Why the Democrat Party Is Dissolving

By Larry Huss,

In the Spring of 1972 I asked Nancy O’Neill to marry me. Gratefully she accepted. (Even more gratefully, we are still married and are approaching our 53^rd wedding anniversary in September.) At the time I was a Deputy Attorney General for the State of Montana, working for Republican Robert Woodahl. Shortly after the engagement announcement was made, Mr. Woodahl, knowing that I was a card carrying Goldwater conservative, asked me if I knew Nancy’s father, Danny O’Neill – a rancher, cattleman and prominent figure in Democrat circles. I allowed that I had met him several times but was still getting to know him.

I’ll never know whether Mr. Woodahl was worried that I might be an inadvertent conduit for the Democrats or that the Democrats might try to corrupt me into joining their ranks. It didn’t matter because neither concern was grounded in fact and I was more concerned on making my way as a new lawyer than I was about politics. Regardless over time I got to know Danny well and as our conversations drifted into everything from soup to nuts, I got to know his political views. For the whole of the rest of his life I doubt there were a half a dozen things upon which we disagreed and even at that the disagreements were at the edges of the issues rather than the substance.

At that time in Montana, despite the fact the Democrats regularly captured the statewide offices, Montana was governed from the middle by an alliance of urban Republicans and rural Democrats. There were seldom strictly partisan votes which is the norm today for everything.

Nancy and I recently moved our summer home from Bend, Oregon to Prescott, Arizona. Prescott being slightly over a mile high escapes the unrelenting heat of Phoenix and the Valley of the Sun during the summers. As we continue to unpack boxes that we have ferried from state to state and twenty-six different homes, we came across several news clips from over fifty years ago when Danny ran for Congress in Montana. It provides an insight as to how conservative rural Democrats were.

An article in the Great Falls Tribune in May of 1968 noted:

‘Danny O’Neill, Democratic candidate for Congress from the second district, said here Saturday afternoon, ‘While I believe the better education of our children is approaching the status of a national emergency and the federal government should allocated some funds to meet this emergency, this aid should not be made an occasion for the creation of another constantly expanding federal bureau exercising authority over the control of our education system.’

“’That control should be left to the state government, and to a much greater degree, local communities.’”

On the cost of living from a May 2, 1968 article in the Great Falls Tribune:

“’No member of our American society is compelled to endure greater distress and more anxiety due to the high cost of living than the nation’s housewives.’”

Those comments were made in support of his proposal to lower income taxes by increasing the amount of exemptions for purposes of paying federal income taxes. Which he also backed up by noting, “. . . for that reason if no other reason the country’s housewives should know the only way to cut the high living cost is to cut the high cost of government.”

And Danny was not an outlier in the Democrat party. After I left the Attorney General’s office to engage in private practice I found that a significant part of my practice required me to represent a number of state wide business associations before the state legislature. I knew at the outset that the issues of my client’s were relatively non-partisan and that they would be best served by engaging Republicans and Democrats alike and that recognition was heightened as I became more familiar with that cross-party alliance and that Montana, at that time, tended to deal with issues from the middle with little regard for partisan preference. So much so that one of my best friends then and still now, and godfather to my daughter was one of the Democrat leaders in the House. So much so that as we talked and debated issues, it was apparent there was little we disagreed on.

But time passes. The Democrat Party in an attempt to be the Big Tent party embraced every new political movement that came along and it was only later that those movements came to realize that their issues were subsumed by those of the Democrat leadership. So, for instance, the Democrats embraced the women’s movement but soon enough learned that it only applied to Democrat women and not to women generally. They embraced the civil rights movement but learned soon enough that those “rights” were reserved for Democrat people of color and not people of color generally.

So many people crowded the Big Tent, that internal disputes arose,  the agendas for some groups were put on the back burner in favor of the next new group to be embraced. Those groups that were most loyal over time, found that they made little or no progress on their issues. They continued to be loyal based on assurances that they were next and their issues were always highlighted during campaign seasons but never in Congress. Soon enough Danny and my friend from the state legislature realized that the Democrat Party had moved on and that the issues that they held to be important were no longer embraced by the Democrat leadership – lower taxes, more efficient government, better education not by spending more but by demanding better performance, etc.

So far have the Democrats moved from their point of origin that they only have one issue – whatever President Donald Trump supports, they oppose – period, hard stop.

But before the Republicans get too full of themselves, they too are trending toward some of the same myopia – if a liberal Democrat is for something, they must necessarily be against it. It will continue to be a partisan mess unless and until we can re-establish that alliance of politicians who will strive to solve problems rather than running on those same problems year after year without any intention of actually resolving them. But then again it may just be that the type of people that we send to run our governments are just too dumb to actually solve problems.

Danny O’Neill continues to spin in his grave.