Dodo Birds, Disco & Democrats

The party founded by Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson enters the final stadium of moribundity.

During World War I, French Prime Minister George Clemenceau remarked that “generals always prepare to fight the last war, especially if they won it.” I thought of Clemenceau in recent days as I watched the hoary elders of the Democratic Party—Bernie Sanders, Ron Wyden, and Elizabeth Warren—express the same ideological platitudes about public health policy they’ve been expressing for decades.

Democratic Party leadership now consists of senior political hacks of middling intelligence who possess no understanding that the Republic and the people who inhabit it have undergone a profound cognitive change in the way they view the federal government.

None of the Democratic Senators who attacked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. demonstrated any understanding of his character or of the intellectual journey he has been on for the last 25 years. Our understanding of nature has NEVER—not once in history—advanced by embracing orthodoxy.

Throughout history, heterodox thinkers have been compelled by their voracious curiosity to learn new things. Making new discoveries and gaining new insight is invariably a process of trial and error. Long ago, Mr. Kennedy recognized maladies in the environment and public health of the American homeland, and he set out to correct them.

He didn’t begin his journey with a perfect understanding. He began with the elementary perception that certain features of the environment and public health were ailing. This elementary perception was the beginning of his intellectual journey.

Had he simply embraced the prevailing views of his day, he would have retained celebrity status and remained comfortably ensconced in the bien pensant society of America’s bicoastal elites. To his credit, he recognized that this society is not motivated to see the maladies that he saw and to understand them.

At any given moment in history, the safest posture has always been to embrace the prevailing orthodoxy. Each era’s ruling class has little interest in insights that could threaten their established order. This is the essence of the following scene from The Last Temptation of Christ. What is interesting about the scene is not what Jesus says, but what Pontius Pilate says.

The Democrat Senators who assumed the role of Kennedy’s inquisitors are geezers with ossified minds. They starkly contrast with the dynamo Donald Trump, who seems to have perfectly grasped the radical shift in the American Zeitgeist and have harnessed it to acquire a vast sum of political capital.

The party founded by Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson has reached the final stadium of moribundity. Time is running out for new leadership to take the helm and steer the party back to reason and representative government. If the Party doesn’t aggressively adapt and change its course, it will soon go the way of the dodo bird and disco.