By David Carlin

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Now for Mr. Carlin's column...

I used to be a good Democrat. I was a Democratic elected official, serving twelve years in the Rhode Island Senate, two of those as majority leader. I was even a Democratic candidate for the US House of Representatives, being trounced (alas!) in November of 1992.

But that was a long time ago. I was a different kind of Democrat than the kind typical in the party today. When I was born Franklin Roosevelt was president. I still think of him as the ideal Democrat. I also think very well of Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

It was abortion that drove me out of the Democratic Party. I have always thought of abortion as a kind of homicide. The party increasingly embraced the doctrine of abortion "rights" - the right to kill very young human beings. For a long time, I imagined it was possible to be a pro-life Democrat in a pro-abortion party. I abandoned that fantasy sometime in the 1990s as I became convinced that being pro-abortion was an essential element of being a Democrat.

My alienation from the party began with abortion but it grew greater and greater with same-sex marriage and other things. Today I am so alienated that I am willing to vote for Donald Trump, not my ideal, in order to keep a Democrat out of the White House.

In the old days (back in the 1920s,1930s, and 1940s), if you were a good Communist, you had to be morally and intellectually flexible. Which is to say, you had to be ready, often at a moment's notice, to change your most important political beliefs in order to keep in step with the latest version of the "party line."

Comrade Stalin had a knack for sudden changes in the party line. But the typical Communist was loyal to the party, and Stalin was the Mind and Heart and Soul of the party. And so, when the Great Helmsman changed the party line, the good Communist was able to make the needed mental and moral adjustments.

But this wasn't always easy. Sometimes it was so difficult that certain Communists, rather to their own astonishment, were unable to make the adjustments. The most famous instance of such a hard-to-swallow alteration - or rather, 180-degree reversal - of the party line came in August of 1939 when Communists all over the world woke up one fine day to learn that Nazi Germany, until yesterday the most hideous of all enemies, was now a friend of the Soviet Union. Comrade Stalin and Herr Hitler had become pals.

This drove more than a few heartbroken Communists out of the party. But most Communists remained, though dizzy with confusion. Stalin couldn't be wrong. After all, he was the lineal and legitimate successor to Marx and Lenin, who were infallible. Good Communists argued themselves into becoming supporters of the new arrangement, and they cheered for Hitler in his war against Britain and France.

The party line did another reversal less than two years later when Hitler invaded the USSR.

Today's Democratic Party also has a party line that often changes. The party has no equivalent or near equivalent to Comrade Stalin, no single person, and not even a small group of persons (a Politburo), who can order a change in the official line. Changes are the results of a collective party spirit (the Holy Ghost of the Democratic Party, so to speak). We learned that the party has changed its line when mainstream journa...