The Democratic Party didn't die. Democracy did.

Columnist Kevin Woster, acting as a political coroner, has pronounced the South Dakota Democratic Party dead. He thinks that its few survivors should join the Republican Party to form a progressive faction within it.  However, his idea is an acknowledgement that what is actually dead in the state is  democratic rule. His advice to the remnants of the Democratic Party is to submit to the conquerers and make their progressive sallies within the single, ruling party, so that they can be controlled and dismissed internally and never heard in public  on a legislative floor.  The South Dakota GOP legislature has a record of punishing dissent within its caucus and will not tolerate even minor differences of opinion.

For many years as a county party treasurer, I maintained a list of active Democrats. For a time, Brown County leaned Democratic.  But stalwart Democrats in Brown County dwindled by attrition and were not replaced.  In that attrition was a factor that I had experienced as a professor with students.   That factor was a desire to leave South Dakota, and that desire was not just a matter of looking for better wages, better opportunity, or better climate.  Although South Dakotans believe that they have a superior work ethic and are "nicer" than people in more congested places, those qualities also exist in other places.  But along with the hard work and niceness, South Dakota also has malice, resentment, intolerance,  meanness, all fed by a devotion to ignorance.  Other places have those, too.  But some places acknowledge the negative in human society and people recognize it and work to isolate it so that it is not a presence in their daily lives.  

As a professor and academic adviser to students over the years, I was made aware of a common experience they had in South Dakota, especially in the smaller and rural communities.   Many of these students were of the first generation in their families to go to college. When they returned to their homes during their first breaks in their academic schedules, they often found that old friends from high school who did not go to college were resentful toward them.  The college kids wanted to talk about their college experiences, but their hometown friends took this as flaunting their higher education, suggesting that they thought themselves better than their high school peers.Thus, friendships ended.  And this rift was a frequent factor in the college students' determination to live their lives in places outside of South Dakota when they graduated from college.  It is a factor in the withering process of small towns.  It is a motive behind the brain drain.

However, there were also many students who planned to leave South Dakota while still in high school.  Many, in fact, left the state to go to college, comprising the first wave of outmigration of brain power.    As I analyzed the dwindling names on the list of active Democrats, it became apparent the the brain drain was a significant factor in the political makeup of the state.  

There was another aspect to why people leave the state and how it came to have one-party rule.  And that factor is politics itself.  What has become a fact about the way that politics is conducted, both on the state and national levels, is that it is resentful, mean, stupid and debasing.  There is an undercurrent of malice that runs through politics, and it is demonstrated when Trump stands in front of a rally casting insults, calling names, and telling outright lies.  He represents a deterioration of human culture in which what was once considered degraded behavior is now normal.  As one conservative columnist writes, “Telling entirely unconvincing lies has been a hallmark of the Trump administration..."  At the last Democratic debate, the presidential candidates contended that America is better than that.  Unfortunately, that is precisely what America has become.  And it is the kind of politics that was practiced in South Dakota long before Trump took charge of the country.

A sociologist colleague of mine has been working on a study of the decline of fraternal, patriotic, and cultural organizations across the country.  Within our city, organizations that once had large participation are gone or are greatly diminished.  He listed the Elks, the Eagles, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars,  Westerners, and many other organizations with civic purposes.  He said these organizations were created for the opportunities of people getting together, but in today's divisive atmosphere people put more effort into avoiding each other.  

His study indicates a process through which communities take form as blue (Democratic) or red (Republican), but it also reveals that many people want to escape the conflicts of mean politics.  They physically move or mentally remove themselves from the resentful and degrading politics.  Some of the people on my list of active participants dropped away not because they thought the Democratic Party did not represent their views and interests, but because political activity in general had become so nasty that they found it degrading. 

An experience of mine illustrates the kind of occurrence that drives people away from politics.  One day when I was running personal errands, some party members asked if I could pick up a newsletter from the printers and deliver it to them so that they could  mail it out.  I stopped by the printers and said I was there to pick up a printing job for the Brown County Democrats.  A woman who was at the counter blurted "Democrats!"  And then started ranting at me for being a liberal baby-killer and all sorts of odious things.  The man working the counter motioned me into his office and said I could wait there while he took care of the woman and got the order for the Democrats ready to go.  He apologized that I was subjected to abuse while in his establishment.

The kind of abusive, insulting rant the woman went on has become common.  On The Dakota Free Press blog, here is a sample of a state senator's response when the subject of guns came up:

Rambo was Army, I’m a Marine.. Read a book, there’s a difference and don’t hate me because of my patriotic service to God & Country.. it’s like the unwritten Socialist rule “never tell the lady-abiding Americans you’re coming for their guns..” People don’t like Leftists when they really see them for who they are
You and Jerry are projecting and your “male” insecurities are telling. It’s the reason you cowards have to hide behind your new age KKK hoods of anonymity and chuck lies and fecal matter while driving people away from interacting on Cory’s blog. Several of you have been specifically cited by folks who read the blog in apologies by democrats who are ashamed to be associated with your ilk and blame “you” for many registered Democrat losses.
Law enforcement is not required nor or they responsible for any citizens personal safety. LE cannot protect people and you offer lies claiming otherwise. The only “responsible” thing is to empower law-abiding South Dakotans to protect themselves, which is exactly what I’ve done
I’ve yet to find anyone with the firearms & law enforcement training and experience comparable with own. Why in the world would I surrender my family’s safety and my own because of your unreasonable male insecurity over firearms. Go to a therapist, get some counseling, get some help for your pathological insecurities.
You keep up the good work for “Democrats,” Mike! What ever Dan Lederman is paying you, some of you guys are worth your weight in gold for the GOP.
Everything BcB said about me is horsecrap. You two clowns spew your ignorant partisan hatred and bile driving people away from Cory’s blog. Keep up the good work, let the engraver know your real names so they can give you credit on the SDDP’ tombstone.

If you can get past trying to figure out what a "lady-abiding American" is, you will note the incoherence and the mindless malice with which the senator conducts himself.  Who wants to live in a state where a person of this abusive ilk writes the laws?  And who wants to be involved in this level of  a discussion?  It is not an an example of democratic discourse, but rather a demonstration of how democracy fails.

But we now have a president who engages in just such diatribes.  People of some intelligence and decency realize there is no political antidote for this kind of toxic insanity.  For those of us who once proudly served our country, it is dismaying to realize our country has become what we defended it against.  

To note, with some glee, that the Democratic Party is dead and its survivors should resign themselves and submit to the hateful, malicious rule of the party that state senator represents is to abandon the hope for democracy.  It is to refute the course on which Lincoln tried to steer the nation:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

It is not the Democratic Party that is in its death throes.  It is democracy itself.  Because there is a large contingent of people who have abandoned its principles which gives others a reason to give up on it.  Those facts must be confronted if democracy is to have a chance to survive.