A party in inexplicable paralysis

The story is about the Democratic Party, headlined "We have no coherent message." It's a splendidly accurate little headline, for true enough, it's the story's only coherent message. This less than startling news is from The NY Times, which interviewed more than 50 Democratic leaders, all of whom see "a party that is struggling to define what it stands for, what issues to prioritize and how to confront a Trump administration that is carrying out a right-wing agenda with head-spinning speed."

Those last seven words would likely strike rank-and-file Democrats as an excellent theme with which to commence confrontation. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of Texas certainly believes so, noting that "this guy is psychotic." Her subject and diagnosis require

"Why is this so hard?" — Rep. Crockett

no personal identification and clinical substantiation‚ that's how well known the guy and his psychosis are. About the latter, continues Crockett, "there’s so much, but everything that underlines it is white supremacy and hate."

Because we find these truths to be self-evident, we're rather befuddled. And so we ask why the Democratic Party resists unifying against these truths, why it is paralyzed by internal disputes and dissent, why the party has no coherent message — when the message is so conspicuous. The president of the United States is deranged, bigoted and hateful. Still, Crockett adds that "there needs to be a message that is clear on at least the underlying thing that comes with all of this."

Constitutional attorney Norm Eisen seems to offer one, though it isn't suggested as such. "Trump famously declared that he would be a dictator on day one," he writes. "History, alas, teaches us that dictators are rarely able to confine such ambitions to a single day." This qualifies well and perhaps even ideally as the "underlying" motif of the administration's most notable personality disorders.

As the "message," however, it's too wordy. Republicans' keenest appreciation of that fundamental fact of U.S. politics came decades before. In the 1884 election they came up with the snappy label of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" for Democrats and the crisp mockery of "Ma, Ma, where's my pa?" concerning Grover Cleveland's illegitimate child with a prostitute. (The Rs probably would have won had their own nominee, James G.Blaine, not been tainted by corruption.)

Far be it from me to suggest that today's Democrats mosey about the country while audibly mumbling that Republicans are the "KKK" party, even though the alliterated acronym does capture Trump & Administration's old-school white supremacy and hatefulness, capped by some serious derangement. Besides, in this case KKK would stand not for Ku Klux Klan but rather Trumpism's kakistocracy, kleptocracy and kratocracy. True, this alternate threesome wouldn't fly either, since the audible mumblers would be met only by gazes of Huh?

But we're not yet out of the distillation business. While pocketing KKK for perhaps another day — that being whenever American voters were taught American history when in middle school — the most familiar, memorable and shortest possible shorthand to deploy against the administration would be the simple and singular autocracy.

In Trump's White House iteration, without question "autocracy" entails the three Ks, each being a not uncommon component of dictatorships throughout history: rule by the least suited to rule, corruption and brute force. Plus, returning to Mr. Eisen's quasi-offering: "In these first two weeks [Trump] has mounted a sustained assault upon every dimension of American rule of law—to a degree never before seen at such a pace."

When reassembled into one watchword of collective meaning, these related yet distinctive attributes of government add up to autocracy, or dictatorship if preferred: At the helm are the most unfit, the utterly corrupt, the brutal who assault what once was the nation's rule of law. Too often a Democrat or other critic of Trumpism uses oligarchy in autocracy's place, which seems to me unwise. Its definition is less known by and large, but more important is that oligarchy is a crowd, and a crowd of the lawless etc. detracts from the one, Trump.

He demagogued his way back into the White House three months ago. And yet Democrats are still struggling to even "find themselves," let alone devise a unified strategy of attack. That's an egregious lapse in reaction.

But most disconcerting is that Democrats aren't facing a smooth-talking, prepackaged, superbly rehearsed and reasonably traditional Republican of the Ronald Reagan School of Political Pishposh. They're up against an inarticulate, scatterbrained, Constitution-shattering and outright psychotic fascist. That should be a clincher more easily achieved than even Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.