How the Democratic party became the party of the aggrieved

A well-known writer in the 1930s – I think John Dos Passos – compared Southern California to the lower-left corner of a board that has been tipped in that direction and into which everything in the rest of the country that is not nailed down slides. In the 21st century the mental, cultural and ideological equivalent of that geographic locality is a venerable and once mighty institution, the national Democratic party, whose name is synonymous with it.

Throughout the 20th century, the party maintained a strong and consistent identity which accurately and effectively represented its constituency – an alliance that included the working classes, the labor unions, the small farmers, black people, the public educational establishment, colleges and universities, the arts and bohemia. Since, roughly speaking, Barack Obama’s first administration, it has grown steadily less identified with practical interests and concrete policies and more with feelings, attitudes, identities and states of mind, nearly all of them “progressive” or frankly revolutionary. In fact, the most bizarre have no political content or substance at all, being in essence purely existential.

Today, the Donkey party is the party of the aggrieved, the resentful, the angry, the neurotic, the desperate, the illogical, the delusional, the irrational, the unchurched, the metaphysically uncentered, the unattached and childless, the anti-social, the resentful, the failures and the congenitally rebellious – all those not nailed down or secured to anything, beginning with themselves. They are the product, or rather the detritus, of an anti-traditional, aggressively secular, excessively technological, overly connected, trivialized and wholly commercialized and urbanized society divorced from nature and the direct experience of it that had been basic to human existence until a couple of hundred years ago.

I have read that the most unhappy people in America today are white, educated, upper-middle-class, liberal women, having in common so many of the characteristics enumerated above. Of course, it would be absurd to suppose that they are the sole cohort in western societies who, in their  mental and emotional confusion, imagine that their misery, and that of the world, is plausibly attributable to such abstract historical bogeys as “imperialism,” “slavery,” “bourgeois capitalist society,” “religion,”  “the patriarchy” and “sexism,” “men” and “white people.” In fact, were it possible to identify any single agency as the party responsible for what Sigmund Freud (in a wholly different context) called the “discontents” of modern civilization, it would be liberals and liberalism itself – though even that would be a gross historical and human generalization, never mind that liberals have been chiefly responsible for the modern tendency to think in abstract, generalized and completely ahistorical terms.

The Democratic party’s electorate, like its leadership, is heavily comprised of people who can never be happy and satisfied and who are consequently a danger to society, to the political system and to themselves. They are not, however, a majority of the voting citizens of this country; most likely, they never will be, however closely national elections in the United States continue to be run. Nonetheless, the party continues to be critically influential among the sort of people who are best positioned to amplify and extend its power through non- or anti-democratic institutions and organizations that give it a strength a good deal greater than is justified by its support among voters.

The Donkey party is the party of the aggrieved, the resentful, the angry, the neurotic, the desperate, the illogical

The imbalance between popularity and power is most obvious among the western democratic nations in Great Britain, which would partially account for the recent assertion (if true) of a columnist for the London Daily Telegraph that Americans view her as being on the path to extinction. To a greater extent even than the US, the UK is ruled, not by representative government, but by lawyers, quangos, NGOs, bureaucracies and the loosely assorted cranks and fanatics whom George Orwell, in the 1930s, described in shorthand as the sandal-wearers and fruit-juice drinkers in the capital city and elsewhere. Such people, as I say, can never be happy anywhere save in the next world (in which they don’t believe), and so they will continue until the crack of doom to agitate, to organize, to demonstrate, to dream up and advocate dangerously absurd legislation, and in other ways make life miserable for the sane democratic majority they hold in contempt and despise.

On the other side of the Atlantic it is the Democratic party, not the US, that is headed for extinction unless it discovers – and quickly – the means to reimagine, redefine, repurpose and reintroduce itself for the whole of the American public. Failing that, it will go the way of the Whigs in the antebellum era, the Progressive party before the Great War and the Liberal party in Britain immediately following it.

To judge from accounts of the convocation of the Democratic National Committee in Minnesota at the end of last month, where the committee chairman raged against the “king with swollen ankles” in the White House and another party official spoke of “fascism in a red tie,” it is nowhere close to identifying that means. I think it was the most recently failed former candidate for US vice-president who made reference to “that thing in the White House.”

The Democrats remain convinced that they lost the election last year not on account of the caliber of their candidates or the content of their policies, but rather through the clumsy presentation of them. Even if they were right about that, they haven’t corrected their “message” yet – and show no signs of understanding how to do so. Critics have called them tone deaf. The truth is, the Democrats are stone deaf, their hearing destroyed by their own high-decibel shouts and screams against the Great Sauron in the White House.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.