This week my thoughts travelled back a few decades to a long drink of a man I knew well. Sam was rail thin with a shoe-leather face and big, working hands. The smile lines on his face were deep and gave a hint of a big heart and generous soul.
Sam was from Arkansas. He was a working man his whole life. Of course, he was a Democrat.
Near the end of his life, Sam was kind enough to give me one of his proudest possessions — a lapel pin shaped like a donkey’s butt with a moving, chain-link tail. I still have it.
Sam had acquired the pin at the Democratic Party convention in 1960. Back then, the Democrats were the party of working people like Sam.
The Democrats represented change and renewal. They were unafraid to challenge an entrenched establishment to make a better country for a struggling middle class. Sam wore that pin with pride.
A couple of generations later, another old man seems lost in the recollections of that time. In the fog of memory, Joe Biden seems to believe he is still a scrappy kid from Scranton, Pennsylvania fighting for the underdog.
But delusions aside, the Democrats are not Sam’s party anymore. Over Biden’s long political career, the Democrats have abandoned the working people of Scranton and most of America.
Four years ago, in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, Donald Trump was a spent political force. Biden resuscitated him.
Ignoring the anxiety over inflation. Getting the border wrong. Embarrassing the country in a bungled exit from Afghanistan. Holding to progressive views on issues from gender to climate. At every step, Biden drew the Democrats further from the streets of Scranton.
And, in a final insult to the electorate, Biden and the Democrats insisted until the eve of the Democratic Party convention that a failing man in his 80s was capable of leading America for four more years. It was pure hubris.
The Democrats are no longer the party of Sam. They are now slaves to the elites and fringe progressive notions.
This should be sobering news for Liberals in Canada.
Canadians are not Americans. We have different ambitions and expectations. And Justin Trudeau is no Joe Biden. He is a man born to the rarified air of the Lawrentian elite.
Governments that have disdain for working people are fated for defeat. The Trudeau government has repeatedly demonstrated an arrogant dismissal of a large segment of blue-collar Canadians.
The signs of that disconnect are everywhere. The blatant antisemitism in publicly funded universities. The upside-down diversity initiatives that are profoundly unfair. The public services that refuse to provide service.
The Trudeau government has bowed before every fringe progressive initiative in an adolescent impulse to appear woke. Working people are done with it.
The alienation of the Liberal party from working Canadians is well deserved. The question for the Liberal party is whether or not it has any interest in doing the hard work required to reconnect.
So far, the answer seems to be, ‘No.’
I don’t know if the Democrats can reconnect with people like my late friend Sam. But I am confident the Liberals’ fascination with virtue-signalling will prevent them from understanding and appreciating the people they want to govern.
Much like Biden’s virtuous Democrats, the entitled Trudeau Liberals richly deserve the fate they have created. I suspect Sam is smiling.