My Path to Disilusionment with the Democratic Party

I registered as a Democrat when I was still in high school. I joined the party that opposed unnecessary wars and stood up for the working class. If the Democrats had nominated someone like Bernie Sanders--or another candidate with similar views--I would vote for Sanders or a like-minded Democrat with zero hesitation and I would not be writting posts supportive of Trump who, alas, is the most mainstream sort-of antiwar candidate with a chance of winning.  

Unfortunately, during the first election after the disastrous Iraq War, whom did the Democrats nominate? John Kerry, who voted for the Iraq War.  In 2008 and 2012, the Party couldn't very well oppose Obama, for obvious reasons, and bless the man, he did oppose the Iraq War before it started. It is also my sense that the Democrat establishment did their best to do an end-run around his more dovish foreign policy after he was elected. 

Once Obama had served his eight years, the party went back to form and nominated Hillary Clinton, who voted for the Iraq War and lied, saying she was voting for war because she was really for peace. Right. Her later votes showed she was lying.  The late Senator Carl Levin introduced the Levin Amendment, the purpose of which was to slow the rush to war by tying war to concessions made by Saddam Hussein.  Clinton voted against an amendment that could have avoided that costly, disastrous war. 

According to two political scientists, Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen, the Iraq War was fought by America's working class. While enlistment rates did not vary that much by social class, casualty rates did. The lower the average income of a recruit's zipcode, the higher the casualty rate. 

And don't forget that debacle in Libya. We overthrew Qaddaffi, a no-goodnik if there ever was one, but something worse happened:

But Libya is largely considered a failed state. Since Muammar Gaddafi, who ran the country for four decades, was ousted in 2011, the country has descended into civil war. A transitional government failed to implement rule of law in the country, which has splintered into several factions of militias, tribes, and gangs. In lawless Libya, many see the slave trade and smuggling as a lucrative industry. Tackling the country’s humanitarian crisis will require international assistance.

Clinton was partially responsible for this tragedy.  

In 2016, Democrats forget about about her involvement in the Iraq War and Libya. Leaked emails from Deborah Wasserman Schultz showed that the Democratic National Committee violated its own rules about neutrality and tried to swing the nomination away from Sanders and to Clinton. She also spent a lot of 2016 skewering Vladimir Putin--a Machiavellian man, but provoking him is *not* a good idea. 

In 2020, the Demoratic elite rigged the nomination to get another Iraq War supporter in the top position. Okay, we don't have proof like those smoking emails but does anyone really believe that people who bested Biden in Iowa and New Hampshire--Buttigieg, Bloomberg, and Klobuchar--all of a sudden decided to withdraw on their own and ALL decided to endorse Biden? 

In other words, the Democrat party has failed to represent the interests of the little guy--that blue-collar worker, the kid who joins the military because it is his only way of getting ahead and finds himself fighting a war based on lies, that waitress who now must learn Spanish in order to have a job because of the large number of immigrants entering the country--and it takes many months or years to learn a language. What should her kids eat in the meantime? 

I am waiting for my political party to come to its senses and return to its values. 

I am inclined to vote for Kamala Harris but cannot quite understand what she will do on questions of war and peace.