No Dodging the Democrats’ Degradation, or, “We’re All San Francisco Democrats Now”
27th May 2023
You would think a team named “Dodgers” would know how to dodge a culture war battle they can’t win (see: Target, Bud Light), but no, the Los Angeles Dodgers managed to get picked off in the most embarrassing fashion in a pickle-style rundown entirely of their own ineptitude. Surely the conservative (and Catholic) O’Malley family that used to own the Dodgers—before the onerous estate tax forced the family to sell the team back in the 1990s after Peter O’Malley died—are rolling in their graves.
But there’s a larger lesson here. Back in 1984 I attended the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco as a credentialed reporter (you can read the long feature Ken Masugi and I filed, “Revenge of the Nerds,” here). The day before the convention opened, there was a large gay pride parade on Market Street, which I watched from the sidewalk for the show. It was what you would have expected—a flamboyant and festive display of gay fetishes and skimpy costumes made mostly of leather, along with lots of banners expressing grievances against the Reagan Administration for not instantly curing AIDS with more money.
I somehow got to chatting on the sidewalk with a Republican campaign operative who was observing the convention, and he remarked, “In 1972 we paid people to do this to McGovern, and now the Democrats are doing it for us for free.” Sure enough, Democrats running the convention were careful to keep this sideshow out of sight as much as possible. They knew political poison when they saw it, though Jeanne Kirkpatrick nonetheless later stuck them with the label “San Francisco Democrats.” Though she had foreign policy chiefly in mind, there was a distinct undercurrent of their victim mentality that defines the party’s dominant ideology today.