Cory Booker: Grand Speechifying as Utter Impotence

Talk is often deemed the antithesis of action, and endless talk smacks of impotence.

By

David Gottfried

As I write this, Senator Cory Booker is now engaged in endless speechifying in the United States Senate. Most of the Senate is, of course, absent. Only the slightest scintilla of the population is listening to his largely repetitive rant. I agree with everything he says. But the way in which he speaks, and the very act of giving this speech, underscores the impotence of Democrats and liberals.

Several decades ago, marathon speeches in the Senate were often seen as valiant and vigorous oratory. To prevent a bill from being voted upon, a lone Senator, or a clique of Senators, would hold the floor for countless hours. For example, Senator Strom Thurmond, in 1957, spoke for about 24 hours to try to prevent a civil rights bill from being voted upon.

(The Civil Rights bill of 1957 was a toothless bill that was the invention of Lyndon Johnson. By backing such a bill, he was able to prettify his image for liberal Northern Democrats in preparation for his attempt at the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1960. By making the bill so weak, he refrained from offending his Southern base. Martin Luther King, Jr. said the bill was analogous to chicken soup made from a severely emaciated chicken.)

However, Cory is talking endlessly not to block a particular vote or bill or item of business in the Senate. He is talking to catalogue the deficits of Trump, something that has been done much more effectively and vigorously by Bernie Sanders.

Of course, endless talking was lionized in movies such as “Mr. Smith goes to Washington.” Also talking and speeches were lauded and idealized in an era when people studied rhetoric and read the speeches of Cicero. However, a huge proportion of the populace has never seen “Mr. Smith goes to Washington,” doesn’t even know what rhetoric is and thinks that a guy with a name like Cicero is hung up about cis males. Today’s young people live in a binary world in which the answer to everything is either positive or negative, and the English language, a language so prolix that it contains five times as many words as French, is seen as a doddering, withered instrument that is at best tiresome and at worst irrelevant.

The essence of neurotic behavior is doing something that does not achieve one’s objectives and then doing the same damn useless thing again. And Democrats seem to exude the impotence of Woody Allen in “Annie Hall.” Democrats are reflective, intellectual, considerate and perpetually lose.

Much of Trump’s appeal is patently obvious: He is so brash, and so impatient with facts and theories and ideation, and his exasperation and hostility toward reasoned analysis is wholly in sync with the way many normal, decent people feel when they look at forms promulgated by the IRS.

We are a society governed by law, but most of us don’t understand law, and to most of the populace, Trump is like a refreshing, punishing Tsunami rashly destroying the hated law which resembles thickets, and Normandy-like rough vegetation, that tackles us, and overwhelms us, while the enemy is raining fire on us. And when Corey Booker talks, his endless speechifying seems like just another endless waste of time, maybe not as confusing as an IRS form, but certainly as inconsequential and irritating as the stream of consciousness rants of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce – fine writers, but writers who would not have garnered more than 10 percent of the vote.

And its very ineffectual nature is why so many young men have left the Democratic Party.

However, young men are not necessarily expressing hatred toward the left. They are expressing their distaste and revulsion for the ladylike, genteel tea party “liberalism” that has domesticated and castrated the left.

I am not advocating violent action, but I would like to remind the reader that many supposedly apathetic people who supposedly hate the left would readily embrace the left of Luigi Mangione, the gallant, brilliant man who assassinated an insurance company executive shortly after Trump won the 2024 election.

My reference to Luigi Mangione might seem like the outburst of an extremist, but what appears to be extremism is easily explained by Hegel:

Every thesis and every sentiment have within it the seeds of its own antithesis. After clinging to idea A for 40 years, we will get so sick of idea A that we will embrace negative A. For the past 40 years, the right wing has been ascendant, and the Left has been whimpering like a wounded kitten. More concretely: 40 years ago, the ratio of the average income of CEOs to their factory workers was about 40 to 1. Today, that ratio is more like 400 to 1.

And while the rich robbed the nation, the left has behaved like ladies who luncheon, as Michelle Obama said, “When they take the low road, we…(I really don’t remember what she said) and that dunce of a Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania, Mr. Fetterman (The dude who goes to the Senate in shorts and hoodies), suggests that Democrats appease Trump.

While Democrats talk (and beg and plead), Republicans swear.

As Bob Dylan said, “Money doesn’t talk; it swears.”