By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
‘When the Ship Comes In’
That’s a Dylan song about the hopes and fears that come with big changes. But I’m referring to something different. Like so many stories, this one comes from the great Teddy White, mid-century journalist and presidential historian (if only he and Hunter S. Thompson had ever met) (they probably did, and Thompson was too drunk to remember).
A young man running for Congress felt worried. The local machine had not helped his candidacy at all. He visited his Tammany club house to find out why. The cigar-chomping Irishman seated behind a rolltop desk listened politely. Then he explained.
“Mister,” he said. “You ever been down to the docks when one of them giant ocean liners comes in? And all that trash and clumps of seaweed and blobs of oil bounce around in its wake? In this election, that ocean liner’s name is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And you are a piece of the scum that floats right behind.”
In this election, that ocean liner was the opposite of FDR. It was the tawdry reality of Donald Trump’s presidency coming home to roost: the self-dealing, the emotionality, the gutting of science and art and decency. The body politic finally reacted to the poison it has been made to swallow, and it wanted no more. And for every James Talarico, Sherrod Brown, and Chris Pappas who embodied that rejection (congratulations to them all), plenty of opportunists came along for the ride.
Polling shows dissatisfaction with both parties these days. Nothing has changed. Voters in states like Kansas and Texas did not fall in love with the Democratic party. But in an either-or world, they had nowhere else to turn. The danger is to see those votes and think they represent approval. They don’t. They represent disgust.
Sadly, the Democrats have already proven that they have not learned valuable lessons from these last few years. Take that nightmare in Michigan for starters. Abdul El-Sayed beat Haley Stevens in a tight primary that got ugly, replete with the participation (on El-Sayed’s side) of known racists and hate-mongers. She agreed to support him afterwards, but things stayed rough. When she found she could no longer accept his politics, which included continued Jew-baiting and the unwillingness to name Iran as an enemy nation, she finally endorsed his Republican opponent instead. The Democratic establishment heaped abuse on her. Chuck Schumer called her actions “a despicable betrayal”; others were even crueler.
When Republicans refuse to denounce their extremists, Democrats criticize them for lacking courage, giving in to Trumpism, and not putting country ahead of politics. That shoe is now on the other foot. The Democrats’ tent is now so big, it welcomes people with matches and gasoline.
The New York Times did a great job covering that race, by the way. It reported that El-Sayed and his Republican rival traded barbs for each having second homes away from Michigan. His rival owned a home in Florida. El-Sayed, the Times reported, owned a home “overseas.” The overseas in question is Dubai, which Times readers did not need to know. I don’t know why. Everybody likes that chocolate. And Dubai deserves a senator of its own.
One hopes that the Democratic wave is so large, the moderates can do without their radical peers. We can put them in a corner, let them make speeches, and pray that nobody takes them seriously. But that can only happen if we see them for what they are, and right now, the Democrats are acting like their party has no extremists at all. All they have are anti-semites, and that has become a mainstream thing.
One of two things will happen, then. Either the Democrats get their house in order or they don’t. But either way, the Republicans need to pivot away from their cultic obsessions and start presenting reasonable solutions to real problems again. Each party has had blind spots for decades now, but they’ve come up short in different ways. The Democrats never dealt with immigration, they prioritized identity politics at the cost of common sense, and they oversaw stagnation on one international front after another. The Republicans, meanwhile, have declared weird wars on science; they’ve wished away global warming, they’ve bungled their own international stance, and most recently, they’ve turned a blind eye to corruption.
We need to have ideas for all those things, and those ideas need to come from different vantage points because one idea will rarely work for long, if at all. America has long missed the contribution of principled Republican voices. No time like the present to find them again, before the next big ship arrives.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.