For all my complaints about the immorality of the current Republican Party — and they’re legion — I’m not giving the Democrats a pass, either. They screwed this up badly, for years, and are only getting worse.

Hapless. If I word-associate, it’s the word first out of my lips right after I hear ‘Democratic Party’. How can a modern political party be so abysmally bad at articulating what they stand for? How craven to you have to be to roll over every time a Republican questions your manhood? If you’re proud of your record, why can’t you do more to point to it?

If you can’t say what you’re for, you should lose elections. It’s not complicated. Sure, I’ve read the Democratic Party Platform. I just haven’t heard those words out of actual Democrat’s mouths.

Are the Democrats for or against raising the minimum wage? According to the party platform, sure. You’d think it was an easy answer. Why was it hard to find someone who would say that during the election? It was like they were afraid to offend their business supporters. Yeah, they’d complain that Republicans were against it. Opposition is easy. But it’s hard to be sure those people would still support it if Republicans suddenly changed sides.

When the economy was crashing, Obama struggled to get as much stimulus as he could. Many argue that he got the best deal he could, when he settled for half the money we needed, and we ended up getting half a recovery we’d hoped for. Maybe true (I think so, anyway.)

Who was he struggling against? Elves? Other Democrats? Critical ink shortages? Most of us do remember, with a little prompting. The Republicans were violently opposed to any stimulus. Did they have alternatives? Good reasons? Naa. And it’s not because they thought it wouldn’t work; the macroeconomics was clear enough. They knew it would work. They opposed the stimulus to deny Obama any success.

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Mitch McConnell to the National Journal.

[Speaking of Obama’s agenda] “We’re going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.” John Boehner, the presumptive Speaker at the time.

They said it out loud, and for attribution. They did this knowing their intransigence would hurt all of us, and openly didn’t care. They did it deliberately, time and again, gambling that the public would never connect our pain with that monkey wrench in the gears, or that smiling Republican candidate with our pinched, sour lives.

Not much of a gamble, it turned out.

And where have the brave, righteous Democrats been while Republicans lied their way out of their sordid history? Were they the voice of reason and honesty, reminding people what had actually happened, and when? Did they point out each place where our sleazy ‘opposition party’ gleefully hacked into the national fabric? How many of our national failures they stage-managed?

Nope. Sudden amnesia. Everyone looking around, blinking, jaws flapping.

I have no idea why they were so silent, but I’m not voting for a party so clearly suffering from dementia.

Bernie Sanders had real Progressive ideas. Listening to him was a relief. From public education funding, to wage inequality, to a living wage, he said real stuff. Risky stuff. Things people might disagree with. We stood for things again.

I used to say that he was a great candidate who would have made a terrible President, but damn, was I wrong about that last part. Relatively speaking.

Yes, the Democratic Party lost the 2016 election because of Comey, and the Russians, and gerrymandered districts, and voter suppression, and all the rest. Doesn’t change the fact that they had been losing people’s hearts long before that. Even if this specific election was rigged, the decline would have caught up to Democrats eventually.