Unaffiliated

And you got them all convinced that you’re the means and the end

All the VIPs and PYTs and wannabes

Afraid of not being your friend

And I’ve always been too smart for that, but you know what?

My heart was not, I took it like a kid, you see

The cool kids voted to get rid of me

I’m ashamed of what it did to me

What I let get done

It stole my fun, it stole my fun

Fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long

-Fiona Apple

On a beautiful spring evening last month, the Democratic Party broke my heart for the last time.

The Morris County Democrats chose as their leader a woman who contradicts and undermines every value that my father, himself a lifelong Democrat, taught me. Kindness. Decency. Respect for others. Generosity of spirit. Honesty. This was the final step in my long overdue awakening. From my first job out of college through this newest tyrant’s ascension, the unhealthiest relationship in my life has been with the Democratic Party.

I always believed that shared institutions like the Democratic Party were the best path to bring my values to life. But my adult life has instead seen each of the most significant institutions that traced my development- the Democratic Party, the Catholic Church, and the rule of law- betray those values and, in the process, betray me. I now find myself without any anchor, drifting helplessly from the values that always energized and sustained me.

Although New Jersey Democratic politics are well known for Succession-style plots and circular firing squads, such battles have rarely made their way to Morris County, the richest and among the reddest of counties. But Democrats see cracks in their structural majorities across the state, and so the state’s party leaders are looking to Morris to be the next Somerset, another rich, longtime Republican county that has recently turned blue.

To do that, the party gave the long-time party chair the Kendall Roy treatment. Waiting in the wings to feast on another’s misfortune as always was “The Queen,” so named by me and her other local victims for her imperiousness, vindictiveness, and malignant narcissism. The Queen was the first Democrat elected to the governing body in my current home of Mendham Township. She has spent the last five years telling anyone who will listen about how that win, which was nothing more than being in the “right place at the right time,” proves her political brilliance and immense talent.

In 2019, I served as campaign manager for the local Democratic campaign for my wife and her running mate. We came closer than any campaign before or since to giving Democrats control of Mendham Township for the first time, only losing by 16 votes. We reached this result in spite of, not because of, the Queen’s involvement in the campaign.

I had endured months of the Queen’s malice, passive aggression, and backbiting until things came to a head late in the campaign. We were trying to get approval from Mikie Sherrill’s political team to use a picture of her with our candidates in a campaign mailer. The Queen insisted that she would be the one to reach out to Sherrill’s people. After delay without any word, I reached out through the county political apparatus, which I’m sure the Queen would now agree is the proper chain of command. When I informed the Queen that I had done this, she absolutely lost her mind. Her eyes turned hot with anger and she began screaming at me about how she was the elected official in this town.

After months of abuse, I had enough, and I left the campaign meeting, which was always held in her home. That was the last meeting we would hold there. Others rolled in for the campaign meeting as I was leaving. Rather than describe what had happened, I simply walked away. When others asked the Queen what happened, she responded, “It must be his time of the month.”

Imagine if a male elected official had said the same of a female campaign volunteer.

Of course the Queen spun the incident as me acting irrationally, because only I, my wife’s running mate, and her husband witnessed her rage, and we were all easily dismissable to her and her inner circle. That is par for the course with the Queen. She attempts to otherize and isolate anyone who disagrees with her. It’s a tactic as brilliant and effective as it is cruel and dehumanizing. At that point, I had moved to this town two years earlier and the only social circle I had developed was with local Democrats. And now its most prominent member had a target on me.

It was obvious at the time, and it’s even more obvious now, that the Queen was angry because she wanted to be the only person in town to have a relationship with Sherrill. And I really could not have cared less about that relationship. I just wanted to win. That was my only concern. It’s also obvious how successful her approach was, as Sherrill played a role in orchestrating her rise to county chair. No one said that being awful wasn’t a great path to ascension

This was just the final disappointment. I’ve spent my whole life believing in and then being disappointed by the Democratic Party. The first Democratic president of my adult life urged me to believe in a place called Hope while he bathed his personal and political life in calculated cynicism and misogyny.

My first job after college was working for a U.S. Senator from New Jersey who shared my political beliefs. Part of my job was to be his driver. In the three weeks that I lasted in the role, he was deeply abusive to me. This was a multimillionaire U.S. Senator perpetually attacking a middle class kid straight out of college who gave up a path to earnings to make $20,000 to support what he thought was a meaningful cause. A few years back, we held a reunion of staffers for this senator. One of the running themes of the anecdotes was the Senator’s explosive temper and mistreatment of people. Someone even told my driving story, not realizing I was on the line. The biggest reaction was laughter. We were all so conditioned to accepting abuse from a powerful man that we never stopped to think about how contrary his actions were to the values he claimed to represent as a senator.

Several years later, I worked for a Democratic governor of New Jersey. At the time, I considered myself part of a loyal clan that would defend this man’s honor to the end of the earth. I thought we were doing so much good, though it’s hard looking back to think of many things we did that made life better for people. What I do see now is that the Governor’s garden variety corruption, like putting a lover on the state payroll, should shock the conscience. But what’s even more shocking is just how little regard he showed for all the lives he upended through his selfishness and thoughtlessness.

We were outraged by the U.S. Attorney’s constant investigations of the Governor. No one could doubt even now, particularly now, that this U.S. Attorney- a stalwart supporter of the most wickedly corrupt human on the planet in Donald Trump- had political motivations for these investigations, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t an uncomfortable amount of truth to them. And all the people who once hated that U.S. Attorney (himself a fellow constituent of the Queen) have now made their peace with each other to advance that most important end of New Jersey politics: monetizing your connections.

It saddens me that the Governor never had the character and decency to take the time to apologize personally to the many young staffers who devoted night and day to his rise given how his selfishness had undermined their futures as well. The Queen, the Senator, and the Governor, malignant narcissists all.

As a cherry on top, I took another, final job in politics, which was only distinguished by the elected official- a county executive- being pricklier and nastier than even my previous bosses had been. I had finally had enough of making far below market salaries to promote the ambitions of malignant narcissists. At least until I moved to Mendham.

What I’ve told here is far from the full story of the Queen’s rampages and malicious behavior. I made a choice not to use her name or those of the other politicians who abused me here, not because they aren’t easily identifiable, but because they aren’t the point. If anyone is looking for candid reflections about any of these people, I’m happy to go on record and hold them accountable. However, I won’t weigh down this reflection with a laundry list about the Queen. But I do have records of (and receipts for) all of her most abhorrent actions, and I stand ready to tell my story when and if it might stop her further rise. For now, her power wildly exceeds my own, and it would be a waste. She has definitely won this round. But it’s a round world and a long time.

Getting abused by a senator or county executive is painful, but there’s something particularly galling about witnessing in person, in real time the origin story of the next generation of malevolent political bosses in New Jersey and seeing no one stand up to stop her. I believed that Phil Murphy, Tom Malinowski, and Sherrill were different, but their role in Duarte’s ascension shows they are just like every other hack that came before them.

Please do remember as we all bemoan the death of Roe in the next few weeks, that it was people like the Queen- a full fledged Republican through the ascendancy of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to the Court- who made this moment possible. Don’t believe her crocodile tears now- she showed her true colors decades ago.

These are all of the reasons why I filed paperwork this week changing my party status to “Unaffiliated.” This does not represent my surrender from the political process, which remains essential. Of course, I will still vote. And most times, I will likely still vote for Democrats. But I no longer wish to be associated with the Democratic Party as an institution.

Needless to say, this does not make me a fan of the Republican Party. But that party’s utter wickedness does not make the Democratic Party good merely by opposition. Perhaps if many of us stop believing the lie that we are compelled to support Democrats because of the unacceptable alternative, Democrats will finally start being attentive to our needs. What I see is a world on fire, and while Republicans lit much of the conflagration, Democrats have been utterly ineffectual in putting out the fires or preventing the next one. Murder weapon violence runs rampant, the rich and powerful control everything, and Democrats have done literally nothing to reverse this oligarchic hellscape. So no, I won’t contribute 50 more dollars before your monthly deadline.

I devoted thousands of hours and thousands of dollars to the Democratic Party because I believe in values like justice, fairness, equality, kindness, decency, and respect and I believed, like my father before me, that the Party would advance those values. It took me 25 years to understand that my personal interactions with the Party’s members, and the Party’s actual policy efforts- have never exemplified those values. The New Jersey, Morris County, and Mendham Township Democratic parties deserve the Queen. They don’t deserve me.

The Democratic Party isn’t the only institution that I have witnessed decay. I was raised in an incredibly Catholic home, an altar boy with a former nun for a mother and a father who was somehow more religious than she was. I can’t overstate how central Catholicism was and is to who I became, spiritually and culturally. I attended Catholic schools for 14 years. The entire basis of my social life in high school was our Catholic Church’s youth group. I found that the messages of the Gospel informed and empowered me. I found peace, love, and joy through this connection.

But I have found myself slowly alienated from the Church during my adult life. Over the years, I watched the Church obsess over issues Jesus never mentioned, and in the process empower those who would harm the poor and vulnerable who were Jesus’ central concern.

More personally, I belonged to a Catholic Church as a young parishioner, attended a Catholic grammar school, attended a Catholic high school, attended numerous retreats at another Catholic high school, and attended a Catholic university. Each of these five Catholic institutions had a religious clergy member implicated in the Church’s wicked, wide-ranging sex abuse scandal. And to top it off, the Catholic bishop of my youth who later became one of the most respected members of the clergy in the country was shown to be a serial abuser.

You might have hoped that Catholic leaders would respond with expressions of contrition and searches for renewal. Instead, we saw a sinful cover-up. And the reaction of the rank and file was not humility and candid reflection but arrogant “whataboutism” followed by equating honest criticism with faithlessness.

Well, mission accomplished. My faith is shaken to the point where I don’t know that I believe in anything anymore. The utter failure of this institution served to undermine the values it was supposed to exemplify in my life.

The highest value I’ve been trained to emulate an attorney is the rule of law. And in its highest form, it’s worthy of that adoration. The rule of law is what made America special and what gave us whatever claim we had to being unique or special. Even if we didn’t live up to the ideals, the ideals themselves spread around the world, teaching people that we didn’t need to be ruled solely by the powerful and their heirs. We could govern ourselves, organized around principles of fairness, freedom, and equality of opportunity.

That makes the current state of the law all the more disappointing and painful. We are taught that the institutions that interpret our laws are there to protect the rule of law. But a 50 year political campaign as brilliant as it is wicked has undermined the rule of law beyond recognition and turned the highest level of our justice system– the Supreme Court– into a collective of right wing political hacks who act to protect oligarchy, enable gun rampages, restore white supremacy, and of late, destroy our republic itself. I do not have any respect for the Supreme Court as an institution because its majority does not have any respect for the values I hold dear. Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavaugh, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Amy Coney Barrett deserve no respect. None.

As lawyers, we spend years in training, reading and analyzing cases, statutes, and articles in order to be able to interpret the meaning of the law. But that is all, in fact, meaningless. It does not matter what the law should mean; it only matters what the rich, powerful, and violent want the law to mean. Their patrons in black robes will do the rest.

What the Court is doing and will do in the next few weeks is disgusting. It is not based on reason, precedent, majoritarianism, or fairness. It is the product of a brilliant, wicked campaign by the Federalist Society, a cabal for the rich and powerful that long since surrendered the masquerade that it is a legal organization with principles.

As I write today, the Supreme Court has gutted another gun safety law, once again worshiping at the altar of far right wing gun nuts whose own sexual dysfunction causes them to overcompensate with weapons of war. What the Supreme Court has done to completely change the true meaning of the Supreme Court is the most despicable act of radicalism ever perpetrated in the law. Thousands, if not millions of people, will die thanks to Thomas,Alito, Kavaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett. These are deeply, deeply evil people.

I want to believe in the rule of law, but the right wing has destroyed that belief. And it leaves me feeling ever more alone.

I thrive on belonging. I join groups in the hopes that they will help me to amplify my values and make the world a better place. But now I feel like the three most significant commitments I made to groups in my life have proven to be abysmal failures.

So where do I go from here?

For the time being, I need to recommit myself to the values I hold dear, and to find the meaning in them that these decaying institutions have cost me. I want to find ways to improve the lives of the powerless and to push our society towards greater equity. I think the way for me to do that right now is to dedicate my time and energy to charitable endeavors. I got more meaning out of serving as a mentor to a Newark high school student for the past three years than I ever did out of my lifetime association with the Democratic Party.

I also want to see mean, self-obsessed jerks driven out of public life forever. We would hate their behavior among family and friends, so why do we put up with it in our leaders?

I want to search for faith. Right now, I am a committed agnostic, but I long for and miss the community and meaning that religion provided in my life in my youth. I have no idea what form this journey will take, but I know that it’s one that I need to commit to taking before it’s too late.

The death of fairness and justice in the law is the most depressing and hardest problem. It is so easy for those of us who are the most capable of changing things to take the safe route. In many ways, we have no choice- I am shackled to debts and commitments that muzzle my ability to speak out forcefully on issues of economic justice.

But I can start with some basic principles that I intend to guide my life and those of any organization to which I will commit. Truth must be a non-negotiable defining virtue of the organization. The quest for justice and fairness must be central. We must treat people who have not harmed us or harmed the common good with respect, decency, and kindness. These are universal values that unite most people. They can bring us together and then unite us around a framework of actionable ideas that emanate naturally from these principles.

There is a small minority of right wing activists who are desperate to see our government paralyzed by preventing the government from acting for the common good. The rest of us want the government to be a force to improve our lives, but we have too often seen both parties act to undermine that goal. The time is now to think hard and think big about the principles that unite us and build a movement around implementing them.

The world is on fire because the institutions that have served as our firefighters have decayed to the point of uselessness. We must rebuild them, brick by brick, on the values they once represented. If we fail, the future is a scary place to contemplate.

For now, I start my own journey towards living these values on my own. But I hope you will join me.