Democrats and Self Reliance

     "Though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."

       Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

Self Reliance is a deep-seated American value.  And darned if Americans want to pay for someone else's sloth, improvidence, or bad luck. 

We want to be fair. We also don't want to be chumps. That goes for Democrats and Republicans both.

Republicans think of themselves as the party of self-reliance. Democrats are more inclined to support group services and Republicans to resist them. People "vote with their feet," which means that people choose to live in neighborhoods that seem "right" for them. Democrats dominate the cities. People in cities get and pay for services that are essential when people live near each other: sewerage systems, water systems, mass transit. They share utilities. Rural people don't have most city services. They have wells and septic tanks and when they go bad it's the homeowner's problem. The urban/rural divide in voting behavior syncs with each Party's traditional orientation toward taking care of oneself and expecting the other guy to do so as well.

At time of war or communicable disease the goalposts get moved a little, but not without stress. Under certain conditions, we are all in this together, sure, but we are still on the lookout for people using the situation to game the system. America is struggling with diversity and its multitude of cultures, and it has from the first conflicts between White settlers and Indians, between Whites and Black slaves, and between the different cultures and religions of the British colonies.

In a multicultural nation, different ethnicities give ample opportunity for people to generalize, to profile, to scapegoat. Trump played on that, more heavily and directly than Republicans had in the recent past, but the desire not to be a chump is bi-partisan. Democrats and Republicans both are conscious of whether others are trying to grab more than their fair share from the broad social pot. People look for cheating, both up at the very wealthy, and down at people below them in income. If Democrats ignore that reality, or define it as immoral selfishness or racism, they are doomed to continued electoral misery. Those are Democrats they are insulting.

Bright blue California voters decisively defeated a ballot measure on a state constitutional amendment that would have allowed race to be taken into consideration by state government. It was essentially yes or no on affirmative action. California voters said NO. It just didn't seem fair to them that some groups got special advantages, even if they started out poor and discriminated against.

I will repeat what I wrote shortly after the election. Yes, Americans excised a President, but this was primarily a rejection of Democrats. American voters nearly chose to keep a deeply flawed, dangerously narcissistic, authoritarian scofflaw and a constant embarrassment even to his supporters, rather than accept what Democrats were offering.

Michael Trigoboff has submitted Guest Posts in the past. He teaches computer science courses at Portland Community College. Programming computers involves objective, highly specific commands. Loose, rough, approximations don't work. People can either do the work correctly or they cannot, and not everyone can. It can be demanding for students, but for a purpose. The clients of those future students need work done that actually works. Customers of those clients, people who click a "Submit" button on an order to buy something, expect the computer to respond saying the purchase was completed, not see some gear spins endlessly and then a report that the purchase order was lost in the ether.

Two days ago this blog warned Democrats that the woke university-oriented wing of the Party was out of touch with the voters. Trigoboff sent this comment:

Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff 

To start with, I am happy that Joe Biden won. For whatever reason, I wasn’t that bothered by Donald Trump‘s personality, but his incompetence was unforgivable.

Trigoboff

In honor of Saturday’s events, I wore a blue and red plaid shirt. It had more blue than red, but not by that much, which is a reasonably accurate expression of where I stand politically.

I was raised in a left-wing Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. We were Democrats. Voting for a Republican would have been unthinkable. 

We believed in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. I still remember a TV cartoon from back then — a peach pit and an apple core on the back of a train, singing:

As the peach pit said to the apple core,
“The color of our skin doesn’t matter anymore.“

I liked that cartoon.

My grandparents arrived in America from Eastern Europe around 1900. They came here to escape anti-Semitic persecution and build a better life for themselves and their descendants. I owe my life to their willingness to take that difficult journey. If not for their courage, my parents would have died in The Holocaust.

We believed in working hard, doing well in school, and building a good life through sheer achievement. America gave us the opportunity to do that. We believed that opportunity should be extended to everyone.

I no longer consider myself a Democrat. As Ronald Reagan famously said, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the party left me." They left me when they began to abandon a belief in individual achievement for a commitment to group rights, and advocate equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity.

The current wave of wokeness sweeping through academia, corporate America, and the Democratic Party is exactly that. The woke believe that all “disparities“ need to be corrected. If a particular minority is “underrepresented“ in some job category, they claim that disparity by itself is proof of discrimination, and they advocate taking measures to equalize representation. But If no group can be underrepresented, it follows that no group can be allowed to be overrepresented.

The percentage of Jews in various professions is far above their share of the population. Jews are overrepresented among Nobel Prize winners. Is that a problem that needs to be “corrected?“ Did that happen because there is so much discrimination in favor of Jews? Do the advocates of wokeness think there is something like “Jewish privilege?“ Should Jews be banished from professions in which they are overrepresented?

I could say the same sorts of things about immigrants from Asia, India, or Nigeria. The example of Nigerian immigrants in particular contradicts the claims of the woke. How did these Black immigrants succeed so spectacularly if America is so institutionally racist against Black people?

Wokeness is a war against excellence and achievement.

These woke beliefs are a threat to the principles that I have lived by for my entire life. There is no way that I will support a party that adopts them even slightly. Joe Biden said he wanted to be a President for the entire country. That won’t work if he allows woke ideology into his administration.