Hockey teams don’t do it, swarms of bees don’t do it. So why do liberals do it?

Why do liberals always end up biting great bloody chunks out of each other while conservative ruminants stick to their grass, their four stomachs working nonstop? Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are just the latest example of the liberal tendency to self-destruct over small things, those minor campaign gaffes that are Freud’s “narcissism of minor difference” incarnate.

Democrats, they’re the Balkanists of American politics. They’re fighting a Republican party that thinks the torture techniques of the Khmer Rouge are manly, that women who have abortions should be jailed, that the national debt credit card has “Get Out of Jail Free” on it. Clinton, to my disgust, is now making nice with Richard Mellon Scaife, the misogynist monster of the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” a man who still says the Clintons had Vince Foster murdered. It’s like sitting on a porch swing with your rapist 20 years later.

Meanwhile, she’s trying to destroy the Democrats’ salvation, Obama. This is madness.

Hardly new

The British Labour party did it in the 1970s with the grotesque Militant Tendency doing so much damage to the left that Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was ushered in, the Labour party was purged and New Labour is no longer a party of the citizenry but of aspirant toffs. The Tories are busy trying to pass themselves off as Everyman, this being the only position left, and good luck to the plucky Old Etonians.

I’m not referring to the infighting at the end of a long reign in power — see Thatcher’s shaming demise, see the Republican party in a parody of a shambles with John McCain as their addled leader — which is a battle over power that is still possessed and need not be squandered. No, I’m talking about the simmering fight that goes on when victory is so close and only a fool could lose.

And he does. They do.

Closer to home

I refer to the Liberal Party of Canada, where Stéphane Dion, whether by his own efforts or those of others, has gone from green beacon to dim bulb. In the meantime, Dion’s rivals, like the Slytherins of Hogwarts who bite their own tongues for the reviving taste of blood, are honing their blades of Venetian glass with which to pierce Dion’s flesh and break off, leaving no visible blade. Wouldn’t Stephen Harper’s Conservatives be a better target as they build a miniaturized version of the Bush wasteland in this country? The Tories have so little fear from the Liberals that they are taking Canada back to the 1950s — look at their plans for changing immigration patterns — and they’re doing it without bodyguards.

It’s important to know who your friends are. Why did the Canadian Auto Workers union renounce their traditional ties to the NDP? Were they under the impression that any other party gives a toss about factory workers? Stick with the party that likes you.

I understand the relentless debates among liberal-minded people. The right is as one because their answers are easy. But as Eric Alterman said on The Daily Show this week, “liberals have a more complicated case to make.”

Beyond right and left, there’s women

It isn’t just politics, and it isn’t just right and left. Other people with common cause fight with each other. I am appalled by the nastiness between novelists and among print journalists, and then there’s the animal rights people arguing over whether to dig up a scientist’s grandmother, newly dead, just to make a point. But that kind of quarrel is bald men fighting over a comb. These are dying industries and failed causes.

Are wretched writers and PETAs invited to dinner parties for their fashion daring, their polished anecdotes, their reckless humour and their Carla Bruni beauty? No, they’re enamoured of their own small, exquisitely arranged failures and that’s why they’re at each other’s throats.

And the worst example of people who, despite their common hardships, can find little common cause? Women. I shiver to my bones at hearing women trash women.

Recently CBC.ca ran a story about a woman with triplets who failed in her effort to get extra maternity leave. The mother was terrific, especially about the delicate essential needs of babies. “I feel like they’re all cupped into being one person, one little baby. And they’re not. They’re three individuals. They have three different personalities âe¦ yet they’re all treated as one and there’s no special time given to them, so it’s frustrating.” Sleepless, changing upwards of 24 diapers a day, and this woman was still able to form words.

What repelled me was the venom of the reader comments and the contempt for a woman whiny enough to give birth and still have needs. As the great comedian Mike Bullard said sardonically, if there’s one thing men and women agree on, we all hate women. Misogyny is one thing. But female self-hatred is truly twisted.

We women resent beautiful women, we mock childlessness but snicker at fertility, we blame women for their misfortune, we ridicule ambitious women, female obesity repels us but male obesity isn’t mentioned, we love catfights, lard jumpin’ dyin’ (as we used to say in Newfoundland) we hate our sisters.

So there we are, the failing gender, and why? Partly because our greatest energy goes into damaging each other.