The Big Tent Party: Right? Sure? Whatever?

By Patrick Hall

As you are more than aware.  Political pundits and other constituencies who identify as Democrats utilize the “Big Tent” nomenclature to describe the cultural-political make-up of the present-day Democratic Party.   This is juxtaposed to the mainstream Republican Party, which is often branded by Big Tent proponents as littered with a bunch of xenophobic, flag-waving, myopically patriotic, mostly white people, sprinkled with a few misinformed minorities like myself.  We are Hillary Clinton's “basket of deplorables”; that is, Republicans, and especially supporters of Donald Trump, are racist, sexist, jingoistic, Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic, and numerous other political pejoratives.

Republicans supposedly harbor ill will, if not outright prejudices or an ethnocentric value system, with great suspicion and animosity toward those who look different or who don’t share our old-fashioned love of America, which many modern-day Big Tent Democrats perceive as far too icky and naively vacant.

Yes, the present-day Democratic Party endlessly throws up in your face that they are the “Big Tent Party”; when in fact the current movers and shakers who control the body politic or political mindset are not the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, or even Hubert Humphrey, the first presidential candidate whom I campaigned for in the late 1960s.

The political and/or socio-economic identity of those at the helm of the Democratic Party runs from left to more left to most left. They are generally unabashed multicultural/DEI catechumens who now openly avow socialism and other egalitarian chicanery.  Many also have a growing man-crush on Radical Islamic catechetics like the current Democratic senatorial candidate from the State of Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, buttressed by an unapologetic allegiance to Socialism, or what I view as a smiley, happy-happy joy-joy version of Trotskyist Communism.  The reality is that the political agenda or secular theology of the current Big Tent Party comes before those of our country. It is anti-constitutional, anti-Republic poison nurtured in many, if not all, of our colleges and universities.

This especially took root as the baby-boomer generation slowly ascended to control of higher education in the late 1970s, a trend that went into overdrive by the 1990s.

As a sidebar, it might seem counterintuitive that Socialists like AOC, Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and others within the Democratic Party are allying with those who sympathize with Radical Islam.  Historically, this is a marriage of political convenience among Socialist/Communist/ Democrats and pseudo-radical Democrat Islamists like Hasan Piker and others. Individuals like Hasan Piker are fervent believers that America deserved 9/11 and that the deliberate slaughter of Israeli citizens on Oct 7 was justified. He and others like him are little more than “non-uniformed enemy combatants” and traitorous pieces of dog-pooh……!  Their counterparts don’t even exist and would be immediately killed or imprisoned in many of the Islamic and Socialist/Communist hellholes they seem to sing their hosannas to.

  During the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran, which ushered in the ascendancy of Radical Islam and the hellscape of the Ayatollah clerics. Socialists and other cultural leftists who allied themselves with Islamic fundamentalism were having a grand old time until they found themselves imprisoned, tortured, and hanged from construction cranes in Iran. This took place less than three years after the fall of the Shah. Their leftist-godless socialism only took them so far in their cultural-political infatuation with the religious sociopaths that took over Iran after the Shah, whom we are now still fighting 47 years later.  

A Difference in Degree but not Kind
Below is a partial list of demands and cultural-political beliefs that many of us have been exposed to with the rise and popularity of Democratic Socialists (or Trotskyist Communists) running in upcoming midterms.

• Open or no borders
• Defund the Police
• No Prisons
• Provide free, quality public education from pre-K to college and cancel all student debt
• No Voter ID
• Medicare for All
• Enact aggressive wealth tax on richest individuals and corporations
• Establish “a 32-hour workweek with full pay and benefits
• Enact a federally supported living minimum wage
• Abolish ICE
• Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure “Democratic” control and accountability to the people
• Pack the Supreme Court
• Abolish the Senate
• Move toward a Parliamentary System as opposed to a Republic form of Governance
• Housing is a human right. Build new, publicly owned social housing; strictly regulate investment properties; establish rent control; and guarantee the right to counsel for all tenants.
• A value-added tax on privately owned homes or residences valued over one million dollars
• Reparation for Blacks as well as all Native American People

Is it me, or do some, if not most, of the above sound like the demands or socio-political beliefs of many mainstream, “Big Tent” Democrats, before members of DSA loudly stamp their names to them? I can clearly remember just a few years ago, if not months, Democrats like Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Cory Booker, Adam Schiff, AOC, and most, if not all, members of the Congressional Black Caucus supporting many of the above political axioms.  To paraphrase the late American psychiatrist, political philosopher, and journalist Charles Krauthammer, in the United States, Marxists, socialists, and Democrats cloak themselves and their beliefs in phrases like Progressives, “Democratic Socialist,” social activists or community activists, or “community organizers” like Barack Obama, who as President, could barely hide his” Goo-Goo Eyed love” for collectivist and other share the wealth governance schemes.

The Big Tent, or the politically eclectic party that Democrats and many mainstream liberals profess, is a ruse. It is a stratagem that hides their demand for political and/or cultural conformity. As I indicated in a previous article, you’d better have the right type of “Diversity” if you wish to stay in the so-called graciousness of the Big Tent Party.

 I used to be a proud Hubert Humphrey, Jimmy Carter Democrat until October 1991. At that time, I penned an article in American Libraries Magazine that questioned “some” shortcomings of Affirmative Action and other Government Preference policies for designated minorities and others.  I naively thought at the time that we could have a reasonable discussion as Democrats (The Big Tenter’s) concerning some of the discriminatory shortfalls of special set-asides for blacks, other minorities, and women. I also inferred in my 1991 article that Affirmative Action and other government-sponsored preference programs were little more than “discrimination, sexism and racism” under new management. Of course, this was well before the rise of DEI and Critical Race and Gender Theory, the progeny or offspring of early Affirmative Action aesthetics and ideology.

 Well, crap hit the proverbial fan because of my call for open discussion. As I warned over 30 years ago, “with the transition of affirmative action from equal opportunity to preference, we are setting our society and its people against one another.”¹ 

 From that point onward, my political apostasy, or secular heresy, ousted me from the Big Tent Party, and I eventually became a Republican; or what far too many Big Tent constituents now view as a party of “evil-closed-minded-racist-misinformed-sexist-xenophobic-bigot-kingoistic-Trump-worshiping simpletons.”

Even today, I still get that uncomfortable look from Liberal friends, mostly LIBERAL WOMEN, once they discover through one of my writings that I don’t think like a “real black person or PERSON OF COLOR.”  Whatever the hell that means! They’re shocked or go apoplectic that I, as an African American (and I prefer just plain old American), don’t have the right type of Diversity for inclusion in their Big Tent.²
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1.Patrick Hall. Against Our Best Interests: An Ambivalent View of Affirmative Action.   American Libraries: October 1991, pp 898-902.
2. Patrick Hall.  Imagine I had the Wrong Type of Diversity.  Freedom Journal Magazine: February 10, 2025.

Patrick Hall is a retired University Library Director. He graduated from Canisius College and the University of Washington, where he earned Masters Degrees in Religious Studies Education, Urban Anthropology, and Library and Information Science.  Mr. Hall has also completed additional coursework at the University of Buffalo, Seattle University, and St. John Fishers College of Rochester, New York. He has been published in several national publications such as Commonweal, America, Conservative Review, Headway, National Catholic Reporter, Freedom's Journal Magazine, and American Libraries. He has published in peer-reviewed publications, the Journal of Academic Librarianship, and the Internet Reference Services Quarterly. From 1997 until his retirement in January 2014, he served on the Advisory Board of Urban Library Journal, a CUNY Publication.