party activities altogether. At age 71, I'm going to focus on work and other activities from now on. I'll continue to write about political matters, and will remain active in some political venues, but I'm not going to become further involved in organized groups. This election year convinced me that splitting is not going to result in any progressive success. This year, splitting cost us a presidential election and worsened our position in Congress. I watched it happen in horror, frankly.
It is impossible to reform the Democratic Party by forming separate groups, whether you consider them splinter groups or not. All that will do is further cause the Party to lose effectiveness, and will not create any sort of new direction for anyone other than those involved with the various separate groups.
I look at DU and JPR this year as a similar exercise in splitting. JPR is already splitting into further fragments as I write. Such is what happens. It united against Hillary Clinton, but once that was over, it has no core, and is rapidly devolving into bickering and disputes.
I've been there and have done that already in my political life. Similar splitting happened in the late 1960s and led to a horrible period in this country, to be quite frank. It gave us Nixon, Reagan and Bush. On a national level, the only pattern for success is melding and amalgamation. In 2016, splitting resulted in a devastating loss. I won't participate in splitting further. National and even state politics are a matter of groups coming together, despite differences, not the opposite. Work toward the better, always, not the perfect. There is no perfect in a nation of 315 million people.
So, you go right ahead and do as you think best. I will do the same. But, I'm dropping out of political evangelism of any kind. It's a losing proposition. This election is over, and I'm not going to dissect it any further. We lost. We should not have lost. We will be paying a heavy, heavy price for our loss. How heavy I'm not certain, but we have marginalized ourselves for the next four years, at least, and maybe longer, if the Republicans can force through changes that make it even more difficult to move progressively.
By the next presidential election, I will be completely out of politics, really, except to vote. I'm out of energy, out of time, and completely out of enthusiasm for the bickering and ill-humor of today's Democratic movement. I'm too damned old to play games with politics.
We lost. We will have a very, very hard time winning for some considerable time. We made our separate beds and will have to sleep in them until we figure out why that happened and correct it. The people who voted for Hillary Clinton outnumber those who did not by a very, very large margin. We might have won, but we did not. Splitting was the reason.
Now, we will have a very ugly Republican administration. It will try its hardest to make it almost impossible for Democrats and progressives to recover. If I do anything at all, it will be to try to undermine those efforts. I'll leave it to you and others to figure out how to create a majority for the next election.
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