One Reason Why Democrats Are Becoming Even More Monolithic

Driving Out Mesha Mainor and Real Diversity

I’m old enough to remember when the Democrats were a very mixed party.   They ranged across most of the political spectrum.  That’s one reason Texas remained a Democrat state until Ronald Reagan.  Texas Democrats had some awful feuds — largely forgotten is that one reason President Kennedy flew to Dallas on that fateful day in November 1963 was to cool hot divisions between conservatives and liberals in the Texas Democrat Party.  But conservative Democrats and liberal Democrats recognized they needed each other politically for the most part even if they weren’t thrilled about it.  And defections to the Republican Party were rare before 1970.

Yet now, even in Texas along with the rest of the nation, conservative Democrats are close to extinction.  And most of the remaining few “moderate” Democrats are really liberals, too.  So what was once a mixed party is now a Leftist party.  A few years ago, I would have said a liberal party.  But it has become so extreme and even totalitarian now, it has gone past liberalism.  The Democrat Party has not only become monolithic; it has moved the Overton window well to the Left and beyond.

There is no one reason why this has occurred.  In the 80’s and 90’s, the national Democrat Party being mostly captured by liberals and Leftists alienated conservatives who once were Democrats. Reagan was an attractive and successful alternative.  Many of the “Reagan Democrats” became Republicans for good.  And the old largely conservative “my Daddy voted Democrat and my Granddaddy voted Democrat” die hards finally began dying.  With fewer conservative Democrat voters left, it was to be expected there would be fewer conservative Democrat elected officials.

So now Leftists pretty much have the Democrat Party under control.  But they are aren’t happy with that.  Leftist Democrats (But I repeat myself.) are making their party even more monolithic by driving away sane somewhat moderate Democrat officials.  Not that there remain many sane left to drive away.

The latest case in Georgia is illustrative.  State Representative Mesha Mainor (pictured) is from a blue Atlanta district.  Her constituency is affected when crime increases and public schools grow worse.  So she supports school choice and opposes defunding the police, both reasonable and hardly ideological positions.  Yet, in her words, her fellow Democrats in the State House “crucified” her for those stands.  Now she has switched to the Republican Party, likely to her political disadvantage.

She is to be commended for her principled decision, but it is a sad situation.  Her district will probably lose a good principled representative as the Democrat Party already has.  Probably a Leftist hack will replace her.  But that’s what Leftist Democrats (Again, I repeat myself.) want, not “a black woman having a mind of her own.”

In the U. S. House, I can only think of one Democrat Congressman I can still respect, Henry Cuellar of South Texas.  He is a rarity — he is perhaps the most educated Congressman with both a J. D. and a PhD, and he is an actual moderate Democrat.

Perhaps even more remarkable, he is a moderate with a spine.  He was the only Democrat in the House to vote against the monstrous Women’s Heath Protection Act of 2021, which would have legalized abortion for all nine months and made it more difficult for doctors to consciously decline to perform abortions.  Yes, a profoundly evil bill, yet House Democrats are so monolithic — and evil — that they all voted for it, except for one Henry Cuellar.  He alone among them stood for moral sanity.

(And right here I will head off the argument that Republicans have become monolithic, too.  Yes, they all voted against the above bill — to their credit.  Yes, they also are far less mixed than decades ago.  Nonetheless, they are today more mixed than the Democrats, and the stands they unite around are not nearly as persistently evil as Democrat stands.  I am hardly a fan of the Republicans but I suffer moral equivalence b. s. even less.)

Well, Democrats are doing their worst to rid themselves of this principled man.  A frothing babykiller, Jessica Cisneros, primaried Cuellar in 2022 and nearly succeeded, losing by less then 300 votes.  It may not be long before Henry Cuellar also is driven out of the Democrat Party and out of office.  That, too, will be a sad day.

The irony of all this is that Democrats, who are all about “diversity,” are becoming less and less diverse.  Heck, they are resolutely driving real diversity out along with sanity.

And they are thereby becoming more and more dangerous.