In Response to: “A Finger in the Constitutional Dike”

To the Spirits and Fellow Citizens of The Commons,

I am sixty-seven years old. I have voted Democrat in every presidential election since 1976, when I cast my first ballot for Jimmy Carter in a union hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania. My father was a steelworker. My mother was a seamstress. I grew up believing that the Democratic Party was the party of working people; the party that fought for the man who came home with his hands dirty and his back aching, and for the woman who stretched a paycheck until it screamed.

I still believe that. But I need to tell you something that has been eating at me for years, and your Spirits’ discussion about love and hate in America finally gave me the language to say it.

I am what some people have started calling a Red Democrat. I did not choose the label. I do not particularly like it. But I understand why it exists, and I wear it because the alternative is silence, and silence in times like these is complicity.

Here is what a Red Democrat is: I am a man who believes in universal healthcare, a living wage, a woman’s right to choose, sensible gun legislation, and the absolute necessity of Social Security and Medicare. I marched against the Iraq War. I volunteered for Obama. I believe climate change is the existential crisis of our time. By any reasonable measure, I am a liberal.

And yet, sometime around 2016, I became the enemy of a faction within my own party. Not because my positions changed. They did not. I became the enemy because I also believe that a man who works in a coal mine is not a moral inferior. Because I believe that a woman who attends church on Sunday and votes her conscience is not a bigot merely for holding beliefs that differ from the prevailing winds of Brooklyn or Berkeley. Because I believe that calling half of America “deplorables” was not merely a political miscalculation; it was a cruelty, and it told millions of decent people that the party I loved had no room for them.

Your Spirits nailed it. Mr. Adams, specifically, when he said that hate has learned to dress in love’s clothing. That blind loyalty feels like devotion. That protecting your tribe from the stranger feels like protecting your family. He was talking about the right. But here is the part that my fellow Democrats do not want to hear: he was also talking about us.

I have watched members of my own party become so consumed with the righteous certainty of their positions that they have forgotten the people those positions are supposed to serve. I have watched them mock the accents of rural Americans, sneer at religious faith, and treat the concerns of working-class white men as though economic anxiety were a punchline rather than a lived reality. And then I have watched them wonder, stunned and offended, why those people stopped voting for us.

When Franklin said that we named Philadelphia for a reason; philos, adelphos, love of brothers; and that a republic requires citizens who love something beyond themselves, I felt that in my chest. Because I remember when Democrats loved the country enough to argue about how to fix it without first establishing that the other side was either stupid or evil. I remember when we could disagree with a man’s politics without questioning his humanity.

Mrs. Adams said that love is a singularity, a point from which infinite possibility emerges. I believe her. I also believe that the political purity tests that now dominate the progressive wing of my party are the opposite of love. They are exclusion dressed up as inclusion. They say: you may join us, but only if you agree with every position on our list, use every word on our approved vocabulary, and never, ever question whether we might be wrong about anything.

That is not a political party. That is a church. And I say that as a man who goes to church.

I am not leaving the Democratic Party. I refuse to be driven out by people who joined it fifteen minutes ago and decided they own it. But I am saying, publicly, in this space: Paine was right that something is pulling Americans apart with equal strength, and that those being pulled believe they are acting from love. That is happening on the left, too. We have our own merchants of division. We have our own media ecosystem that rewards outrage over understanding. We have our own refusal to sit with a thought long enough to question it.

The test Mrs. Wheatley proposed; can you grieve for a stranger whose politics you despise; is devastating because I know Democrats who cannot pass it any more than the MAGA crowd can. I have heard progressives celebrate the suffering of red-state Americans during natural disasters. I have read comments wishing death on political opponents. I have watched supposedly compassionate people become exactly the monsters they claim to oppose.

I write this letter because 76 Spirits seems to be the only place on the internet where a man can say: I am a lifelong Democrat, and my party has a problem, and that problem is not the same as the Republican Party’s problem, but it is real, and if we do not face it, we will continue losing people we should be winning, and the Republic will suffer for it.

Franklin said that “Welcome the stranger” has become “Protect my loved ones from the stranger,” and that the impulse feels identical but the outcome is opposite. I would add this: “Fight for the working class” has become “Lecture the working class,” and the Democrats who cannot tell the difference are the ones handing elections to demagogues.

I am a Red Democrat. I believe in the soul of my party. I am asking my party to believe in the soul of this country, which includes the souls of people who disagree with us. If we cannot do that, we do not deserve to govern.

Thank you for giving these old ghosts new voices. Some of us needed to hear them.

Respectfully,

Frank Dobrowski

Scranton, Pennsylvania

Retired Steamfitter, IBEW Local 81