There is a particular genre of moral performance at which the Democratic Party has become unrivaled. It is the conscience that switches on and off according to whose ox is being gored. When the offender wears the wrong jersey, the outrage is total, theological, beyond appeal, and usually downright glandular. When he wears theirs, the identical offense softens into a “dark period," a “mistake he owned," a regrettable and dangerous “distraction" cooked up by manipulating enemies who are afraid of the truth.
The most recent installment arrived in Maine, but to treat it as a story about one candidate is to miss the pattern entirely. It is a story about a party that has quietly but conveniently abandoned the notion that principles are supposed to obligate the people who hold them.
Consider the case they are now asking the country to see past and wave through. Graham Platner, the party’s front-runner for the Senate in Maine, spent years wearing a chest tattoo of the Totenkopf, the death’s-head insignia of Hitler’s SS. He says he got it during a night of drinking in Croatia in 2007 and had no idea what it meant. The trouble is that a former girlfriend told reporters he referred to it years earlier as “my Totenkopf," and his own former political director has said the campaign understood it was a problem months before he claims he suddenly learned the truth. To this the party adds a documented record of old posts in which he trivialized and blamed the victims of sexual assault, and a New York Times account in which three former partners described relationships they called toxic, with one alleging he physically restrained her and prevented her from leaving a room.
Now watch the dirty machine engage even as it absurdly boasts its pristine virtue. Bernie Sanders, the party’s most theatrically self-identifying Jew, looked at the man with the SS tattoo and the rape-trivializing posts and pronounced him an “excellent candidate" whose difficult war experiences deserve our sympathy. Kirsten Gillibrand, who built a national profile on “believe all women", offered the immortal reassurance that the party would still win Maine. Ro Khanna solemnly allowed that the behavior was “wrong" and “misogynistic" in one breath and blithely pivoted to the billionaire class and “genocide" in the next. Platner himself supplied the script everyone is reading from, insisting that the stories exist only to stop us from talking about healthcare and taxes.
The gaslighting is the point. The accusations are not false, so they must be reframed as a plot.
Set this beside the Kavanaugh confirmation, when “believe all women" was not a slogan but a sacrament, applied with full force to decades-old allegations no investigation could corroborate. Set it beside the reflex, deployed against anyone in a red hat, of reaching instantly for Nazi comparisons over a meme or a hand gesture. The same party that detects fascism in a campaign logo cannot summon a single hard question for a nominee who wore the actual emblem of the actual SS on his actual chest. The high inquisitors of toxic masculinity have, on cue, misplaced their robes.
If this were confined to candidates, it would merely be sordid. But the selective conscience is a governing philosophy, and nowhere is it clearer than on the gravest question a republic faces, the question of war.
When American and Israeli forces struck Iran on the last day of February, the Democratic reaction was immediate and uniform. There was no imminent threat! It was a war of choice! The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to commit the nation to war! Senator Adam Schiff called the action illegal from the start, insisting there had been no attack and no imminent threat. Congressman Sean Casten noted pointedly that the word “imminent" did not appear even once in the administration’s notification to Congress. The party forced vote after vote, and on June 3 the House passed a war powers resolution ordering an end to hostilities, 215 to 208. Suddenly every Democrat was a constitutional originalist, every one a jealous guardian of legislative prerogative.
It is a beautiful principle. One only wishes they had discovered it before.
In 1999 Bill Clinton launched a seventy-eight-day bombing campaign against Serbia. He did it without a declaration of war or congressional authorization. The House actually voted against supporting the air campaign while the bombs were already falling, and Clinton kept bombing anyway. Serbia had not attacked the United States. Serbia posed no threat to the United States. There was no “imminent" anything. And the Democratic leadership did not reach for the Constitution. Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle declared that he fully supported the president, and the war of choice proceeded with their blessing.
In 2011 Barack Obama did the same to Libya. He ordered strikes without congressional approval, against a regime that threatened no American, and his lawyers performed the contortion of arguing that an air war was not even “hostilities" requiring authorization. And who rose to defend the proposition that the president needed no permission at all? Asked whether Obama needed congressional authorization for Libya, Nancy Pelosi replied, “Yes" - when asked if he could proceed without it.
Here is the part that should end the argument. Of the three regimes, Iran is the only one that actually fits the criteria the Democrats now invoke so piously. Serbia never chanted death to America. Libya never armed the militias that killed American soldiers. Iran has done both for forty years, while pursuing the bomb and openly attacking allies. If a president ever had a national-interest case for acting, it is this one. Yet the war they cannot abide is the only war directed at the enemy that genuinely targets us, and the wars they cheered were the ones aimed at countries that did not.
The thread connecting Maine to Tehran is not hard to find.
-“Believe all women" always meant believe the women who are useful.
-“Nazi" was always a charge reserved for opponents, never for allies caught wearing the insignia.
-And the war powers of Congress, sacred and inviolable this season, were entirely negotiable in every season when the war belonged to a Democrat.
The principle was never the principle. It was the costume worn over the only conviction that has never wavered, which is that the rules are for other people.
Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli marriage therapist, trainer of therapists, lecturer and author. He volunteers in the IDF reserves, as an MDA medic, in Zaka, and in the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team. His articles have appeared in Jewish News Syndicate, Israel National News, The Jerusalem Post, Breitbart and elsewhere.