Pre-Mortem for the Democratic Party

San Franciscans have just rid themselves of pro-crime prosecutor Chesa Boudin. One understands that Boudin and his cohorts in America’s great blue cities have been directly responsible for an unconscionable spike in crime in those cities. Only the most ignorant fool would miss the connection. 

Now, as the nation prepares for a November election that will apparently be a wholesale repudiation of the Democratic Party and especially of its radical leftist wing, Bret Stephens offers what we might call a pre-mortem. He offers to explain to Democrats how they went so wrong.

One might imagine that it was all the result of stupid policies, policies that anyone with a modicum of intelligence would have seen for what they were-- exercises in self-destruction. And yet, as evidenced by the Biden administration, the Democratic Party has come so thoroughly to believe its own nonsense about diversity that it has amassed a band of imbeciles to run the executive branch of government. 

Whatever you think of Biden administration policies, the fact that the president is barely literate and barely cognizant, accompanied by the fact that his administration is led by fools, idiots and morons-- does not inspire confidence. It’s one thing to say that the policies are not working. It’s quite another to say that they do not know what their policies are and are incapable of doing the analysis necessary to draw intelligent conclusions.

So, Stephens opens, by saying that today’s Democrats have ignored reality, and that reality, taking offense, is biting them:

What’s going on in San Francisco is happening nationwide, and not just in matters of criminal justice and urban governance. In one area after another, the left is being mugged by reality, to borrow Irving Kristol’s famous phrase.

Of course, the Biden administration does not understand inflation, even though, if it had a modicum of intelligence it could have consulted with Democrats like Larry Summers and Steven Rattner, both of whom have had a clear understanding of the issue:

The left’s combination of nonchalance about inflation (it will erase debts!), along with a reluctance to tackle it forcefully, is why the left so often ends up losing working-class voters to the right.

And, of course, the mini-minds of the Biden administration, led around by a certifiable imbecile named Alexandria Occasional-Cortex, has decided to impose its half-baked climate policies on the nation, without having any sense of the consequences.

And, dare we say, when Sen. Debbie Stabenow laughs like an idiot over the fact that her electric car does not use gasoline and when Energy Secretary, and sublimely unqualified fool, Jennifer Granholm gets the giggles when asked about reducing energy inflation, things are very bad indeed. The Democratic Party is showing off its incompetence, and its contempt for voters:

The one form of nature progressives reliably fail to understand is human nature. If they ever wonder why their climate fervor hasn’t translated into more policy victories, they should grapple with the fact that the rapid decarbonization of the economy is not something for which most people are prepared to pay a high price, at least from their own pocketbooks.

How about working on a different message, one that is measured, adaptive and meliorative, rather than draconian, grim and doomsaying?

The problem is that today’s Democrats do not have enough IQ points to fashion a rational and measured message. They are so stupid that they only understand hysterical apocalyptic visions, ones that they are going to impose on the nation, regardless of whether you like it or not.

And then there are the culture wars, another front where Democrats are losing bigly:

How did progressives come out on the losing end of the culture wars? How did they become the butt of jokes for our era’s sharpest comedians, from Bill Maher to Dave Chappelle? Why are lifelong liberals at universities, newspapers and publishing houses constantly whispering under their breath about the rank Maoism of their younger colleagues?

When you have lost comedians, you are in serious trouble. When you cannot laugh at yourself you have no character left.

And then there is the mania over transgenderism. Is this really a hill that Democrats want to fight on-- that being, the hill where people are being forced to acknowledge a lie as a higher truth:

When a trans collegiate swimmer such as Lia Thomas identifies as a woman, that’s liberation — a decision that surely required courage and is worthy of respect.

But when Thomas is allowed to compete in women’s races, that’s a blatantly unfair act that has given Thomas one victory after another while diminishing the legacy of female athletes. That it has become difficult to even say this out loud merely underscores the point.

And then there are progressive policies like dumbing down schools, shutting schools down at the behest of the decadent teachers’ unions and not caring about crime rates, when crime most directly impacts poor voters:

That comforting prediction is failing because members of minority groups don’t necessarily like being stuffed into the back end of progressive acronyms like BIPOC or being stymied by progressive policies, such as efforts to do away with entrance exams for selective public schools, or neglecting law-and-order priorities in poorer communities that often need them most, including those on the southern border.

When it comes to foreign policy, as in, the face America shows to the world-- dare we mention that Joe Biden’s face is contorted-- the result of cosmetic surgery-- the Afghanistan withdrawal was a calamity:

Progressives (aided by isolationist Republicans) spent a decade demanding that America disentangle itself from faraway military commitments, particularly in Afghanistan, so that we could do more nation-building at home. Joe Biden made the mistake of believing it, and his presidency hasn’t recovered from the strategic and moral debacle of withdrawal.

Obviously, and it is good that Stephens points this out, were it not for the fact that the Biden administration is fundamentally incompetent and that Western Europe is not much better, Russia would probably not have invaded Ukraine:

The perception of American diffidence and incompetence, which the administration has labored so hard to counteract in Ukraine, is part of what tempted the Kremlin to invade in the first place.