Such a foul mood envelops me, politically, that I should be reconsidering my affiliation as a Democrat. I know of similarly disenchanted Republicans, and our mutual paralysis is, paradoxically, an encouraging sign.
The capacity to contemplate marching under the other party’s banner is the safety valve of our political system.
It wouldn’t be easy to turn my back on the Democratic Party. I was raised in a Jewish neighborhood where “Republican” had the ring of “Cossack” in our grandparents’ tales of finding refuge in America from the persecutions of czarist Russia.
But those memories are overwhelmed by my present distaste for tongue-tied and tone-deaf Democratic Party leaders.
After the fall of Kabul, President Joe Biden was asked about reports that we gave the Taliban a list of Afghans who worked for us.
A true leader would reply: “If I find that’s true, whoever put a target on our allies’ backs will be gone, immediately!” Instead Biden said: “There may have been. But I know of no circumstances. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”
Soldiers deserve better than a president who, like Hamlet, vacillates when their lives are on the line. So, too, do Chicagoans deserve a better response to the city’s plague of gun violence.
“It’s obvious we cannot arrest our way out of this problem,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot said after a day when three mass shootings took one victim’s life and wounded 17 others.
Yet I can’t switch to a Republican Party that’s fighting a rear-guard action against reason. With an epidemic raging, the governors of Florida and Texas tried to prohibit schoolchildren from being protected by masks and teachers being inoculated against a deadly virus.
I envision the parallel dilemma of my Republican counterparts: offended equally by a delusional Donald Trump and Democratic leaders who sacrifice common sense on the altar of reform.
Carlos Yanes Sr., a retired cop and the father of a cop gravely wounded when his partner was shot to death, faulted Lightfoot for constraints put on the police.
“There wasn’t a day that I didn’t draw my weapon, have it behind my leg or behind my thigh,” Yanes Sr. said. “All the officers are told now that, if you draw your weapon and it’s not a situation that warrants it, unless you have guaranteed proof, there’ll be consequences.”
Lightfoot didn’t reply to reporters’ requests for comment. So why would a Republican change parties when a Democratic mayor won’t explain how a cop can know danger lies ahead before getting out of the squad car?
Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats once had mutually intelligible vocabularies. They shared what the historian Arthur Schlesinger dubbed the “vital center.” It was home to bipartisan cooperation.
In other countries, new parties are formed when voters sense the old ones are failing. But given our election laws, third parties are seldom effective. It’s the political center that rallies our defense when danger looms.
Americans were bitterly divided on the eve of World War II because World War I didn’t live up to its hype as a battle to save democracy. But after Pearl Harbor was attacked, former pacifists agreed with staunch patriots that Japan, Germany, and Italy had to be defeated.
In the 1950s, Black people tired of waiting for America to fulfill its promise launched a Civil Rights movement. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, a southern Democrat, and Sen. Everett Dirksen, a northern Republican, agreed that Congress had to respond. The result was unprecedented federal legislation targeting segregation.
Now the vital center has a hole ripped in it by bragging and name-calling. To liberals, “woke” means owning up to America’s shortcomings. To conservatives, it evokes images of barbarian hordes rushing across civilization’s drawbridge.
Yet the problems we confront require hands extended across the political aisle. Hopefully, disenchanted Republicans and Democrats will repair the vital center.
Absent that, Republicans will be tempted to substitute “Afghanistan” in their Cold War mantra: “The Democrats lost China!” Liberals will run for cover, as they did when Communist insurgents defeated a corrupt Chinese government the U.S. was propping up.
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How can voter restrictions in the name of nonexistent “rigged” elections be overcome unless Republicans support civil rights as they did in 1964?
It will take a heap of bipartisanship to stop the trickle-by-trickle erosion of a woman’s right to control her reproductive destiny. Otherwise Roe v. Wade will be essentially repealed.
Yet I fear that both political parties will pull back into defensive positions, like armies weakened by battle fatigue. I hear echoes of lines written by W.B. Yeats in the aftermath of the disastrous First World War:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
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