Requiem for the Democratic Party

Here’s a bit of alarmism to brighten up your day. Democrat Joel Kotkin sees the Democratic Party heading for a massive wipe-out in November. In truth, the only chance that the Democrats now have will be if certain Republicans continue to play crazy ball.

Anyway, the Democratic Party is like the Titanic, heading for an iceberg, its leftist leaders screaming-- Full steam ahead. 

Or, to shift the metaphor slightly, perhaps the Democratic Party has already hit the iceberg, is taking on water, and the call goes out-- women and children first. But now the party can debate whether Lia Thomas and Rachel Levine should count as women. They can always call up a certain Supreme Court nominee, but she does not seem to be willing to define women.

Kotkin begins with the simple fact that the Democratic Party has succumbed to a totalitarian temptation to shut down dissent and to push ahead with policies that the country does not support. One dares to mention that the party has leaders who are pathetically stupid, who do not inspire confidence, and certainly not respect. I will not name names-- it starts from the top and works its way down.

Yet today the traditional factiousness of the Democratic coalition has been engulfed by an almost Stalinist attitude that brooks no dissent on its most treasured policies – even though these do not resonate well with the bulk of the electorate.

The fault, Kotkin suggests, is that the cerebrally impaired Joe Biden has embraced a leftist agenda that he does not understand:

In contrast, President Biden’s boneheaded embrace of a progressive agenda that is widely detested across most of the population may prove to be one of the greatest political blunders of recent American history.

Working class and middle class voters are turned off by Biden and his woke, highly diverse administration:

Many of these voters may be receptive to the traditional, economic-centred social-democratic message of the Democrats. But they are less enthused about the priorities of the now dominant progressives – especially the loudest and most pervasive among them, namely, the climate-change activists. Backed by the media and numerous celebrities, and funded generously by tech and Wall Street oligarchs, they have asserted their dominance since the very beginning of the Biden administration, and appear to have further solidified their control over energy policy, even in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its numerous after-effects.

As it happened, and as is obvious to anyone with a double digit IQ, the war in Ukraine happened on Biden’s watch. You can go all warmonger about Trump, but the president who got the world into a war was Biden-- with no small assist from the environmental activists over here and especially in Germany:

Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, roughly 60 per cent of all voters, notes one recent survey, disapproved of Biden’s economic leadership.

Economic leadership-- a joke. Unfortunately, the people who are suffering the most are most of the country’s voters:

The economic metrics are awful. Despite nominal GDP gains and higher wages, inflation, largely driven by energy prices, has been particularly cruel to minority and working-class voters. Overall, when asked if they are better off now than a year ago, twice as many Americans said ‘worse’ than better in a recent poll.

You can only lie so long. When people feel inflation eating into their paychecks, you can spin it any way you wish, but if you are in charge you are going to be held accountable-- regardless of what Twitter says.

Surely, environmentalism is a large part of the problem:

The well-funded American environmental elite lack the grudging sense of realism of their German counterparts, who have been forced to reconsider some of their energy policies in light of the invasion. But in resource-rich America, the green grandees still oppose boosting fossil-fuel energy supplies, despite 80 per cent of voters, and an equal percentage of Democrats, favouring the use of both fossil fuels and renewables. Public support for Net Zero / the Green New Deal hovers around 20 per cent.

Essentially the Democrats’ Net Zero obsession could result in a political disaster. In February, according to Gallup, only two per cent of voters named climate or the environment as their biggest concern, one-fifth the number who named inflation and barely one-tenth the number who cited poor government leadership. Relentless climate scaremongering has not moved the needle among voters. ‘Climate catastrophism’, notes political strategist Ruy Teixeira, is a political ‘loser’, particularly among working-class voters of all races.

And, let’s not forget the decidedly pathetic leadership skills of a sanctimonious twit from Queens, by the name of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If she, along with Biden and the evidently stupid Kamala Harris and the corrupt Nancy Pelosi are the faces of today’s Democratic Party, whatever did you expect?

And, of course, the Democratic Party mounted an insurrection against Donald Trump through the Black Lives Matter movement. This insurrection has never really stopped and has now turned into a crime wave in America’s largest blue cities. And, let’s not forget the flood of illegal aliens invading the nation, with the full support of the Biden administration:

Voters view crime as the second-most pressing issue, after the economy and inflation. Here again the survey results are equally distressing for the progressive agenda. Voters, according to one recent survey, blame the Democrats for the current crime wave by a margin of two to one. Moderate Democrats, like retiring Florida congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, herself a refugee from Vietnam, found her support for legislation that would penalise undocumented criminals got her labeled as ‘anti-immigrant’ by the party’s dominant progressive mob.

And then there is the school system. The Democratic Party has gone all in for closing down schools, for rendering children stupid and for replacing education with indoctrination. The people have noticed and the people do not like it:

Even San Francisco, the cosmic capital of left-wing lunacy, has just recalled three ultra-progressive school-board members for their refusal to deal with a deteriorating education system. Traditional Democrats may favour expanded medical coverage, better roads and cleaner air, but they’re less enthusiastic about having their youngsters indoctrinated in the fashionable racial theories embraced by the educational establishment. The teachers’ unions may be arguably the Democrats’ most powerful support base, but they have become widely disdained by parents, most of whom oppose their woke ideology.

The Democratic Party has been taken over by tech oligarchs. Their interest is not that of the mass of the American people. Let’s hope that the people have not let this go on too long:

The problem, however, lies with the takeover of the party by the super-affluent of Manhattan, Menlo Park or Malibu, and the party’s continued shrinkage outside the big inner cities. This pattern could be reinforced in the election as candidates in middle- and working-class districts may end up paying for allowing themselves to be frogmarched into supporting policies largely unpopular in their constituencies.