The Party’s Over: Democrats Betray the “Working Class”

by Celeste Barber

“Welcome to my world, Alan.” That was my first thought when I read that Alan Dershowitz had walked away from the Democrat Party. The only surprise here is that it took Dershowitz so long. The same party that stood against Jim Crow in the ‘50s and ‘60’, now giddily discriminates against individuals based on their skin color (white or Asian), sex (male), religious affiliation (Christian/Jew), and geography (rural America).

The same party that supported the ACLU’s defense of the Nazi Party’s right to speak and parade in Skokie, now stands for the censure of female athletes who refuse to use “preferred pronouns” for transgender-identifying teammates, in some cases under threat of losing their scholarships and careers. As for Alan Dershowitz, his final straw was the DNC’s flip-flop from longtime, unwavering support of Israel’s right to exist, to the shameful defense of terrorists seeking total annihilation of the Jewish people.

Welcome to my world, Alan.

Over the past months – perhaps because we are witnessing a bloody presidential election year – I have listened to stories from other Democrat exiles. They are strangers mostly, women standing in line at the grocery checkout or conversing with me on my morning walk through the neighborhood.

One woman I “message” on Facebook: we open ourselves to each other. Feminist women who believed in the party that once believed in them: passing the ERA; supporting reproductive rights; celebrating the expansion of Title IX athletics to girls and women over the decades. Women who have been maligned and yet feel safe telling a stranger their stories – but not too loudly.

Yep, those women have been betrayed by the Democrats.

McGovern Callously Dumps Eagleton

I have been a political refugee since 2016, compelled to leave the party that no longer represented me: a moderate left, feminist woman who loves her country first and before Party. It’s telling that Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Senate seat was gifted by the DNC to Carpetbagger Hillary Clinton, in what ought to have been an open primary race.

Stunning that following a termed-out Obama, the DNC ran Clinton unopposed, and then again in 2020 with Biden when party leadership shut down the primaries. Where was the vaunted press to question why, in the final year of his Administration, Barack Obama purchased an estate in Washington, D.C.? He was the first former president in my lifetime not to return to his home state. All Sieg Heil to the donkey.

Upon reflection, my concerns with the Democrat Party go further back… actually, to 1972. That’s the summer I was to cast my first vote in a presidential election. Following the Democrat Convention, I had intended to vote for George McGovern. But within days, it was revealed to the press that his running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, had been hospitalized for depression years before running for the Senate.

Political expediency carried the day. In short order, McGovern dropped Eagleton from the ticket, ending my support for the Democrat candidate. Instead of standing beside the vice-presidential nominee, exhorting that Eagleton’s depression had been treated twelve years previous and that he was a respected member of the Senate, McGovern caved. And Nixon won by a landslide. (Thomas Eagleton continued in the Senate, elected to serve two more terms. Furthermore, consider the Democrats’ support for John Fetterman following his mental health breakdown in the aftermath to his 2022 election to a U.S. Senate seat.)

First Vote as a Democrat was for Richard Nixon

I had one issue in 1972: Vietnam. I was twenty years old. Every year, my high school yearbooks were dedicated to the memory of alumni who died in service to our country. At Pierce Junior College, many of the fellows I knew were returning vets, some from “in-country.” I wanted the boys home. I determined to vote for the candidate with the backbone to end the war that devastated my generation. McGovern’s political cowardice switched my vote to Richard Nixon.

I’ve never regretted that vote, my first for president and cast for the Republican candidate. In retrospect, Nixon was a good president despite his flaws.  He created the Environmental Protection Agency. He helped open China to America and the rest of the world. He supported women’s rights in the workplace and signed Title IX into law. And he opened dialogue with Vietnam. Yet in the decades since his 1974 resignation, it’s hard to find people willing to admit their vote for Richard Nixon, despite the 1972 landslide victory.

Frankly, I still don’t understand why Watergate was a political scandal of such import. Low-level GOP operatives broke into the DNC’s headquarters. Okay? Doesn’t that go on all the time in election campaigns, digging for dirt on one’s opponent, including today? Perhaps the question to ask is: “Would the United States have been a better country had George McGovern won the White House in 1972?”

In today’s world, we aren’t permitted to question. Look at the gushing over Kamala Harris, the number two in a disastrous Biden Administration. To question her candidacy is to be accused of being racist, MAGA, anti-immigrant, anti-Arab, anti this and anti-that.

It’s All Over But the Voting

I had hoped following Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, that the DNC would have licked its wounds and returned to its base: slightly left of center on the political spectrum. Instead, who was showcased at the Chicago Convention this summer? The most extremist elements of the Democrats’ upper echelon, starting with AOC – unrepentant and vitriolic in her rhetoric. The party of the working class has devolved into a playground bully. One can see how those tactics prompted not one, but two assassination attempts on Donald Trump, and within weeks of each other. Still, the Democrat Party, from elites down to the local rank and file, slanders, and silences through a complicit media any citizen who questions.

I am done.

After fifty years, I still cast my ballot in person at the neighborhood precinct. This November 5^th, I shall walk into the Hope School cafeteria voting my conscience and independence. As my ballot drops into the box, I am more powerful in that moment than any political machine.

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