Gotham Diary:
Invocation
Never have I felt quite so foolish as I do now, waiting for someone young to take over. But that’s the only hope left.
The prospect of a GOP recapture of both houses of Congress in November is not only depressing but unreasonable: Republicans have done nothing (absolutely nothing) to earn voter support. The midterm election will be a windfall for them because there is no one else to benefit from electoral reproach of the Democratic Party. And, indeed, the Democratic Party deserves that reproach. Even if Congressional Democrats had done their best, the White House’s leadership failures alone would signal the need for a regime change. Whatever the shortcomings of the men and women who hold office, the problem of the Democratic Party is embedded in the class of advisers that its elected officials listen to, the Axelrods and the Summerses, the Emanuels and the Holbrookes, not to mention anyone and everyone who has ever advised the Clintons. Democratic advisers are largely indistinguishable from their Republican counterparts; they certainly share the conservatives’ contempt for John Q Public. They’re largely conservative themselves, made so by their terror of being mistaken for “socialists.” They may have a few genuinely liberal objectives, but a difference in programs does not amount to a political difference. Those liberal ideas simply make Democrats look less disciplined and organized than Republicans. If there is one thing that Republicans know how to do, it is singing Americans to sleep every night — in close harmony, if necessary. When Democrats tuck us in, they hand us a teacher evaluation form and remind us of their record. We don’t sleep so well under the Democrats.
And we never will. This is not the place to lay out my thesis that the Democratic Party destroyed itself — heroically, like a soldier throwing himself on a live grenade — in the Sixties fight for civil rights, but perhaps it will suffice to remind younger readers that, until that campaign, Southern whites and Yankee labor constituted the backbone of the Party. Neither of those constituencies remains in the Democratic camp today. The Nixonian “Southern Strategy” took care of Dixie; globalization finished off the industrial unions. Back in the Fifties, the kind of man whom Clint Eastwood portrays in movie after movie was a Democrat. Since the Sixties? Not so much.
So who are the Democrats? They’re people who ought to have formed a new party forty-odd years ago, but who didn’t, because they hardly knew who they were. “Liberated” working women. Opponents of American imperialism. Immigrants. And — of course — those former Republicans who happened to be black, as most blacks happened to be. The Democratic Party, beginning in the Seventies, was the party of the formerly marginalized. From such an organization we expected leadership? Such leadership as the Democratic Party has offered, since the days of Lyndon Johnson, has been rented from men with no personal stakes in the party’s projects, men whose lofty and somewhat gratuitous ambition to do good has increasingly alienated ordinary Americans.
The world has turned a good deal: the children of the formerly marginalized are not themselves marginalized. Barack Obama may be a black American, but there is nothing marginalized about him; he springs from the heart of the meritocracy that runs the United States. Runs the country — but does not, can not, lead it. For leadership, we must hope for visionaries who may not necessarily have tested well or shown the impressive organizational acumen that’s required to get to the top of the heap today. We must hope for someone smart and capable who is also graced, not so much by ideals of what we might become as by understanding of what we are and what we’re capable of right now.
This leader whom I’m hoping for must be young for another reason: the capabilities of information technology must be an open book. He or she must see the world through its capabilities, instead of trying to harness them to serve the world as it is. Almost every institution that flourished in the age of the modern nation state has suffered massive blows, and almost none deserve to be saved or salvaged. I say this not because I welcome, with immature recklessness, the excitement of social chaos. It’s for precisely the opposite reason that I call upon the young to see what can be made of still abundant resources, human and material, in the development of new institutions. I pray for smooth transitions. I know that no one my age is competent to imagine them.
I’m hoping for an old soul in a young frame.