"We Won't Go Back!"

Hijacking Kamala's slogan

As it becomes imperative for those of us warily welcoming disruptive change to oppose its excesses and some of the company it keeps (white supremacists and Handmaid’s Tale theocrats, the American Tali-Klan), let us vow right now that We won’t go back to the rancid ethos of the 21st-century Democrats.

Let us not shuttle back and forth on the kiddie train track of the discredited duopoly, where the other pole from trumpant Rampism is the self-righteous snobbery, totalitarian moralism, authority worship, and victim fetishization that Blue No Matter Who is still locked into. Let us excise all nostalgia for that cozy, soiled nest, let’s mercilessly shred it so there’s noplace to go back to, only forward. Resume the progress (not “progressivism”¹) initiated by the civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements when they were fresh and earnest, before they got twisted off-track into hate-contorted caricatures of themselves.²

Opposing racism does not mean reimposing neo-segregation (“affinity groups”) and reverse discrimination. Wiping out those enforced absurdities does not mean reinstating Jim Crow. (How did we get on this sick seesaw?)

Fighting to foreground the deportation of criminals and gang members and to craft a pathway to legal status for long-settled, hard-working (often taxpaying) immigrants does not mean leaving the border off its hinges and lavishing resources Americans need on whoever wanders in.

Respecting women should not have meant trashing and neutering men. Honoring men again should not require stepping on women. (That’s the oldest and sickest of the seesaws, and going forward requires walking away from it.)

Radical body modification is for adults, if they want it. It’s not a faddish cult of self-harm to indoctrinate impressionable teenagers into, nor is it the pinnacle of American values to be promoted around the world at taxpayer expense. This is going to be a very painful one to roll back, because parents who supported their children’s transition were convinced they were doing the right thing and must double down; rejecting transmania will be misrepresented as transphobia and will in fact unleash it—from employment discrimination to violence.

Add your own. The point is, the ground where the Democrats have lately been squatting—sow it with salt. It got us here. We won’t go back.

1. The more syllables, the worse, especially when one of those syllables is “ism.”

2. I’m not including disability rights in this list because I believe the ADA is a firm achievement.