The Democratic Party is taking a beating right now. Rightly so. There have been transgressions. People have been let down over the years and especially this last election year.
Why am I still a proud Democrat? And proud to say it out loud to crowds of people?
There is so much left to the core of the Democratic Party that is good, that is workable, that is what this country needs and has always needed. It needed an adjustment. A wake-up call at 5:00 am with the most annoying buzzer it had ever heard. It got it. Last November.
I must admit, there is a book in my personal library that has been there for years, unread. If you saw our personal library, well, you would know. The book is “The Working Poor” by David K. Shipler. I commit myself to reading one chapter a day. You may ask what this has to do with my topic. I will get there.
The Democratic Party has done some things very well over a long period of time and we cannot forget those times because it has temporarily lost its way. It has stood up for people. It gave voice to people that could not give voice to themselves. It also gave voice to non-people, like the land we walk on, the air we breathe, and the water we drink. That was a long time ago. I was a kid.
Something happened along the yellow brick road to the Emerald City. We thought half measures would be fine. Roe didn’t need to be in the Constitution. It would be fine where it was. Until it wasn’t. African Americans would be fine once they had voting rights. They weren’t. Bush and Reagan era testing standards for our schools are still in place although we had a trifecta when Obama was President for two years. The Affordable Care Act could have been Universal Health Care instead of appeasing the Republicans. Democrats have been afraid to take the reins of power when they had all the power. Play nice. Republicans never did that and are not doing it now.
Democrats let go of the working class in this country.
Our mistake. It’s a little late now for reparations. Many have gone over to Donald Trump and the Republicans.
Part of the reason for reading that book, “The Working Poor”, is to mesh my experiences with those of others. Will I see myself in those pages? I was like a lot of young people today. I had half of a college degree, student loan debt, a full-time job that paid slightly more than minimum wage, and some health benefits that I did not understand. That was a while back. Now, you count yourself lucky to have health benefits. I did not go on to finish my degree until later in life and those student loans sat there, for a long time, in deferment. Not enough money to pay them and survive beyond paycheck to paycheck. Not having a finished degree may be worse than never attempting a degree at all. Never mind the reason for not finishing it in the eyes of the interviewer.
That book was written in 2004, we have not come very far since then. And Democrats have not either. The Democrat Party way of thinking for many years was educating our way out of this economic mess of too many poor. Have everyone get a degree. Well, that only works when there are enough of those jobs. When now even a customer service type job, still paying just above minimum wage, wants a four-year degree, that is a serious problem. That also brought with it a LOT of student loan debt. That is another topic for another day.
I think the turnaround for the Democratic Party was when we were losing manufacturing jobs and unions at the same time during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Seeing the writing on the wall, they pivoted, instead of fighting for the jobs and the workers, right then and there. In fact, they created NAFTA which many will argue, created the offshoring problem of many manufacturing jobs that went to Mexico and beyond.
Not fighting hard enough to keep unions alive, especially when Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 workers on strike at the time of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. And stacking the National Labor Relations Board with lawyers that had specifically represented management rather than government lawyers, more neutral. Sound familiar?
It is this loss of union representation that is where America has gone wrong and the confluence of NAFTA, offshoring, union busting and the loss of the Democratic Party really representing and fighting for the working-class union people is exactly where the Party went wrong. This is where the Democratic Party strayed off the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City and has been walking down a false path lined with something yellow, but not gold ever since. It has not been until very recently that our leaders have not seen the scraggly bushes all around them with the spiders and webs hanging off. They only now have heard their people’s protests in the streets.
After all of this why am I still a Democrat? Because I still believe. I believe in the Emerald City. And the Democrats will take us there. The new breed of Democrat. People like me. Some are older, some young. Our ideas are what make us different. Our playbook is not the same as the old Democrats.
Our allegiance to the Party is not as strong. My allegiance to the People is. I see my party as a framework for my beliefs, a place to hang my hat so a voter can identify sort of where I belong. My allegiance is not to MONEY in politics. We must get a handle on money in politics as Bernie Sanders argues every day.
Come along with me as we traverse this new Democratic Party and let’s see what we can make of it, together.