellian orgies of deception and carefully-disguised dementia, versus hiking, surfing, and margarita-sipping on the balmy east coast of Vancouver Island with friends. But in the end, the sunbaked baby powder beaches and sylvan cathedrals won out.
What will I have missed? Nothing but garbage. The Democrat Party ain't what it used to be.
You see, in the old days, even though the Democrat Party was indeed "problematic", as the kids say these days, there were always a few Democrats around worth listening to.
Take Daniel Patrick Moynihan: he was worth listening to. While serving as Lyndon Johnson's assistant labor secretary, Moynihan took a deep dive into the social science data and emerged with one of the most important government documents since the Constitution 180 years earlier.
Officially titled The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, Moynihan's 1965 report showed that, contrary to unanimous expectation, the dismantling of racially discriminatory laws over the previous decade hadn't resulted in more equality between blacks and whites. Alarmingly, the gap was widening.
Lingering racism was a factor, wrote Moynihan, but that would fade soon enough. The bigger problem was something else altogether: a core of cultural dysfunction within the "urban ghetto" community itself.
Although Moynihan faulted "three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment" for instigating this dysfunction, he identified the growing trend of black family breakdown—specifically, black males abandoning the roles of husband and father within a family unit—as now dramatically amplifying it. Moynihan concluded that without a national "new and special effort" to "establish a stable Negro family structure...the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself".
Even in an era before dishonesty and compulsive destructionism had hardened into inviolable Democrat Party orthodoxy, this was controversial. Yet Lyndon Johnson—in many ways, a stone-cold son of a bitch if there ever was one—accepted the findings, felt the same concern as Moynihan, and with what appeared to be genuine sincerity, began discussing black cultural dysfunction and how to arrest it in his speeches. (It was even the subject of his most famous speech ever, his 1965 commencement address at Howard University).
Now, contrast the serious, data-driven Moynihan Report with the farrago of nonsense that is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's $93 trillion dollar "Green New Deal" resolution, or the digital cat litter that is sociopath Adam Schiff's impeachment report, or the accidental comedy that is Senator Debbie Stabenow's screed against the alleged horror of constitutionalist judges. No, they don't make Democrats like Moynihan anymore.
Nor do they make 'em like the Democrat senator I had as a kid growing up in Washington, Scoop Jackson. Jackson chaired the 1960 Democratic National Committee, supported labor unions, and authored the National Environmental Policy Act.
But he also saw communism as a cancer to be defeated. To that end, he supported the Vietnam War, favored Reagan's foreign policy over Carter's, and, in his early days, even criticized war hero President Eisenhower for reducing the military budget. When it came to national defense, said Scoop, "the best politics is no politics". That meant a big, badass American military extirpating the mind-virus of Marxism wherever feasible (like by killing communists, or at least threatening to do so).
Like Moynihan, but unlike anyone with a "D" after their name these days, Jackson—wrong though he may have been on certain issues—was a serious political actor whose ideas demanded serious consideration. No wonder Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Douglas Murray, and hundreds of other heavyweight political thinkers cite him as an influence. And back to my original point: Who is Scoop Jackson's Democrat senatorial equivalent today? No one.
The same goes for diehard Democrat Arthur Schlesinger. In his 1991 napalm-in-print offering, The Disuniting of America, the former Kennedy adviser flamed the nascent cult of multiculturalism as a potentially nation-destroying force fueled by academic fraud. In words no Democrat would ever type today, Schlesinger wrote:
"There is surely no reason for Western civilization to have guilt trips laid on it by champions of cultures based on despotism, superstition, tribalism, and fanaticism. In this regard the Afrocentrists are especially absurd. The West needs no lectures on the superior virtue of those who sustained slavery until Western imperialism abolished it...who still keep women in subjection and cut off their clitorises, who carry out racial persecutions not only against Indians and other Asians but against fellow Africans from the wrong tribes, who show themselves either incapable of operating a democracy or ideologically hostile to the democratic idea, and who in their tyrannies and massacre, their Idi Amins and Boukassas, have stamped with utmost brutality on human rights."
Schlesinger wasn't done:
"Whatever the particular crimes of Europe, that continent is also the source—the unique source—of those liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom that constitute our most precious legacy and to which most of the world today aspires. These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle Eastern ideas, except by adoption."
Again, the question here isn't whether Democrat Schlesinger was right. The question is whether he was a serious political actor whose ideas demanded serious consideration. And that, he was.
But those types no longer exist in the now-completely-deranged Democrat Party. They've all been replaced with supporters of violent anarchism, censorship, race wars, baby-killing, adolescent genital amputation, lunatic denialism, cockamamie conspiracy theories, geriatric genocide, and just overall compulsive, mindless, Joker-like destructionism.
So no, there's nothing I want to hear any of these people say anymore, either at their convention or anywhere else. As far as I'm concerned, they belong on their own distant planet somewhere—Planet Chaz, perhaps—lightyears away from anyone who values sanity, decency, and actual civilization. And if we can take them at their word, they should appreciate the opportunity to travel as far as away as possible from the nation they hate so much (and the planet they keep telling us is overpopulated anyway).
As soon as Trump's new Space Force locates a habitable planet—actually, maybe "habitable" is optional; any old floating rock will do—I say let the one-way-trips begin. That'll make everyone happy.
And if it happens in the next week? I'll miss the send-off while I'm out camping, but then, no worries: I'd be celebrating the rest of my life.
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