Abandoning Common Sense, Democrats Feel the Burn

Lori Amos, VA’s Director for the Veterans Point of Service Program, explains to Senator Bernard Sanders (I-Vermont) (left), Chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, and Dr. Robert A. Petzel, Under Secretary for Health (center), that kiosks enable VA Medical Centers to make better use of Veteran waiting time for updating important information, filling out clinical questionnaires, reviewing their medications and allergies and providing important information to their care providers. Photo courtesy of the VA, July 30, 2013.

At many American universities, standards and intellectual authority have given way to political correctness and indemnity politics. That same scenario, argues Joseph Epstein in the WSJ, is what has been playing out in the Democratic Party.

By ceding moral authority to the far left, the Democrats have lost the power “to counter bizarre proposals with simple common sense.” The PC crowd has allowed identity politics to override any intellectual authority, which leads one to wonder if honest and independent thinkers are still inclusive in the Democratic Party?

• When a freshman congresswoman proposes a wildly improbable Green New Deal, instead of responding as Democrats of an earlier day would have—“Whaddya, kiddin’ me?”—they now take it seriously and several adopt it.
• When two other freshman Democrats make anti-Semitic pronouncements, no one in a party overwhelmingly the choice of Jewish voters has the authority to tell them to knock it off.
• When Democratic presidential candidates propose to provide free health care for all, or eliminate college tuition and college debt, or enlarge and pack the Supreme Court, or eliminate the Electoral College, all this is taken in earnest.

Hostage to Identity Politics?

The Democratic Party, by its own standards, means no national ticket can ever again be without a black or female candidate.

Consider Speaker Nancy Pelosi

A serious and skillful politician, (Pelosi) was finally pushed by her party’s left wing into permitting a hopeless impeachment proceeding that violated her own sensible criteria:

• the reasons for impeachment be compelling
• the evidence for it overwhelming
• the support for it bipartisan.

When the impeachment failed in the Senate, as she had predicted it would, it drove her to the distinctly un-Pelosian act of tearing up her copy of the State of the Union address on national television.

What’s Going to Happen?

Perhaps the only hope is that the Democrats put together a nightmare ticket— Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, say, or Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris —

A two-party system, with its fundamental checks and balances, is integral to the country. Will Democrats be so crushingly defeated in November that the Party will at last return to its long-lost political seriousness?

Don’t miss Mayor Pete, as Socialist as Bernie Sanders, and Socialism, the Avoidable Economic and Political System Disaster for more on the devolution of the Democratic Party.