Requiem for the Democratic Party

The great minds of the American left are applying themselves to their new challenge. Writing a Requiem for the Democratic Party.

Mozart they are not. However intelligent they are, they are having considerable difficulty explaining how and why the nation rejected their superior wisdom and brilliant thought. 

Thomas Frank, known from his musing about what happened to Kansas, suggests that the problem is that the Democratic Party because an elitist enterprise filled with scolds. As he and many other Democrats pointed out, the party lost touch with the working class. And also with the middle class. It was so self-important that it imagined that it could say anything and get away with it. 

The Democratic Party became the province of a guardian class of philosopher kings, inhabiting the academy and the media, and lately even corporate America, who believed that their superior intellect made them worthy of being in charge and telling everyone what to think. 

It was bad enough that the academy was infested with groupthink. It became far worse when the corporate world decided to embrace DEI, thus discriminating actively against white males. At that point, academic theories became practical prejudice. 

The incredible irony of choosing a certifiable imbecile as a leader for a party of philosopher kings  seems to have escaped these great thinkers. The otherwise intelligent David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, declared that Kamala had an “appealing intelligence.” 

In truth, the more America saw of Kamala’s intelligence, the more they chose to vote for Trump. A guardian class that had been therapied to within an inch of its sanity could not muster enough rational thought to figure out how to compete against Donald Trump. They just assumed that name calling would win the day.

The indignity of it all. A dimwitted champion of the philosopher kings. A sensible soul would have concluded that Kamala was trying out for a spot on The View.

In truth there was nothing appealing about Kamala’s serial failures to speak coherently, without using a teleprompter. She was the embodiment of a DEI hire, at a moment when the nation had had its fill of DEI. 

All the nation needed was a few word salads from Kamala, and they recognized that they were being defrauded, that the guardian class was led by a fool. It was like the moment when Dorothy tears back the curtain and we discover the true identity of the wizard of Oz-- not a wizard and not Dr. Oz.

So, Democrats have become self-important scolds. They not only look down on their constituents. They assume that the poor pathetic souls who vote for them will accept just about anything as true just because they have said it. They imagine that their voters will not apply critical judgment to the party line. Especially if the alternative is Hitler.

Do you grasp how insulting it is to imagine that the nation will accept, as fact, without critical judgment, that Trump is Hitler?

The extent of it is breathtaking.  Simon van Zuylen-Wood offered a litany of falsehoods that the Democrats expected their voters to accept unthinkingly. He wrote in New York Magazine:

A partial catalogue of progressive denialism, listed in no particular order: that alienating progressive positions or rhetoric were confined to college campuses; that the externalities of pandemic shutdowns, such as grade-school learning loss, were overblown; that the rapid adoption of new gender orthodoxies, especially in settings involving children, was not a popular concern; that the “defund the police” movement would be embraced by communities of color; that inflation was overstated; that the pandemic crime wave was exaggerated; that concerns over urban disorder represented a moral panic; that Latinos would welcome loosened border restrictions. 

So, who are you going to believe, your philosopher kings or your own eyes? And besides, the defamation of Donald Trump eventually lost its potency. If you had nothing to offer beyond trash talk and illusions, why would anyone want to vote for you? Why would they think that you cared about the nation or even about them?

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