Truth, Decency, Responsibility, Sanity — I Am Now a Democrat

On May 14 I renounced here my 53-year Republican affiliation. I said I couldn’t yet join the Democrats.

But now the other shoe has dropped. As I’m fond of saying, the perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good.

This is, again, a matter of culture trumping ideology. It’s not about policy. More importantly today, Democrats represent truth, decency, responsibility, and sanity.

How sad that that’s what it comes down to.

In New York, party enrollment is required to vote in primaries. The GOP is too far gone to the dark side for my primary vote there to be useful; while I am very concerned about the direction Democrats take in shaping the alternative. I want to have a vote on that.

Truth, decency, responsibility, sanity — that should be their theme. But many on the left have classically illiberal instincts. Despite their “diversity” talk, they’re intolerant of deviations from their party line. There’s a danger Democrats will indulge in ideological purity trials. The Economist sees signs of it already.

I hope Democrats can, just possibly, win the House of Representatives in 2018. That’s the only way Trump and his gang might be held to account. It seems Democrats are recruiting a lot of military vets to run, probably smart. And I do hope they will come up with a presidential candidate I can actually support. Someone like Kirsten Gillibrand (who says she won’t run), or Al Franken, Giant of the Senate. But getting to the right candidate will be like threading a needle — between hard left ideologues like Sanders or Elizabeth Warren and the corrupt blowhard bully Andrew Cuomo.

Republicans have vacated a vast territory in the political center, which Democrats should seize. America cries out not for a left-wing ideological alternative, but a centrist one — a party of truth, decency, responsibility, and sanity.

Macron

At least that’s what I think people should crave. But we don’t actually see it. I used to mock French politics, yet the new President Macron created a party of the radical center, which in parliamentary elections Sunday crushed the old right and left parties, gaining a big legislative majority of fresh newcomers to politics. Macron, indeed, seems to understand how the conventional right-left divide has been superseded by today’s true divide between open and closed mentalities.

But “It Can’t Happen Here.” America’s political system is far more impervious to such a revolution, its voters more entrenched in their ideological ghettoes. We may be condemned to lurch from one political extreme to the other based on the thinnest of electoral margins.