Democrats Embrace Modernity as the GOP Rejects It

A column in the Washington Post looks at the drastic chasm that separates the Democrat Party and the Republican Party as we move toward the 2016 election year.  One the one side, Democrats accept changes occurring in the nation's demographics and modern advances.  On the other stands the GOP which wants to return to the 1950's with all of the discrimination and bigotry that those years entailed.  Most specifically, the GOP seeks to return to a time of unchallenged white privilege and religion was forced upon the populace through prayer in schools and near total deference to Christians and their religious institutions.  As a corollary, the GOP and its base reject any modern knowledge that challenges the make believe fantasy world in which so many of the Christofascist of the party base live.   The Republican Party was not always like this and I attribute the party's decline to the rise of the Christofascists within the GOP who despise anyone who is not a white, heterosexual evangelical Christian.  Here are column highlights:

Which political party loves America? Not the United States that once existed, but the flesh-and-blood nation that we live in now.

The debates we have witnessed — too few and far between for the Democrats, frequent enough for the Republicans to constitute a new reality TV show — have provided an incontestable answer to that question.

The Democrats embrace the United States of Now in all of its raucous diversity.   Democrats are not free of nostalgia. They long for the more economically equal America of decades ago and celebrate liberalism’s heydays during the New Deal and civil rights years.

But Hillary Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Martin O’Malley all stand up for the rights of a younger America — today’s country — that is less white, more Latino and more Asian (and, yes, more Muslim) than was the U.S. of the past. The cultural changes that have reshaped us are welcomed as part of our historical trajectory toward justice and inclusion.

The Republicans, particularly Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), don’t like our country right now. They yearn for the United States of Then. The current version is cast as a fallen nation. 

[U]nease and even rage characterize the response of many in the GOP ranks to what the country has become. This can cross into a loathing that Trump exploits by promising to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants and block Muslims from entering the country while dismissing dissent from his program of demographic reconstruction as nothing more than “political correctness.”

Given that the divide between the parties this year is so fundamental, it’s shameful that Democrats did not try to make their case to as many Americans as possible.

If you have faith in your response to anger and fear, you should be ready to bear witness before the largest congregation you can assemble.