Who Killed the Democratic Party?

After my story Who Killed the Oscars was published in Tablet, I received this letter:

Indeed, I didn’t explain why I voted for Trump in the Tablet piece. It was already too long. No doubt many reading it thought, who cares what she thinks? She voted for Trump. I’m sure there was a time when I would have thought the same thing. I used to be a faithful, loyal Democrat. I used to be a cheerleader for Hollywood. I thought I would do anything for love. But I found out that there was one thing I couldn’t do.

But know this: it’s never been a story about what happened to me. It’s always been a story about what happened to the Left.

So let’s do a Part Two of the Tablet Piece and call it:

Who Killed the Democratic Party?

The first time I remember voting for the Democrats was back in the 1980s. I wore a Dukakis button as a Women's Only Health Spa receptionist. A customer saw my pin and said, “Why are you voting for Du-Tax-us?” I looked at her, confused. I didn’t know why I was voting for him. “Never mind,” she said to me. “You probably never even went to college.”

I knew enough back then that we were different from the Republicans. That political divide had lasted since Nixon's days. They were uncool and had all of the power. We were cool but had no power. We were the subversive side, the Blue Velvet to their Top Gun.

That customer’s words tumbled around in my head long enough to motivate me to go to college and finally graduate from UCLA at 29, the first person in my family to do so. While a student there, I saw Bill Clinton speak. All of that charisma suckered me in, and now I knew why I was a Democrat. It wasn’t complicated. I’ll have what he’s having.

After I dropped out of graduate film school to chase some loser dude back to Los Angeles, my life came apart so spectacularly that I escaped to migrate online, where I would work and live for the next 30 years.

The internet changed everything. It gave so many of us a voice and a platform. Anyone could have a website online. Anyone could generate news. The question of who would control it was never asked because it was obvious. The Democrats did. We colonized it—the New Frontier in Cyberspace.

Obama was as wedded to Silicon Valley as he was to Hollywood. I was in the right place at the right time, a Good Soldier for the Left as a member of a newly mobilized army on Twitter, rallying behind our leader, the nation’s first Black president.

We were more connected than ever before at a time when more people were alive than ever before. On the “inside,” things always felt so big, so monumental. On the “outside,” life went on as normal among “The Proles.” We were in the early stages of 1984 if Whole Foods catered it.

It was an alignment of power not seen since the utopian days of post-war 1950s America when government and culture aligned to snuff out the Communist threat. With an iPhone in my pocket and high-speed internet, I did my duty every day as a Good Liberal fighting the good fight.

It wasn’t until Obama’s re-election bid in 2012 that I understood I was part of a hive mind that could manipulate the media narrative and thus create the reality we wanted. We could stretch the truth—or lie—about, say, Mitt Romney and the “Binders of women,” and it worked. The legacy press would print our headlines. Clickbait would do the rest. Eventually, it trickled down into the homes of ordinary Americans.

It wasn’t just politics. It went much deeper than that. We were different people now, better people, good people doing things, something the Left never was throughout my entire life as a child of the counterculture 60s and 70s. But to be that good, we need to target people who were that bad. We needed a receptacle for our collective sins.

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