I read a fascinating article that I think my readers would like to know about. It is by William Voegeli, in the Claremont Review of Books, Jan. 31, 2017 “The Democratic Party’s Identity Crisis”.

It is not free but the reason it was so powerful can be seen in my understanding of what Voegeli says.

He is examining the future of the Democrat Party.  Unlike the standard demographic argument that more Latino immigrants will fill the Democrats with a permanent majority, Voegeli argues that the very nature of victim coalition building is self defeating.

There are three fundamental problems with a political strategy of building coalitions of victims.

The first and most serious problem is that there is no hope.  Whatever is promised to the victims to mitigate their anger and resentment can’t work.  If it could work it would move the voters out of the victim class into the overlord class and out of the Democrat Party.  Denigrating clusters of people as victims is self defeating because the victims depend on anger and revenge as motivations.  It is hard, if not impossible to build coalitions of angry people.  For example, creating the Black Lives Matter victim organization which focuses its hatred on police and whites will inherently alienate the minority police, their family and friends as well as the people they work with, other emergency personnel and the blacks who appreciate the need for police in their neighborhood.

Second, once in power the Party must continue to support the divisiveness and mutual hostility that created the victim groups in the first place.  It is not possible to govern effectively without unity and cooperation.  Which is why the Obama Democrat Party never accomplished anything positive and rent the social fabric every day while destroying the state and local Democrat Party at every level.  The Democrat support of the environmentalist meant attacking coal that lost the Party voters in West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Pennsylvania.  The same happened with blocking the Keystone pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline.  That alienated many union construction workers, people in the oil industry and ultimately the blue collar workers in vital swing states like Michigan and Ohio.

Lastly, to quote Voegeli who notes the people who are the supposed overlords creating the misery of the victims are called deplorables “denigrating people until they vote for you lacks a certain strategic plausibility.”  

Put simply: creating a political process that divides people into victim classes creates misery for which government is not a useful repair tool.  The Democrat Party has no ideological future.