What is a Democrat, and is it different now than ever before?
I began pondering this in another thread and began to think of the evolution of the Democratic party in my 60+ years on this Earth.
I wrote the following in the other thread.
"The party began moving strongly right in the 80's. Extremely high inflation and the Iran crisis sapped the energy from the Carter administration despite his success in the Camp David Accords.
The 80's lead to the Reagan Revolution, yes they called it a Revolution, and it cemented a philosophy the GOP has continued to embrace. Mondale and Dukakis were trounced, and a new Democratic ideal began in the 90's. One that was an attempt to retreive those Reagan Democrats by moving further right. It worked and Bill Clinton was elected for eight years, but policies such as trade, incarceration and welfare took big hits. The 2000's brought terrorism, and renewed nationalism, and deregulation. Obama, ran on a campaign of Hope and Change. It excited the voters and then when legislative gridlock set in it's pretty well now moved to an acceptance of "No, we can't, because...(insert a thousand reasons here.)
This is where we are. It is a party so far away from FDR who said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, or Kennedy who got America excited with making the impossible possible touting civil rights, and medicare and medicaid and even getting a man to the moon. It took Johnson to put those social policies into action but by the end of the decade America began to believe change could happen.
Now, instead of believing change can happen, we're told the reasons change "can't" happen. It is a pragmatic party now. Feels more "grown up" and less idealistic.
But as a pragmatist would say, it is what it is."
My question is what is the quintessence of the Democratic Party today? Why should people vote Democratic today, NOT why shouldn't they vote Republican and NOT why they shouldn't vote for Trump, but WHY should they vote Democratic?
I ask this because a lot of posters wonder what the Democratic Party really stands for going forward.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I think this year might go higher. Just anecdotal is tradesmen putting Trump stickers on their lifts and vehicles in the parking lot. He is the Middle Finger candidate. They have not been treated very well by the Party and are ready to blame "those animals"
Trump's battlecry) for their troubles. As you say, they have a tendency to ignore their best interests.
by Jon Schwarz
The Intercept, Feb. 22 2016
According to an article in Politico, Bernie Sanders, during his 1974 campaign for the Senate on Vermont’s Liberty Union Party ticket, called the Central Intelligence Agency “a dangerous institution that has got to go.” Sanders complained that the CIA was only accountable to “right-wing lunatics who use it to prop up fascist dictatorships.”
Jeremy Bash, a former CIA chief of staff who is now an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, told reporter Michael Crowley that Sanders’s comment “reinforces the conclusion that he’s not qualified to be commander in chief.” Bash explained: “Abolishing the CIA in the 1970s would have unilaterally disarmed America during the height of the Cold War and at a time when terrorist networks across the Middle East were gaining strength.” Bash was chief of staff for Leon Panetta at both the CIA and Defense Department, and now runs a consulting firm called Beacon Global Strategies.
But Sanders’ position is not that radical: many prominent politicians, including two previous Democratic commanders-in-chief, have called for the CIA to be dismantled or severely constrained.
John F. Kennedy famously described his desire to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds” after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Peter Kornbluh points out in his book Bay of Pigs Declassified that the State Department at that same time proposed that the CIA should be stripped of its covert action capacity and renamed. However, the CIA escaped any serious repercussions — partly because, as Kornbluh explains, the CIA’s then-director John McCone made sure that most of the copies of a damning report on the Bay of Pigs by the Agency’s own Inspector General were literally burned.
Then in 1963, after Kennedy’s assassination, Harry Truman wrote a newspaper column explaining that “I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations … I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President … and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.”
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https://theintercept.com/2016/02/22/in-1974-call-to-abolish-cia-sanders-followed-in-footsteps-of-jfk-truman/
In economic matters, JFK was taped talking about Income Inequality in 1963:
By Tom Putnam | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY 24, 2012
DURING THE last days of his presidency, John F. Kennedy had a number of concerns on his mind. In tapes being released today by the Kennedy Library, we hear, for example, the president focus on his reelection and issues of economic inequality. What can we do, he asks his political advisers, to make voters “decide that they want to vote for us, Democrats? What is it we have to sell ’em? We hope we have to sell them prosperity, but for the average guy the prosperity is nil. He’s not unprosperous, but he’s not very prosperous. He’s not . . . very well-off. And the people who really are well-off hate our guts.’’ As questions about growing social inequity increasingly dominate our current political dialogue, it may be instructive to look back at how these issues played out a half century ago.
Having witnessed the country survive the Great Depression and World War II, JFK understood the economic and military vulnerabilities of democratic capitalism. Though insulated by his family’s wealth, JFK was affected by the poverty he witnessed on the 1960 campaign trail. One of the memorable lines from his inaugural address “if a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich’’ helps explain his first executive order: increasing surplus food allotments to poor communities across the nation.
Once in power, his economic policies were ideologically balanced, combining, for example, a proposed tax cut to stimulate the economy with efforts to raise the minimum wage and expand unemployment benefits. Like the current incumbent, JFK’s legislative efforts - especially those designed to help the poor and advance civil rights - were often stymied by members of Congress. During his 1962 State of the Union address he reminded his congressional colleagues: “The Constitution makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress. . . It is my task to report the State of the Union - to improve it is the task of us all.’’
In terms of his administration’s relationship with the “really well-off,’’ his most famous confrontation came during the steel crisis in 1962. Having helped to negotiate a non-inflationary wage settlement with the United Steelworkers Union, Kennedy thought he had an agreement with industry executives that, in exchange, they would not raise the price of steel that year.
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When secret government agencies and secret government agents act to benefit secret agendas and secret groups and secret individuals, it isn't democracy. Like Bernie Sanders, JFK knew that.
Yep!
funny how Hillary has so much in common with Libertarians and far right Republicans 
