Has the Democratic Party run its course?

Published 2:44 pm Tuesday, November 29, 2016

The presidential election of 2016 has undoubtedly caught a lot of people by surprise, some positively and some negatively.

Regardless of how one feels about the results, one thing seems to be very clear: Democrats failed to utilize their true voting power and the Democratic Party itself failed its constituency.

First, a good many Democrats deserted Clinton because they were supporters of Bernie Sanders and simply refused to vote for another Democrat in lieu of him. Those who declined to vote at all could have made a huge difference in the “swing states,” most of which went for Trump.

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But perhaps most importantly, the Democratic National Committee deserted its base. Under the early leadership of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC manipulated the primaries in several states to favor Clinton and steadfastly refused to offer any support for Sanders despite the fact he was a viable candidate in the Party (as demonstrated by his primary successes even without DNC support and being largely ignored by broadcast media who concentrated on the ravings of Trump and the foibles of Clinton).

The plain truth is that both the Republican National Committee and the DNC contributed to an election cycle in which the most unqualified and most vilified candidates in history were elevated to positions of vying with one another for the presidency of the country. President-elect Trump was probably not wrong in some of his assertions that the system was rigged, especially that part of it which dominated the primaries.

As for the Democrats, they should, collectively, move to dismantle both the Party itself and, if that’s not possible, to at least disband the DNC and re-constitute it anew, with people dedicated to the process of true democratic principles, rather than strictly adhering to a candidate because the ruling cabal has made a decision a particular person is the one to be supported.

But ideally it is perhaps time for the Democrat Party to simply go away, much as did the Federalists, the Greenbacks, the Whigs and all the others which are no longer part of the American political process, and replace it with a new “Progressive Party,” one which not only will expose new and fresh ideas of liberalism, but revert to some of the old ideals which sustained the Democrats through the Roosevelt administration, principles which held the American people together during a period when they were experiencing the greatest challenges since the Civil War, recovery from a horrendous depression and the outset of a world war.

It has been documented independents are among the fastest growing political faction in the country, most likely because more and more people are becoming alienated from the two main political parties which care more about maintaining their own power than in facing and addressing problems which besiege the country.

Both current parties should abandon the tired old “talking heads” who do nothing more than retain and espouse old ideas and old solutions, the likes of Gingrich and Axelrod and even Kissinger, who consistently show up on Sunday morning talk shows spewing the same vitriol nonsense which originally sent them into obscurity.

If this country can never field more than two viable political parties, then the two remaining should be constituted in a way that truly represents the will of those millions who will go to the polls to support them.