The Cultural Contradictions of the Democrat Party

The Beltway establishment wants the US to lead a globalist empire, but the party activists think America a racist genocide state. (900 words, 5 minutes).

Every four years, the Democrats put on a patriotic show of the kind we saw at the Democratic National Convention last month in Chicago. But their base, including the AOC/Bernie wing of the party along with all the social justice and BLM types, really believes that the US is a racist genocide state founded on slavery back in 1619. The contradiction is obvious.

At election time, the Democrats want to be the party of Harry Truman, but their most committed supporters think the U.S. to be at root the country of George Wallace and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

While the activists rail against colonial genocide and capitalist partriarchy, the suit-and-tie inside-the-beltway wing of the Democrat Party wants to administer a global superpower managing crises around the world, not to exclude a war or two.

"We are morally tainted, but follow us anyway," is not a convincing message. It requires leaders to speak out of both sides of their mouths, with the result that no one believes anything they say. It results in the absurdities of Marxist BLM flags flying from US embassies, woke transgender ideology being pushed by the State Department, stern-faced generals preaching against “white rage,” and a regime that despises its own people holding forth about democracy.

Reduced to a visual vignette, the central contradiction of this ruling party is expressed by the contrast between the fluorescent Karine Jean-Pierre, checking so many boxes, racial, sexual, and identitarian, and the stolid Admiral Kirby, a man in a gray suit, but at least in command of the basics of names and places, and aware of the facts his duty requires him to obfuscate.

The old Bush-era neo-cons believed that the US was a good and virtuous country, so powerful and so compelling as to be capable of bringing democracy even to the most atavistic corners of the Islamic world. Whatever its other problems, the democratic evangelism of the neo-conservatives was at least not internally self-contradictory.

The flight of many Bush-era neo-cons, now including the Cheneys, from the vulgarity of Trump into the welcoming arms of the Democrat Party emphasizes the internal contradictions of that party. A party that refuses to secure the borders of the United States wants to fight for those of Ukraine and Iraq.

President Trump's position is that the US is a good country with serious though soluble problems, a country that needs to pull back and look to its own interests. Trump’s view has the advantage of internal coherence, and unlike the globalist philanthropy of the Bush years, it does not require the cooperation of any foreign powers, least of all of Islamic fanatics.

Trump’s denial of the self-hating premises of the Democrats’ woke ideology motivates their endless charges of racism, and those charges while wrong in any precise sense are at least authentically felt: the woke Democrats honestly believe that dissent from the ideology of white American guilt is racist. The Beltway Democrats with equal horror and also equal anger agree that Trump’s self-contained nationalism represents a repudiation of their worldview, and also a threat to their jobs. The internal contradictions of the Democrats, the anti-nationalists and the super-nationalists, are forgotten though not resolved in their hatred of Trump.

But the hatreds of the two wings of the Democrat Party, though converging on Orange Man Bad, come from diametrically opposed motives. The left hates Trump because he loves America and wants it to be a strong country, the establishment because he wants the United States to be a normal country and not a global hegemon.

Tulsi Gabbard @TulsiGabbard often highlights the ground-level realities behind these abstract considerations: few of the Democrats' leaders and fewer of their activists have served in the wars, while Trump, notwithstanding bone spurs long ago during the Vietnam War, represents those who fill the ranks though not of course those who fill the E-ring. The Trump position is more coherent and also more authentic, while the Democrats' quadrennial facade of patriotism is just manipulative.

We saw last week a statement signed by 741 generals, admirals, and senior security-state officials. I don’t doubt the patriotism of the 741, nor their horror of Trump’s mercurial personality. But their patriotism is in plain contradiction with the core ideology of the woke activists who form the Democrat Party’s base. The 741, like the managerial elite they represent, want to run an assertive and essentially hegemonic foreign policy, necessarily resulting in periodic wars. Successful war, like successful empire, requires behind it a martial society and a measure of moral backbone rooted in a social consensus. The lack of that consensus, steadily eroded by the para-Marxist half of the Democrat coalition, almost guarantees failure.

The Trump policy of recuperation and rebuilding enjoys by contrast the united and enthusiastic support of his party. It is genuinely held, honestly advocated, and congruent with the interests and aspirations of his supporters. And Trump’s position — a strong America, seeing to its own interests — has the great advantage of not being internally self-contradictory.

None of these things can be said of the self-abasing globalism of the ruling Democrat Party. The contradiction between the anti-American pseudo-Marxism of the party’s base and the globalist ambitions of its elite is most conspicuously displayed in the flip-flopping tergiversations of Vice-President Harris, who cannot decide if she wants to be Harry Truman or Ilhan Omar.