Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s monthly Spectator column runs under the title Prejudices, but his description of the contemporary Democratic Party in the September 29 issue seems like the work of a scrupulous scientist. In the introductory paragraphs of “How the Democratic party became the party of the aggrieved” he recounts the descent of the Democrat species:
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A well-known writer in the 1930s – I think John Dos Passos – compared Southern California to the lower-left corner of a board that has been tipped in that direction and into which everything in the rest of the country that is not nailed down slides. In the 21st century the mental, cultural and ideological equivalent of that geographic locality is a venerable and once mighty institution, the national Democratic party, whose name is synonymous with it.
Throughout the 20th century, the party maintained a strong and consistent identity which accurately and effectively represented its constituency – an alliance that included the working classes, the labor unions, the small farmers, black people, the public educational establishment, colleges and universities, the arts and bohemia. Since, roughly speaking, Barack Obama’s first administration, it has grown steadily less identified with practical interests and concrete policies and more with feelings, attitudes, identities and states of mind, nearly all of them “progressive” or frankly revolutionary. In fact, the most bizarre have no political content or substance at all, being in essence purely existential.
Today, the Donkey party is the party of the aggrieved, the resentful, the angry, the neurotic, the desperate, the illogical, the delusional, the irrational, the unchurched, the metaphysically uncentered, the unattached and childless, the anti-social, the resentful, the failures and the congenitally rebellious – all those not nailed down or secured to anything, beginning with themselves. They are the product, or rather the detritus, of an anti-traditional, aggressively secular, excessively technological, overly connected, trivialized and wholly commercialized and urbanized society divorced from nature and the direct experience of it that had been basic to human existence until a couple of hundred years ago.
