Been a bit under the weather lately, which is why you haven’t heard from me. Had another cancer surgery on Monday and that does throw a monkey wrench into the works. I’ll spare you the details. At any rate I follow the news, so, as June has now slid into July, let me belatedly wish everyone Happy Pride Month! I remember my first Pride Parade, must have been 1980. Such a happy memory. Little did we, the LGBTQ community in San Francisco, suspect what a fearful nightmare lay just ahead.
This year’s Pride celebration, as you may have heard, was smudged by a particularly ugly little confrontation between Scott Weiner, the gay State Senator running for Congress, and an apparently super-progressive man who was harassing him. I’m doing some assuming here, but the man, who I guess was Gay, was mad at Weiner, who is Jewish, for refusing to criticize Israel and Netanyahu for their stance on Gaza. The man reportedly began yelling at Weiner, saying “It breaks my heart that someone [like you] who wrote good legislation for queers is so fucking terrible on Gaza.” Then he added, for good measure, “You do not belong here anymore, Scott.”
I don’t know your position on Gaza but surely we can agree that this kind of selectively performative personal attack is not good for gay politics or for politics in general. This incident has received widespread publicity, with rightwing media reporting that, even in super-left San Francisco, the wokes are eating their own. There’s an element of truth to that. Democrats can take it as a point of pride that we, at least, have not become a cult the way the MAGA party has. There’s still room for debate among Democrats. But the incident does illustrate the infighting among Democrats that may threaten the party’s chances for success in November.
We Democrats have gotten used to a certain fissuring in the party. In its simplest form, we have moderate Dems, among whom I’d include Gavin Newsom, who have not boarded the Krazy Kar and have been highly critical of it. In its most radical form we have Zohran Mamdani, the “Democratic Socialist” of New York City. I like Zohran, but the truth is that his wing of the party is a huge turnoff for millions of voters, who might otherwise reject the MAGA party but are caught in a difficult Hobson’s choice: whether to express their anger at Democrats for embracing such stupid wokeness, but thereby risk handing everything over to Republicans.
To some extent this is a healthy debate, one I doubt will be resolved in November. The Democratic Party is a huge tent and has always been stuffed with oddball bedfellows. Communists in the 1930s had to lay down next to millionaire businessmen in order to keep the New Deal coalition going. Later, in the 1960s, Vietnam and the student protests brought brand new pressures on the party’s internal cohesion, but we survived that and managed to elect Carter, Clinton, Obama and even Biden (in 2020), not bad for a party said to form circular firing squads.
I have a great deal of affection for the party’s progressives such as Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, AOC and others. They are products (ideological if not by birth) of the Sixties (my era) and its idealism, love for the common man, and tolerance, all of which stand in sharp contrast to the violence of the Republican Party, which has been taken over by religious fanatics. At the same time, when you live in a place like Oakland which the progressives have dominated for decades, you are witness on a daily basis to the insanity, damage and racism of the wokes. You see up close and personal what these maniacs have wrought. It’s not pretty. No wonder so many Americans have formed an adverse opinion of them. They realize, these Americans, that far-left Democrats are a threat to them, their peaceful lives, and their economic and personal security.
And that is the Hobson’s Choice we face today: how to reject an uncivil, deranged Republican right without throwing the baby out with the bathwater? The Democratic Party has been the furnace forging so many of America’s finest concepts. Its main antagonist, the Republicans, would destroy all those concepts in a single mass holocaust and turn us into the United Christian White National States of America. You can deny that all you want but you’d be lying or delusional. Take one look at Trump, at his Cabinet, at his senior advisors, at his big donors, at his Supreme Court (even when it manages a bit of independence), and all illusions are wiped away: there is an evil spirit out there we’ve seen before in world history (paging the Nazis). It is always lurking in the shadows, and is not a friend of yours.
I’ve seen this threat to the Democratic Party and America’s foundational democracy for going on fifty years and have repeatedly warned my friends about it. It’s why I reacted so strongly to the rise of Occupy Oakland back in the day. Occupy started out splendidly and beautifully, and I was a strong supporter. But then they got entrapped in their own radical ideology when they refused to condemn the violent extremists in their midst. Those black-masked thugs took over, reduced Oakland to violent mayhem, and made possible the election of Donald Trump. (Was that their goal all along?) Maybe I’m just too much of a Sixties Hippie, but violence has never appealed to me. You don’t help the world by burning trashcans, smashing store windows, or defunding the police. Nor do you help it by scrawling ACAB on sidewalks. I’d have thought we’d be long past this stage of the Democratic Party in the year 2026, but I was wrong. The enemy is still out there, more virulent and conspiratorial than ever.
So how will you handle the Hobson’s Choice this year? Will you vote for Steve Hilton and whatever other mediocrities the Republicans put on their ticket? Will you support Donald Trump in his mental decline, as he prepares to un-do the Congressional elections? Or will you return to normalcy and vote for Democrats, knowing full well we have our work cut out for us in purging the party of fools? Just as I’m trying to beat this damned cancer in my body, I’m trying to heal the Democratic Party of the cancer that is eating into its vital soul.
Steve Heimoff