Dawn of the Dead?

Drowned out by the uproar over the consumption of dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, was what Republican operatives had hoped would prove a far bigger scandal. This was the shocking news that Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), a Democrat who of course represents the native-born residents of Springfield, had accepted not one, but two donations to his re-election campaign from a woman who, five months before the donations were made, had already died. The donations totaled an appalling $350. Brown has a narrow lead over his GOP challenger, Bernie Moreno, and Ohio’s secretary of state, also a Republican, has referred these alarming facts to the Federal Election Commission. And that, despite the best efforts of the New York Post, which reported the scandal, is about the last anyone has heard of it.

While Moreno’s campaign has called the matter “creepy,” his campaign flak, Reagan McCarthy, upped the ante in comments to the Post: “Brown’s scheme to fund his campaign with contributions from dead people isn’t just creepy, it’s illegal.” That Brown is still a free man, not even required to hobble about wearing an ankle bracelet, must come as a disappointment to many conservative Republicans. As a RINO myself, however, I suspect that they might be uncharacteristically shortsighted in their view of the situation. The country would be in far better shape, it seems to me, if more dead Democrats were influencing our elections, not fewer. 

And rather than explain away the contributions—if they are called on to do so—Democrats might well defend them proudly. It’s the party of Biden, Harris and Walz, after all, who in their devotion to “our democracy” are forever pushing to expand the franchise, not shrink it, and include groups hitherto shut out of the system.

It’s no great surprise that Moreno’s conservative supporters feel the way they do about continuing to restrict the franchise to the undead, but this is misguided on their part. G.K. Chesterton, after all, reminds us that tradition refuses “to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.” 

That’s only one reason—and a rather abstract one, at that—for viewing the whole matter in a different light. There are other considerations, too. In many ways, the Democrats of the 1960s and 1970s—those who came of age protesting the Vietnam war—are far preferable to today’s tedious crop of self-serving establishmentarians who make up the party’s ruling gerontocracy. 

There was a time, not so long ago, that self-described liberal Democrats talked freely and with utter disgust of the national security state, the military–industrial complex, the imperial presidency, and C. Whight Mills’s “Power Elite.” Back then, they claimed to oppose what would later be called the Deep State, though now they have emerged as its greatest defenders. Some of them who, in their college dorms, cheered on the October 1967 March on the Pentagon might take a far dimmer view of any such “insurrection” today.

These earlier Democrats were also far less mule-headed on so-called “social issues” than are today’s exuberantly woke crowd. Too many survivors from those days have moved to the left, of course, and far faster than the American people they presume to represent. It was Joe Biden who, as a freshman Senator, called homosexuals “security risks” and supported the Defense of Marriage Act. Hillary Clinton called marriage “not just a bond but a sacred bond between a man and a woman,” and it was her husband who said abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” Most Democrats who held such unenlightened views have long since died, leaving a lot of Americans feeling abandoned as the “deplorables” they are believed to be.

We would be remiss, of course, to reduce this lofty concern to personalities and personal hypocrisies—and to scoring cheap points in hopes of owning the opposition. Too much is at stake. The Moreno campaign suspects that Brown has actively sought the financial support of dead people, and if that is the case, the rest of us might learn how this is done and encourage the practice. Moreno’s press director calls it a “conspiracy [that] deserves more scrutiny. How far does it go?” In my judgment, not nearly far enough.