Why am I a democrat? Honestly and anticlimactically, my relationships pushed me into the distinction. Because of my individual affections and socially-mediated values, I often tend to hold opinions and ideas that rhyme nicely with the Democratic Party’s particular brand of ideology. Officially registering my name according to this tendency allows me to vote in at least one primary. This may be un-American of me to suppose, but I really don’t think that my opinions are autonomous nor that they spring from my properly individualistic existence like a magical snake-in-a-can. If such really was the nature of ideas concerning groups of people and politics, then such ideas might be less useful as tools of social consequence.
I will not postulate (by any stretch of the imagination) that the Democratic Party somehow fights for my values or holds the key to successful government. To me, each party seems to exist largely to compete with the other in the public limelight. The cognitive dissonance that I get when trying to imagine a particular party's set of postulations as anything approximating a system of internal consistency makes me reel. The idea, for example, that the definition of protected life should be expanded sufficiently to render abortion into "murder" but narrowed enough to consider capital punishment "justice" gives me just the sort of laughter that a disappointed idealist might valuable for its intrinsic ability to dull disappointment and keep the door to optimism open.
All that aside, I do think that the Democratic Party shows great promise in many areas, and not least in its newly elected president. This man has ridden the party’s tide of necessary group-think to a position where he may be able to break the poisonous and cyclic troubles that have arisen from that problematic system in the past. He may yet demonstrate to us that while the human structure upon which politics rests may be less than honest or ideal, a particular kind of leader can still use it to be effective. I hope he continues the trend and establishes this much-needed precedent for progressive leadership. His many gestures of reconciliation to political opponents hearten the young spirit who hopes for such things.
I do hope that he and others succeed wildly. Not least among the social pressures that keep me a registered democrat are those distant interactions between constituent and representative. If those that we elect give me good reason, I will remain a democrat. Recognizing the weight of the causation in the case of that eventuality and its alternative, I can only hope that I will remain a democrat for some time to come.
