…if Keith Ellison is elected the Democrats’ chairman:
My loyalty to my country and my principles and my heritage exceeds any loyalty to my party. I will urge other like-minded people — centrist liberals — to follow my lead and quit the Democratic Party if Ellison is elected chairman. We will not be leaving the Democratic Party we have long supported. The Democratic Party will be leaving us!
The reasons Dershowitz gives are Ellison’s alliance with the anti-Semitic Farrakhan and Ellison’s own expressed anti-Semitism and anti-Israel votes. Dershowitz adds:
The DNC has a momentous choice this weekend. It can move the party in the direction of Jeremy Corbyn’s labor party in England, in the hope of attracting Jill Stein Green Party voters and millennials who stayed home. In doing so they would be giving up on any attempt to recapture the working class and rust-belt voters in the mid-western states that turned the Electoral College over to Donald Trump.
Jeremy Corbyn today could not get elected dog catcher in Great Britain. I do not want to see the Democratic Party relegated to permanent minority status as a hard-left fringe.
I certainly agree with the danger of the Democrats’ hard-left turn. Then again, I think Dershowitz is fooling himself to think that this turn didn’t happen long ago, and was merely somewhat hidden with dissembling rhetoric.
Dershowitz has been expressing views outside the Democratic party line for quite some time now, and I think it’s cost him a lot (I’m written many times on this blog about him). But he is not yet ready to really leave. He adds something that takes away from his declaration:
If [Ellison] is elected, I will quit the [Democratic] party after 60 years of loyal association and voting. I will become an independent, continuing to vote for the best candidates, most of whom, I assume, will still be Democrats. But I will not contribute to the DNC or support it as an institution.
He assumes they will still be Democrats? Why on earth would he assume that? It’s an example of what I have previously called “the birthmark” of political identity:
Dershowitz is kidding himself. The anti-Semitism of the Democrat party is not only revealed in its coddling of girlfriend-beating Ellison; it has been expressed by their blind support for anyone that promises to destroy Israel and forgiving of anything radical Islamists to while blaming Jews for their own persecution.
So, Allen, you might as well start packing your bags. They ain’t going to let some Jew tell them they can’t love Farrakhan.
Dershowitz appears to be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.