Excerpts from "Expect more Bulldozings," an op-ed in the February issue of Harper's.
Donald Trump’s second victory cannot be attributed to any unhappy accident of eighteenth-century constitutionalism. This time, he won not only the Electoral College, that antique curiosity, but the popular vote as well. In the end, Trump’s national margin over Kamala Harris was just 1.5 percent—narrow in the manner of all mandates within our entrenched politics. Yet even this slender triumph was disorienting to his Democratic opponents, who had again staked everything on the notion that Trump was fundamentally unacceptable to the American people. Somehow, this year, they were more wrong than they had ever been before...Fundamentally, the election witnessed a rebellion of working Americans squeezed by rising prices. The Biden Administration boasted that strong employment and wage gains negated the impact of inflation, but their measuring sticks—as the progressives’ bête noire Larry Summers has noted—excluded the price of credit, a major omission in an economy built on housing loans and other financing costs. The combined inflation rate of food and fuel, meanwhile, reached in 2022 levels unseen since 1980. Housing, groceries, and gasoline, of course, are the costs that working Americans experience most keenly in their day-to-day lives. The fact that inflation rates declined in 2023—another factor much touted by liberal economists—was little consolation, given that actual food prices, for instance, remained 25 percent higher than they had been before the advent of COVID-19. On election day, 68 percent of voters said the economy was not good, and 70 percent of those who said so voted for Trump...The fault is not in the Democrats’ campaigns; it is in themselves. This is a party that represents the nerve center of American capitalism, ideological production, and imperial power. Elon Musk’s contributions notwithstanding, in just three months Harris raised far more money than Trump, from a much broader and deeper bench of wealthy elites. This is a party that embodies a contented American status quo—its faultless Constitution, its dynamic “opportunity economy,” its “indispensable” role as military policeman of the global order. And this is a party for which everything is either righteously moral or bloodlessly technical, but for which nothing is political—that is, alert to real questions of power and subject to actual popular contestation.It is no coincidence that the past three Democratic nominees for president did not emerge from any kind of political process, but were preselected by fellow elites—“anointed” is, in fact, the correct word for the actions of a party of such aristocratic manner and apostolic self-regard. Barack Obama anointed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then, in a crunch, Joe Biden in 2020; Biden, in turn, anointed Harris when he stepped down. Squashing the Sanders insurgency was one thing, since the rebels were all outside the castle, but this is a party that simply does not welcome internal ideological debate."
When there are ETFs tracking Nancy Pelosi's investments, it says something about the state of the Democratic Party's hierarchy.
ReplyDeleteAnalysis like this are just empty drivel, IMHO. In the end, American elections in the last few decades have been decided by a few thousand swing voters in a few swing states.
ReplyDeleteSo instead of declaring one party or the other a complete failure for not understanding these small groups of shifting voters, the larger question is why elections keep being decided by so few voters. This is a country of 330,000,000 people, and yet it's a few 100,000 that keep deciding elections.
The rest of the voters do not matter.
That is a problem.
No wonder neither party cares about average Americans.
(I'm trying to score Crowboy points here).
The reason it's not drivel is that regardless of what the 100,000 do we're still stuck on stupid with the ultimate CHOICE. Sorry to keep hammering on this, but in 2016 a real difference was emerging between Sanders and whoever the Republicans nominated. 2016 is a watershed date. It's the moment Occupy had a tangible influence on the political process. But the ruling class was happy with either Clinton or Trump, so they were the nominees, and we got Trump. This is not an anomalous occurrence, but one that was so painfully obvious it can't but illustrate the nature of the problem: elites own these parties. I know many of the kind of Democrats that loudly supported Clinton over Sanders. There was no reasoning with them. In my region of the country most of these people are financially comfortable liberals. (Some have since admitted that Sanders would have beaten Trump.) But is there a real shift away from the comfort zone of the average affluent liberal? I don't think so. This Harper's excerpt is an example of trying to ring the alarm. And, contrary to pragmatic sentiment, it's not just about winning elections. It's about principle, win or lose. Without some guiding ethos, the whole mess is guaranteed to remain a Faustian nightmare. I'm not optimistic given the moral fabric of the US.
DeleteThe truth may hurt, but it makes it no less true. The Dems are resting slightly left of center in an identity politics fugue state. The ruling class never had it so good.
ReplyDeleteAs a Boomer, I say it's time for Boomers to get the hell out of the way. Schumer sends a "strongly worded letter", demanding answers to eight questions. Really? GTFOOH. If the Democrats ever hope to return to even a semblance of power, they need to retire all those elected officials born between 1946 and 1964. Enjoy your retirement and your Social Security while you still can.
ReplyDeleteAs a Boomer, I must say it's time for Boomers to GTF out of the way. Schumer sends a "strongly worded letter" to the President, demanding answers to eight questions. Yeah, that'll fix things. They're all shaking in their boots. If the Democrats hope for even a semblance of power, they need to DO stuff. They seem to believe that everything will be back to normal when this administration ends without even considering that this administration has no intention of ending. Current Democratic leadership is worthless.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is information overload. We thought that more speech was good, and more information is good. Unfortunately, each person has a limited amount of time and attention with which to take in information, so the quality of what they consume becomes crucial. The end of organized curation has led to us all living in our own personal information bubbles.
ReplyDeleteIn this world, the truth is often complicated and nuanced. It takes work to understand things. Not fun. It's much more satisfying to listen to someone who has simple, pithy remarks and explanations for why you feel your life sucks. And people with bad intentions have discovered that if they just flood the channel with bad info, they can engender distrust in the whole system.
What's the solution? People only care about a problem if it impacts them personally. At this point, it seems the only way people will learn is if this country takes one on the chin. I saw someone say recently that there's a reason the government only steeply raises tariffs every 80-100 years... because all the people who lived through it the last time have to die first. I guess we're due for another lesson. Hopefully we survive the fallout.
this is a party that simply does not welcome ANY DEBATE ... there I fixed your last sentence
ReplyDeleteAs a left leaning independent, I'm going to keep voting 3rd party until the powers that be quit giving me a choice of clowns to pick from.
ReplyDeleteAny word on whether Buffet ever actually paid more/higher than his secretary? Eisenhower era tax rates with a panel of median income, median wealth citizens applying tariffs on those deemed to have surpluses of either.
ReplyDeleteWe must either believe that over half the nation is a bunch of utter morons...or that maybe the Democrats are missing something.
ReplyDeleteThe Democrat leadership seems to think that all of their followers are just as keen as they are about unrestricted abortion, genderism, moral outrage every 10 seconds, etc. But they're not! They simply have voted Democrat because they felt that it was better than voting Republican.
Until 2024.
Consider that this was not the best person the Republicans could have ran against the Democrats. They could have run someone much more likeable. Yet it was the case that enough Democrats either voted FOR "the Republicans' worst candidate" or didn't vote at all.
That ought to tell you something.
When you think that Donald Trump is BETTER than whomever the Democrats are running, well, that either makes me think that this is a recoil against the way Trump was treated the first time around...an acknowledgement that he was still better than Kamala...a slam against the way Biden's condition was hidden from us...or maybe just the realization that the country needs to go another way.
Whatever the case, I'm not willing to claim that more than half the nation are utter idiots.
The fact is that both parties are by the rich, for the rich, at this point. Sure, the Democrats throw a few more bones to the working class to try to keep them appeased, while the GOP just blatantly writes the rich blank checks. (It's no mystery the GOP won when the Trump tax cuts were due to expire.) Was inflation a big problem? Absolutely. But, here's the part they don't say: Most of the inflation was sheer corporate greed, not Covid leftovers. Corporations saw the chance to blame profiteering on the government and ran with it all the way to the bank. Now, I'm sure *some* of the corporations were hoping to press the scale towards the GOP to get those tax cuts renewed, but many were just happy to line their pockets while doing the same thing, intentionally, or not.
ReplyDelete