Why Democrts Lost

It is not just that the Democratic Party lost a few elections last November. Its grandees are incapable of drawing any lesson from their defeats. 

Recently, at a gathering of party leaders  all of them concluded that Kamala Harris had lost because of racism and misogyny.That she was an incompetent buffoon seems not to have mattered. That the public repudiated her because they found the Biden administration to have been a failure did not register.

The Democratic party failed at the ballot box because it had failed to govern. Now, it is getting worse. The more people see President Trump engaged in the task of governance, the more they become aware of the fact that the Biden administration was incapable of doing the same.

The Democratic Party was all about identity politics. Its leaders imagined that the public would vote for Kamala because she was a minority female. It was a bad joke, and it systematically ignored the issues that mattered to people. 

The New York Times explained:

Many Americans say they do not believe the Democratic Party is focused on the economic issues that matter most to them and is instead placing too much emphasis on social issues that they consider less urgent.

Asked to identify the Democratic Party’s most important priorities, Americans most often listed abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and climate change, according to a poll from The New York Times and Ipsos conducted from Jan. 2 to 10.

The issues that people cited as most important to them personally were the economy and inflation, health care and immigration, the poll found. The kinds of social causes that progressive activists have championed in recent years ranked much lower.

The issues that people cited as most important to them personally were the economy and inflation, health care and immigration, the poll found. The kinds of social causes that progressive activists have championed in recent years ranked much lower. [emphasis added]

The Democratic Party has failed at governance because it does not care to govern. It does not think that it needs to. It has a more lofty goal. It wants to own your mind. It wants to dictate what you think, how you feel and what you believe. It imagines that once you become a true believer in leftist ideology you will naturally vote the right way.

Its leaders aspire to become a priesthood promoting a dogma. That includes journalists, bureaucrats, academics and religious leaders. It excludes business leaders, soldiers, and builders.

On the contrary, President Trump has surrounded himself with people who notably get things done. Tycoons and tech bros-- this group, beginning with Elon Musk, are notable for functioning within the economy. They build things, and do not sit around whining about why they can’t get anything done.

The presence of such leaders provides a legitimacy that the Democrat Party now lacks. Many were formerly Democrats. When they found their status diminished, for not being sufficiently intellectual, they decamped for the other party. They preferred to be in the company of tech tycoons than subliterate reformed courtesans and tenured academics.

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Returning to Socrates

In her new book philosopher Agnes Callard wants to introduce us to Socrtaes. Perhaps she is writing for college students who have never read any philosophy, but if she is not, her presentation is banal.

After all, Socrates and his student Plato are the godfather of philosopher idealism. This strain of philosophy has been around and has been accepted for millennia now.The most important of the Church Fathers, Augustine himself, declared that Plato was a near-Chrisitan. This ensured that his thinking would always have pride of place in the Christian West.

The empiricism of Aristotle did not receive the same treatment.  It was not until the late Middle Ages that Aristotle became respectable, thanks largely to Thomas Aquinas and his Dominican brethren.

Callard ends up saying that Socrtes taught us the art of conversation. This is an interesting idea, even if it is largely inaccurate.

Socratic dialogue is a trick. The ugly old philosopher encounters a young dupe and proceeds to teach him philosophy.Or so it would seem.

Through a series of questions Socrates persuades the dupe to think what he wants him to thinK. Better yet, he persuades him that he always thought the same thing, only awaiting the midwifery of Socrtes to bring it into the light of consciousness

Socrates does not teach the young person how to think. It teaches him what he must think.But he allows him to think that he has not been influenced by an authority figure, a Socrates, but has merely discovered what he himself has always been thinking.

So, Socrates makes young people think what he wants them to think. His ruse is to persuade them that they are not being influenced by an authority, but are merely geting in touch with what they always knew.

For a philosophy professor, this is a potent ruse.You can help students overcome their ability to respect authority, all the while making them subservient to your authority.

Sundaze

With a warm welcome to new subscribers. 

We have experienced a second week of the new Trump presidency and many of us are pleasantly surprised. For once we have someone who is taking charge. And for the first time in ages we have someone who is an unabashed patriot.

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Saturday Miscelany

First, the biggest dupes must be those American student leftists who have rallied to the Hamas cause. They want to Free Palestine, even though the region that Hamas inhabits does not have any democratic governments.

Anyway, Drew Pavlou remarks the following:

Hamas boasts on Telegram that they are now going through the Gaza Strip with death lists and executing Palestinian dissidents. Western leftists will take to the streets to protest this I’m sure. Because they care so deeply about Palestinian lives.

Second, now President Trump has declared his preference. The Palestinians in Gaza should become part of Egypt and the Palestinians in the West Bank should become Jordanians.

Both of these countries have protested mightily against this solution. Time will tell whether or not they accede to the Donald’s request.

Third, I do not know why the American Airlines plane crashed into a Blackhawk helicopter over the Potomac the other day. For now, it appears that no one else knows either.

And yet, the question has arisen-- how much did DEI policies play into the tragedy.

Fox News reports the FAA policy, on January 24:

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is actively recruiting workers who suffer "severe intellectual" disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website. 

"Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring," the FAA’s website states. "They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism."

The initiative is part of the FAA’s "Diversity and Inclusion" hiring plan, which says "diversity is integral to achieving FAA's mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond." The FAA’s website shows the agency’s guidelines on diversity hiring were last updated on March 23, 2022.

You wonder why there have not been more accidents.

Fourth, since one of the pilots in the helicopter was female, Peachy Keenan offers this comment: 

Feminism means getting to fly a Black Hawk because you’re a girl and if something goes wrong the men in charge will reveal the names of everyone but you and will keep your name and identity secret, because you’re a girl

Fifth,  the war against woke proceeds apace. Now, federal employees have been instructed to keep their pronouns to themselves:

Employees at multiple federal agencies were ordered to remove pronouns from their email signatures by 5pm today.

Sixth, Abigail Shrier feels vindicated, sorta. The author of a book called Irreversible Damage, a scathing critique of transmania, should be feeling good to see President Trump put an end to all forms of government recognition of this delusional belief system.

The problem, she explains in a Free Press essay, was always the spell. It was as though someone had cast a spell on otherwise sane and rational people, and induced them to join a cult to a mania.

In her words:

But that order does break the spell—and the spell was always our biggest problem. Parents who allowed their children to transition are often caricatured as Hollywood eccentrics, the sort who bequeath their estates to teacup Chihuahuas. The parents I spoke to—even those who allowed their children to transition—are nothing like that.

Many are conscientious and loving and afraid, if a little naive. They believed medical science was above politics and beyond question. They had wandered into a Truman Show, an all-consuming simulacrum, designed to convince them to abandon their protective instincts. If the parents still weren’t convinced, therapists coerced them into allowing their daughters to undergo gender transition with this thinly veiled threat: “Would you rather a live son or a dead daughter?”

If it seems, suddenly, that only a fool would fall for this, then it is worth pointing out that millions of us were fools for a while. This social contagion spread far beyond teenage girls. It touched corporate executives who rushed to put pronouns in their profiles, pastors who raised the transgender Pride flag at their churches, and school administrators that actively deceived parents about the new gender identities they had selected for the parents’ children.

A lot of bad actors—pediatricians, surgeons, endocrinologists, therapists, teachers, even clergy—took advantage. No reason to let them off the hook: The science is, and always was, shoddy. When I published Irreversible Damage in 2020 and became, overnight, socially radioactive even among many conservatives, the medical risks were as plain to the experts then as they are today. One only needed to take an interest.

Desperate parents who transitioned their own children during this period, against their better judgment, made an understandable, if devastating, error. Harmonizing one’s views with the powerful reflects the oldest social survival instinct. We are engineered to stay within the herd and get along.

Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs. Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness. There is no reforming us.

But we served a vital function: Together, a ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff. None of us ever expected to be welcomed back into the same elite circles that, only recently, had cheered or looked away as a generation of tormented girls took themselves apart.

It is, dare we say, frightening. People were convinced that they were in accord with the latest in science. People believed that they were defending the rights of the transgendered.

/ 

They were. Shrier suggested, bewitched. An excellent analysis, if my view.

Undoing the institutional forces that embraced and got rich by treating disturbed young people is one thing. Ridding their minds of the garbage that they were induced to believe is quite another.