Political Disarray

November 5th, 2024

I do not like Donald Trump. There are many reasons for this opinion that I would be happy to state any other time, but this post is not one to disparage President-Elect Donald Trump. This post is meant for the Democratic party, a party that has taken my political spirit and smashed it into thousands of pieces. 

November 4th, 2008 was the day I undoubtedly became a democrat, the night Obama was elected to be the first Black President of the United States. I was 6 at the time and to be quite frank, his election meant the world to me, today it still holds that same weight. For a long time now, Obama’s political assent has demonstrated to me that anything is possible. I was proud to be someone who was mixed race, proud to be someone like Obama. Granted, I did not understand the full weight of his election when I was 6, but as the years went on, as I learned more about American history and the way the world works, my admiration grew even more. And by association, my admiration for the democratic party grew in tandem. I figured that if Obama played for that team, then there’s no other team I’d rather play for.

 By the time 2016 came around, I was sad to see the last year in office of my personal hero, but was still excited for the future that his party promised. Then, as we all know, Donald Trump was elected president over Hilary Clinton. At the time, it really made no sense to me– how could a man who appeared so unprofessional in so many aspects be POTUS, he was clearly a step down from Obama. After the election I, like many others, attributed the democratic loss to the fact that Hilary Clinton was a woman, it was the only thing that could possibly explain this dystopia. Then we endured 4 years of Trump in office; again, there's a whole laundry list of actions by him that I have taken issue with, but I’m not here to explain that. Coming into 2020, after 4 years of Trump at the helm, I personally thought that America was in a worse place. The news was OBSESSED with Trump in a way that I don’t think will ever be matched again, the general mood of the country had taken a nosedive as people dug into their political ideologies, and -to me at least- America was seen as an international laughing stalk. I thought the country desperately needed change, so like many, I chose to vote for Joe Biden. In my opinion, he was shoehorned in because the DNC thought he’d be the best candidate to defeat Trump. He wasn’t my favorite choice of the list of Democrats, but I trusted the party and their vision for the future. To my relief, Biden was later elected and everything was supposed to go back to normal, perhaps like the time of 2015 when the world wasn’t consumed by COVID or the politics of Trump. 

Then the next 4 years were tumultuous.

Half the country didn’t believe that Biden won the election, people stormed our nation's capital, the war in Ukraine started, inflation rose like hellfire, Roe v. Wade was overturned, we faced an immigration crisis like we’ve never seen before, Trump himself was indicted on 34 felony counts, the withdrawal from Afghanistan scarred us, and the general mood of the country further spiraled out of control, the list goes on and on. And somehow, through it all, I believe that Biden did a good job as president, he was dealt a shitty hand but he did what he could. Still, I am not here to talk about the policy of any one person. I am here to discuss the democratic party as a whole. My dissolution with the democratic party began late into 2023. By this time many members of the GOP began planning for their presidential primaries in which they would nominate their next candidate. Of course Trump was the front runner, however, to my dismay, there was essentially zero effort from within the democratic party to provide an alternative to Joe Biden. Although he’s a man that I respect, it was quite clear that America was not approving of Biden’s job in office. For christ sake, the amount of sleepy joe memes I had seen within that 4 year period indicated to me that if the democrats nominated him, it would not go well. Now of course, memes aren’t a reliable tool for deciding who to nominate for POTUS, though they are on par with (or maybe a small step down from) political cartoons and their ability to convey general sentiment towards political actors. And sure, I still think that Biden was a great president considering what he had to work with, but when you’re given a bad hand, you’re not gonna get great results. When it comes to politics, people in general don’t care about the hand or the rules of the game, they just care about the outcome. It was abundantly clear that Biden was an unpopular president. Nonetheless, democrats persisted. That is until it all beautifully blew up in their faces after the first presidential debate of 2024. By August, Kamala Harris was the presumptive nominee of the Democratic party. Though, as we know now, that did not work in her favor. 

Upon waking up today, I scrolled social media for what felt like hours. Story after story illustrated my own circle’s disgust with the outcome of the election. “The only thing America hates more than a rapist is a woman,” was a common quote that essentially went viral overnight. The rhetoric displayed was largely of disgust towards people that voted for Donald Trump. I take a great problem with people condemning others for their voting preference, especially when it’s on a national scale as is such for a presidential election. As of now, 51% of the country has voted for Trump and I am playing Harris’ concession speech as I write this. To say that 72 million plus people have zero regard for you, your rights, and way of being is simply untrue and a misplace of anger. It does us no good to blame the individual –who has different problems and priorities from you– for the outcome of an election. Instead, I believe all of the blame lies on the democratic party themselves. The question should not be, “how could one vote for a convicted felon, rapist, racist, etc.,” rather, it should be, “what are the conditions that led to Trump getting back into office considering all of his baggage.” Don’t be mad at the individual who voted for Trump, be mad at the party that could not put up a candidate that was able to defeat him. 

Since 2016, the dems have run purely on an anti-Trump platform. Joe Biden was chosen as a candidate because he was seen as a return to normalcy, not due to innovation in ideas or willingness to take the party in other directions. Biden was in a sense renominated because he was the guy that had beat Trump before. The democratic party became so obsessed with Trump that their very obsession resulted in their own demise. When Kamala was campaigning, a majority of her messaging surrounded Trump. She was the joy candidate, which was meant to be contrary to, “Trump’s hateful rhetoric.” Every answer she gave when questioned somehow circled back to Trump and how she would do better by the American people than him. Very rarely did Harris ever put forth ideas that were about improving American lives, and even when she did, she did so vaguely. When Biden ran for office, his rhetoric largely matched that of Harris, though to the success of the democrats. And for much of the time that Trump was in office, the rhetoric remained the same among elected democratic officials and the left leaning news media. I believe that people got tired of the same old messaging on Trump. For 8 years, he was all that democrats could focus on, in that time, they failed to actually address the problems that brought Trump into power. 

The Democrat party has lost its way in its attempt to broaden itself into the party of everything but upper class white men. In its pursuit, the party’s mistakes are twofold: they adopted an all or nothing mentality that America simply was not ready for and they abandoned working class men. The rhetoric became that, if you support Trump at all, you support everything he stands for; If you care about climate change, then you need to do everything in your power to stop it at this instant; If you care about the LGBTQ+ community then, you need to bend over backwards to what they say is best for them; You MUST use all of our politically correct terms or else you are causing violence; You have to be pro immigration and be willing to accept everybody or else you are a racist and a xenophobe who only cares about their bottom line. I don’t mean in anyway to say that I don’t support many of the policies, I happen to be very pro immigration, I think we should do everything in our power to curtail climate change, and I have many people in my life who are of the LGBTQ+ community who I care for and believe that they should have expanded rights. However, as the party that wants to move the ball forward, you can’t take the all or nothing approach on your ideals, you must meet people where they’re at. The funny part is that this all or nothing approach only benefits the GOP. Detractors can point to all the demands of the democratic party and say that they’re crazy and then progress that needs to happen is stalled. Simply put, America is not ready for all of the policies that the Democratic party wants to put out. 

Many of these policies were born out of the younger, educated class of America. Since the Obama years, the party has increasingly catered to that of the college educated. Policies have become based on the solution as is described by statistics and scholarly studies. Where this often fails is in its implementation. That's not to say that the findings of educated professionals are wrong, but their solutions in a way fail to account for human nature. Let's take climate change as an example: I understand we’re in the midst of a climate crisis, but if I’m being honest, it is already too late. Yes, if we fail to limit the rise of global temperatures to a certain point before 2030 then we will see irreversible damage, but humans aren’t capable of changing at that fast of pace. When you propose policies that force others to change behavior they’ve known for decades, you cannot expect it to be adopted at the snap of your fingers. The lack of compromise, the lack of meeting people where they are at, is where democrats fail. This problem goes in conjunction with the abandonment of the working class. In pushing for all of these policies and more, democrats have alienated the working class that they claim to vouch for. Many of these policies work against the way life has been for Americans for centuries. Most affected by these problems will be people of the working class who don’t have money to shield them from climate change, yet at the same time, the policies put forth affect those of the working class most immediately. This chaotic mess occurs all the while working class men are losing their place in America. Those who have not been to college want the same thing all of us want: a stable job that’s able to provide for a family should I choose to have one, a job that can allow for comfortable living, a break from work every now and then, and one that allows you to retire at a decent age. Living in a capitalist society, these wants are important to everyone. But as we transition to a globalist society, those goals become increasingly hard for those who don’t have specialized education. Manufacturing jobs are decreasing rapidly and the jobs that offer minimum wage consistently don’t go anywhere and don’t pay enough. There are a whole pool of men who only want to provide for their family and they don’t see how they can do that in a world provided by the democratic party, so they voted for Trump.

Humans are inherently selfish, if we weren’t then our species might not exist today. Though to be selfish does not mean that you’re a bad person. To want to look out for your family because that is, among all, your top priority; to want to want to live your life without people having to tell you how it should be; to want to ensure that you are able to get by financially does not inherently make you a bad person. Democrats have failed because they have conflated people who believe in the aforementioned ideals with the actual racists, xenophobes, and sexual predators that do support Donald Trump. If democrats want to win another presidential election, they have to hedge on some of their ideals and listen to the people they abandoned.