The Democrats: Apology and Promise

We are the Democrats. Since 1828, our great party has played a major role in participating in the political process that has produced what is arguably the greatest Republic the world has ever seen. We've produced generation after generation of leaders whom, despite their faults, have helped establish and maintain a country that has served, in the main, as a beacon of light and hope to the desperate masses of the world yearning, in those immemorial words, to breathe free.

Over those nearly 200 years, we have all worked together, despite our differences, to produce a society where desperate want is a rarity; where hard-working men and women can produce a better future for themselves and their children; and where the arbitrary disadvantages that have in the past held so many of us back and deprived others of our genuine talents have been reduced and minimized. Nothing is perfect, and neither is our country, but we have built together a stable, secure, exciting, dynamic community, and can all, in consequence, look forward to an even better tomorrow.

But we, as Democrats, have faltered in our duty in recent years. We have allowed the discourse within our ranks to become increasingly dominated by a tiny, well-organized, and disruptive minority who have insisted, evermore stridently, that our culture is a tyrannical, destructive patriarchy and that we are not sovereign, responsible individual citizens capable of negotiating a shared and prosperous peace, but oppressive or oppressed minority group members defined above all by our sex, race, ethnicity, and sexual preference.

We have failed, as well, to oppose the profoundly anti-American claim that free speech is merely the means by which the powerful protect their interests, and we have abandoned our invaluable commitment to and contract with the American working class, who toiled mightily and often under conditions of extreme deprivation to perform the back-breaking labor so necessary to the creation of our stellar country. In doing so, we betrayed and insulted our primary constituency, and we squandered the opportunity to elect the first woman to the position of the presidency of the United States.

Then, instead of taking responsibility for our well-deserved failure and loss, we insisted upon vilifying those who defeated us appropriately and honestly in the honorable democratic process. We're sorry.

We promise to return to the priorities that made our party great. We promised to build and revitalize the vital infrastructure whose construction employs our tradespeople, and whose use is available to all. We promise to insist that our schools and those who conduct the research upon which their methods are founded abandon their divisive ideology and teach our children the knowledge and skills necessary to make them respectable, mature, productive, reliable citizens.

We promise and have already taken productive steps to reduce the inevitable corruption that tends to take hold of even the greatest and most alert of states. We're the Democrats. We did not uphold our responsibility to the American people, and we're justly and properly sorry for that. We promise to clean our house.

We promise to draw divisions between the key and time-honored principles that unite us all and the divisive identity politics that is threatening to reduce us to an ignoble squabbling and dangerously polarized tribalism. We're the Democrats. We hope you'll forgive us, and we promise, by the sacred social compact defined by our unalienable individual rights, to act responsibly and carefully and do better together. Long may our great country prosper.