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This past week I lay immobilized on a board in a hospital emergency room at about that same time the Democratic Party found itself in a similar situation. In that hallucinatory state between coherency and darker places, a cell phone rang through the pain and an epiphany came to me: the Democrats have become the Cell Phone Party.
The intrusion of cell phones into public spaces represents one facet of the larger erosion of mutual respect and public dialogue that has become a central feature of the Era of Bad Feelings. In supermarkets, on public transit–even in the doctor’s office–people construct electronic walls by the simple act of holding a tiny device to their ears. Intimate conversations reinforce the message: we don’t matter. We are no better than mannequins.
It has this in common with another obnoxious feature of the Era of Bad Feelings–road rage. Road rage is about drivers doing whatever they want on public highways because they have little respect for what binds us together as a society and even less respect for other people. They have no use for laws if a cop isn’t lurking around the next corner. Like cell phone addicts, road ragers flaunt their contempt for their fellow citizens.
In my younger days, public places represented opportunities for conversations that promised insights and friendships. These discussions kept us centered by cluing us into what was on the minds of the rest of the world. Sometimes we awkwardly bumped into people we might not normally associate with, broadening our perspectives.
Today, in the insular environment we seem bent on erecting, the cell phone eliminates the possibility of awkward encounters with those who do not share our tastes in blogs or politics. In public gathering places, cell phones allow us to electronically construct intellectual gated communities that only admit people who promise not to disturb us.
A cell phone-like isolation appears to have infected the Democratic Party. In reports filed after the head-on collision of the Iraq War funding vote, the common theme stresses that the Democrats apparently regard the public with an irrelevancy verging on the contempt that characterizes their Republican rivals. In their refusal to hear the American people, the Democrats resemble cell phone addicts who dismiss those around them.
Instead of reaching out to the public, the Party has a hand cupped to its ear in an indecipherable conversation. Congressional Democratic leaders have become as insular as people strolling the malls oblivious to those around them while they babble away.
In this isolationism, the Democrats have forgotten how to dial into those voters and groups that brought them their congressional majority: people of color, the poor, the elderly, the have-nots of America along with union voters, blue collar workers, and those fighting for equity and morality in domestic and foreign policy.
Perhaps more alarming, the Democrats apparently have little clue about what is happening to America. They face an administration that ranks as the worst since Warren Harding briefly occupied the White House, an administration in which the Iraq War characterizes a larger moral corruption that is becoming more clear as light begins to shine into the dark corners of the Republican Counterrevolution.
Yet the Democrats have no coherent strategy for challenging George W. Bush and the GOP. The Party appears to have lost its sense of purpose as it wanders in directions that make little sense to the rest of us. Sadly, no American knows what the Democratic Party stands for any more.
The Cell Phone Party has lost its moral compass because they have lost touch with the American people. We are not on their “quick call list.” The Democrats seem to be living in a lost world, where they keep their ears covered as they conduct a one-sided conversation with no discernible ideas or values, where they are unable to carry on a dialogue with America, where there is nothing on the other end of the line but static, and where the bill marked “past due” must be paid for by the American public.
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