Once More Unto the Breach: Let's Rebuild this Party Right!

The more things change the more they stay the same.

Mark Hyman’s recent commentary in which he pretends to call for a strong Democratic Party could have made some salient points about growing political polarization, the significance of a “post-ideological” president, the importance (or lack thereof) of parties in a year when the leadership of each major party took it on the chin.

But salient points are not what one ought to expect from Mr. Hyman.

Instead, we get more of what—to some of us, at least—is an all-too-familiar horde of logical fallacies, unsupported innuendo, and a dash of casual race baiting.

Nominally, Hyman is opining about the importance in our democracy of two strong parties.  Mark is apparently losing sleep about the Democrats not being up to the challenge of being the GOP’s sparring partner.

This is, of course, simply an insincere rhetorical framing, using the old rhetorical warhorses of “insincere advice” and “faint praise” to feign concern while condemning.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.  Rhetorical novelty would be really asking for the moon in this case.

However, what we do have are “arguments” that wouldn’t pass muster in a first-year comp course.

To wit: Hyman cites as evidence the loss of “over a thousand” federal and state offices Democrats lost over the eight years of the Obama presidency.  This is true, but elides the fact that a party holding the White House traditionally loses power at lower levels.  Several states that are currently GOP “trifectas” (governor and both legislative houses controlled by one party) were Democratic trifectas during the Bush years.  Indeed, at the close of the Bush years, the president was seen to have presided over a catastrophic loss of Republican seats from Washington to state houses across the nation.  It’s just what seems to happen, especially for two-term presidents.

But there are still worthwhile points to be made about how the Democrats could lose so many down ballot races despite a relatively popular president, to say nothing of losing the presidency (well, electorally anyway), to a train wreck like Trump.

Again, though, this is too subtle for Monsieur Hyman.  Rather, we’re told that this is a “complete repudiation” of Obama’s policies, but are offered no evidence of this.  Rather, Hyman cryptically suggests that Obama’s positive poll numbers are not accurate.  Rather, he employs the following rhetorical question (often a warning sign that an unsupportable assertion is being made): “Does the public really like Obama or are they afraid pollsters would consider them racists if they gave him poor marks?”

Just let that one roll around in your head for a bit.  According to Hyman, a fluctuating-but-steadily-increasing number of Americans say they feel positively about Obama even though they don’t because, snowflakes that they are, their feelings will be hurt if the SurveyMonkey algorithm suspects they’re secret Klansmen. 

But there’s more.  We’re told that the Democratic Party has lost touch with most Americans: “More than a third of House Democrats come from just three states: California, New York and Illinois.”  Of course, this isn’t an especially meaningful statistic, given that these are three of the top five most populous states in the nation.  One could point out that nearly a fifth of the GOP House members come from just two states: Texas and Florida.

Then we get this:

Two-thirds come from the two coasts. Democrats are virtually absent from the rest of America. The party’s lost its way. It’s abandoned farmers, factory workers and suburbanites. It’s now beholden to Hollywood elites, Planned Parenthood and those who feed from the government trough.

So, we’ve gone from being on the brink of perhaps simply overplaying an otherwise interesting and important fact—the role of geography, demographics, and urbanization in political alignment—to being hurled into a universe of dopiness, where somehow the party that won the popular vote for president by 3,000,000 votes is catering to George Clooney, Emma Goldman, and (of course) “those” people.

You know who they are, right?  The one’s who “feed from the government trough?”  No, not defense contractors, agribusiness execs, and broadcast corporations currying favor with the FCC (although those guesses would be more accurate).  Nope.  I’ll give you a hint.  Take away “farmers” and “suburbanites.” What group seems to be getting defined by absence here?  And as we ponder that, let’s note the bestial metaphor Hyman invokes.

Look, there are real problems with the Democratic Party and good points to be made about how/why a party that traditionally champions the average American doesn’t wipe the floor with the Republicans in every race.  My critique of the party would be sharper and more cogent than Hyman’s if for no other reasons that it would A) be sincere, B) be based in something bearing a passing resemblance to facts.

That being said, Hyman’s thesis does nothing to reconcile itself with the following facts:

While both parties have historically low approval ratings, the Democratic Party remains more popular than the Republicans, something that has been true nearly constantly over the last quarter century.

• More voters are registered Democrats than registered Republicans.
• More people express support for, and trust in, the Democratic Party than the Republican Party on a host of major domestic issues.  
• Even in the elections Hyman touts as evidence of the “repudiation” of Obama, Democrats actually won more votes.  In races for the House of Representatives in 2012, for example, Democrats received a million more votes than did Republicans.  However, because of the way the votes fell and the drawing of districts, Republicans received more seats.  A Pyrrhic victory? Perhaps, but if the point is relative popularity of the parties, it’s still a victory.
• Speaking of redistricting, from drawing favorable lines for congressional seats to making voting difficult to waging a fight against the non-existent problem of voter fraud, Republicans do everything they can to find ways of minimizing voter turnout and gaming the system to squeeze the most bang out of the fewest votes.  Why?  Because they know that the more people vote, the worse they do.  100% voter participation would be the end of the modern Republican party.  And this is something they’ve admitted since before Reagan was elected.  
• And oh yeah: Clinton won by 3,000,000 votes.  Has that been mentioned yet?

On the other side of the ledger, we have the GOP, which probably has even more causes for concern than do the Democrats. For example:

• The Republican Party, despite having more than a dozen candidates with legitimate track records as conservative executives and legislators, allowed their party’s 2016 presidential nomination to be seized by a reality TV star with no discernible political philosophy or agenda other than the gratification of his own ego.
• Although often crediting their leaders with standing firm against communism and winning the Cold War, Republicans have put in place a president who was openly supported by a dictatorial former KGB agent and have done nothing to defend the U.S. election system against cyber attacks by enemies. 
• Despite controlling the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, the GOP has not managed to pass one meaningful bill in the first half year of the Trump presidency, despite years of promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act, slash taxes, and create jobs.
• The Republican Party has won the popular vote for president once since 1988. 
• President Trump is rated favorably just over a third of all Americans.  It took George W. Bush five years, the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and two unnecessary wars to reach the level of unpopularity Trump has achieved in six months. 
• The one demographic group Republicans can count on overwhelming support from, white evangelical Christians, will almost certainly continue to drop as a percentage of the electorate for as far into the future as one can project.
• The more conservative the state you live in, the higher the likelihood of you being poor, uneducated, and unhealthy.

As the bard sang, "Turn out the lights . . . the party's over . . . "