“They want to build America, not indict America. Democratic leaders must make it crystal clear that they feel the same way.”
The Dems have had four years to disavow the toxic divisiveness of identity and grievance politics but have clearly decided not to. They could have called out the anarchists that have been vandalizing and burning for months , but they chose not to. They could have set a clear tone of unity that ALL Americans matter by reaching back to MLK’s “character not colour” message. But they chose not to. They’ve done little or no self-reflection of their own failures of 2016 but rather spent four years blaming ‘low information’ voters, dreaming up conspiracy theories and engaging in “don’t worry – we’ll fix this mistake” political machinations.
Er…. not quite, you see, perhaps there is something you should know. Donald J Trump, has just set up the greatest “sting” in history. The Dept of Homeland Security had quietly watermarked and digitally block-chained every single ballot paper in the election, and any ballot paper that does not conform is automatically disqualified. They also have a complete record of every shipment, and who it was sent to.Expect many Democratic leaders to end up in Gitmo very shortly. They’ve been busted.
You may not like this information Eileen, but it’s true. I can also tell you that the CIA director Gina Haspel was caught in Frankfurt Germany on election night, manipulating the dominion voting machines. A battle ensued between her CIA body guards, and US special forces, She was shot and wounded, but is now in custody. 5 US special forces were killed in the operation, but Trump has all the servers..
And 71 million voted for DJT…we’re out, we’re proud and aren’t going anywhere…take away CA and NY, DJT wins popular vote. Biden’s winning margins in swing states were as narrow as Trump’s in ’16…Republicans keep the Senate and close gap in House. Dems can get thrown out of power in all but the presidency in two years. They’re too stupid and arrogant to realize this, so they’ll overreach…see Obama’s first term.
Bad, kinda. Matt Taibbi nails it: if American politics were realistic, it would consist of 99% chasing a couple of obnoxious bankers through the Upper West Side; instead it’s 45%/45% fighting over a 10% slice of the undecided. And, in this case, ending up almost 50/50! And then Kasich has the audacity to say: the progressive left should shut up and crawl back under their rocks, they almost cost the election.
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
As the Socialist Jimmy Dore says, the Democrats are now even more corrupt, and bigger war mongers, than the Republicans. In this election they were the party of Wall St and they put forward a ailing, aged candidate who is bought and sold by China. The whole thing stinks.
Mark Lilla then talks about the ‘right wing media’ when we all know that almost all the mainstream media in the US (and the UK) is fanatically liberal-left. Even Fox is going that way under their new owner.
It’s been reported that the Murdoch outlets are advising Trump to fold gracefully. Smelling which way the wind blows, as usual. Dore is interesting, a member of a minority group who, while excoriating the Republicans, find little or nothing good in the current incarnation of Democratic leadership.
David Bell
3 years ago
When will my fellow liberals learn? – Answer: they won’t. They believe in their own sense of moral superiority which means anyone who doesn’t agree with them must be wrong. That means they refuse to enter into debate, which is where cancel culture comes in.
Once you refuse to enter debate you can never understand other peoples point of view and you can never formulate a policy response to help them or refute their opinion.
Liberals have lost sight of the political spectrum!
This sort of language from those in power helped fuel the Brexit vote. Expressing contempt for a large volume of the voters cannot help your cause; however ‘stupid’ they are, they will eventually notice. Let’s hope a large number of Americans wake up before 2024.
Andrew Harvey
3 years ago
“While the Biden campaign was not overly distracted by these psychodramas…”
Huh?
Harris was specifically chosen as the Vice President candidate (essentially gifted the Presidency given the circumstances) based entirely on her race and gender. Did they think no one would notice?
I broadly agree with the author’s thesis, but he’s not playing it out to the conclusion. The Democratic Party is now no more than a vehicle for the wealthy to divide and rule. They don’t come up with policies and candidates with broad appeal because they don’t want to. Simple as that.
I’d argue that the Democratic Party has become a ‘political machine’ party. That is it expects and relies on their traditional support while not doing anything about their concerns, happy to sit at the top table and enrich themselves.
Machine parties appear powerful… until a party with fresh ideas comes along. In the UK Labour lost out to the SNP, the Conservatives had to adjust themselves to respond to UKIP/Brexit. I suspect the bipartisan politics of the USA is too entrenched to support a different party, but Trump is arguably a Republican ‘adjustment’ and an existential threat to the Democratic machine party.
“I’d argue that the Democratic Party has become a ‘political machine’ party. That is it expects and relies on their traditional support while not doing anything about their concerns, happy to sit at the top table and enrich themselves.”
Can you think of anything else they have in common with the UK Labour Party?
Another essay I read elsewhere stated that the ‘donor class’ of Democrats is much more liberal than the average Democrat, and the donor class for Republicans is more liberal than the average Republican. The ability of the wealthy (along with the lobbyists) means that only a broad movement of the discontented (e.g. Tea Party) can move government back to the center-right.
Caroline Galwey
3 years ago
What about the burning and looting, and ‘defund the police’ and the increasing perception that the law does not protect the poor (of any race)?
The Wokehadi NY Times journalists who bully their fellow employees on Slack think that if they ignore it, it didn’t happen. Or maybe it did happen, but it wasn’t a big deal. Or it was a big deal, but the oppressors deserved it and only hate speech is “violence” anyway. They’ve floated a number of delusions.
David Uzzaman
3 years ago
The Democrats are making the same mistake Labour has made here. They are adopting policies which attract middle class activists while repelling their traditional base. It’s difficult to ride two horses at the same time but if you can’t manage it what are you doing in a circus.
I think there’s distinct a difference between the Dems and Labour. Labour was actually intending to implement their cloud cuckoo-land ideas. A Sanders lead party would have had a Labour-sounding agenda but the DNC clearly wasn’t going there – their Wall St friends wouldn’t allow it. Corporations and Israel would have nothing to fear from a Biden presidency.
Labour, oddly, didn’t have any extreme left-wing proposals. They would have rolled back only 5 of the 80+ privatisations which have occurred under primarily Conservative administrations since 1980: the most popular, being rail franchises and water supply companies, Royal Mail, energy distribution grids, and fibre broadband.
Other than that, proposals centred on increased age 2+ nursery/ early education provision, a return to free University tuition, and a sizable home-building programme.
I believe they also would like to bias the vote even more in their favour by reducing the voting age to 16 (or 6 if they thought they could get away with it 🙂
The Dems cut loose that working class horse and sent it to the knackers.
Paddy Taylor
3 years ago
With respect, you might be a wee bit guilty of that yourself.
When you write “Democrats have had four years to ponder their defeat as America crumbled around them.” you state as fact something that many would see as partisan opinion.
You suggest that America has “crumbled”. The Democrats would have walked into the White House with a landslide if most Americans felt that it had.
I appreciate a lot of what you say but, as much as people might think America is ‘crumbling’ out of their sheer antipathy towards Trump, actually many voters feel as though the last 4 years has been good for them and the country. The only “crumbling” they see is leftist activists rioting and looters destroying and burning cities.
‘…….leftist activists rioting and looters destroying and burning cities.’
Those cities which, I believe, are mainly run by the Democrats.
Simon Denis
3 years ago
The whole focus on racial groupings lies at the heart of the problem, so you yourself are only two steps away from the blunders you excoriate. Rather than talking of African-Americans you should speak of working class Americans – which is what Trump did, from time to time. Suggesting that there are historic grievances of a racial character all over the States and then proposing racially targeted measures to tackle them puts you right back in hard left territory. Identity politics is only not divisive when the identity embraces the majority; the left’s sponsorship of minority identity politics is nothing but a destabilising trick, much the same as its sponsorship of separatism in the old Russian Empire, which it followed up with brutal suppression once it got control. There are three ways forward: one, towards a ghettoised future in which the old majority of the west becomes a passive, declining victim; two, a ghettoised future in which all groups are treated equitably, with particular privileges and rights; and three, a renewal of the Classical Liberal assimilationist dream. That there is no consensus as to which of these is preferable is the most dangerous circumstance of all.
Black Americans (by any respectable study) have different problems (single parent family) than any other group in the country. To pretend otherwise is absurd. The economic of interest of Latinos in Texas (many small business owners) are very different from the economic interest of blacks which are most likely to be unskilled workers.
Are you suggesting that single parent family life is an inherent racial characteristic? No? Then it should be addressed as a problem in itself and not as part of some spurious “racial” profile.
A problem arises if there is a high correlation between a trait and a group; how do you characterise that? Perhaps not so much ‘racial’ as ‘cultural’, which is the basis of many of the differences between groups.
But many of the problems experienced by the working class of one “group” are exactly the same as those of the working class of another. For instance, the two cohorts most likely to under achieve in UK schools are black and white working class boys. The problem, as the sadly late Lord Sacks used to say, is one of de-moralisation, the collapse of the family and – implicitly – of the religious and cultural traditions which held it together. Charles Murray has made the same point at greater length. The focus on “race” is therefore a massive distraction engineered by extreme “liberals” to prevent the natural conclusion – that culture counts and that the gospel of irresponsibility is either unsustainable or leads to the imposition of state fetters. Chesterton’s remark that ignorance of Golden Rules brings on the Rule of Iron is relevant here.
I do agree with your point about shared problems, but is there a greater incidence of single parents among the black population than other populations? In other words, is that particular problem specific to a group? If so, one assumes the answer may need to be tailored to that group, and this would apply to any problem demonstrably specific to a group – much as a particular pathology would need to be applied to a specific group of people who showed a propensity to suffer from a particular illness.
This has bureaucratic plausibility – in that an easily identified group is then the recipient of government assistance – but it remains a mistake. Why? Because by linking racial character with behavioural tendencies it reinforces separatism and even chauvinism among the targeted group: “If this is how we behave, then we’ll damn well go on behaving in this way!” It also creates an incentive to behave badly, in that it gets you noticed, pitied and funded; and it creates resentment among persons not so assisted, thanks to the possession of the “wrong” ethnicity. Finally, it gives a growing pile of ammo to those who would stigmatise the group in question. Surely, if the problem is behavioural, social, to do with incentives and circumstances, we can leave the “racial” element out altogether, can’t we?
Black Americans (by any respectable study) have different problems (single parent family) than any other group in the country.
I’d be careful about picking this as a reason why black Americans are different, because single parent families are very hard to blame on society and very easy to blame on personal irresponsibility.
ard10027
3 years ago
Mark, you say you cannot help anybody if you don’t hold institutional power. Did you not hear what Ronald Reagan said forty years ago? “The nine most frightening words in the English language – ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help'”?
Amen. Govt is only supposed to do for people what they cannot do for themselves; it is not a substitute for morality, humanity, and charity… nor for work which people must do for themselves.
Govt is supposed to do what is done better by Govt than by individuals. In the UK even Conservatives accept that that includes providing healthcare.
Govt’s role also includes rectifying market failure, ie when corporations externalise costs while internalising returns, so that actions which are non-‘economic’ (ie the costs to society exceed the benefits) are nonetheless ‘commercial’ (because the benefits are visible on the balance sheet but some of the costs are externalised).
‘……that includes healthcare.’ Seriously? The NHS? It has now failed us twice over Covid (and please do not blame the government or underfunding) and we have been asked to surrender more and more of our freedoms and/or die without fuss of non covid illnesses in order to save it. I have spoken to nurses who have no idea what the problem is with covid and cannot understand why their places of work are running at reduced capacity. Even without covid it screams every winter. It needs massive reform; will the government deliver this? I doubt it.
In Mark’s title, “When Will My Fellow Liberals Learn,” the words “my fellow” are redundant. The author was being a bit presumptive in excluding himself.
Frederick Hastings
3 years ago
The Democrats have a problem. The highly educated elites, such as Lilla, are their base, and you cannot alienate your base. But if your base alienates everyone else, what do you do?
Yes, they now have a base very similar to that of the Labour Party in the UK. Namely, the woke, liberal city dwellers. I used to be one myself, and still am to some extent, but even I have come to hate them/us.
Democrat voters do not care about ‘fair play, open debate, and legitimate differences of opinion’, because the party they are voting for doesn’t care about them either. Haven’t you been paying attention? Liberals and the Fascist Left are all about suppression, bias, bullying and misinformation. They can’t be trusted under any circumstances and will do and say anything to get what they want, regardless of the chaos they cause. Voting for these people makes you part of the problem, not the solution.
“Democrats have had four years to ponder their defeat as America crumbled around them.”This sort of biased jingoism litter most of these vote articles. I would say. ‘As Trump kept America from crumbling around them’.
Both parties are part of the problem; “bigger govt” has not worked; what we need is “bigger morality”. That cannot be mandated by govt (nor by industries serving the idol of wealth), but only by People serving a higher good.
I completely agree, but won’t happen while ‘cultural relativism’ is a popular concept. Without some sort of universal values to bind them together (like Christianity), people will fall into bickering and factionalism.
To be fair, there was also a lot of bickering and factionalism within Christianity, often with lethal consequences.
Mike Spoors
3 years ago
Much that this comment says can be posed to social democratic parties in most countries. In the UK the Labour Party, after a 5 year experiment in identitarian politics managed to alienate enough of their once core vote to gift their opponents a majority of 80. Since winning but losing they have elected a new leader whilst clinging on to much of the core policies that apparently ‘won the argument’ whilst managing to lose seats. But of course the argument they won was around positions not central to the concerns of voters in the seats they lost. In the places that mattered, the cities, the university towns, amongst the young and particularly politicised BAME groups, they won the internal argument they were largely having amongst themselves and which continues after the election of Starmer and the backwash of the EHRC report. And yet the Government still commands significant support in England whilst Labour flails around trying to hold on to their preferred constituency even though it is not large enough to deliver them a majority. And best not to mention Scotland. Labour and the Democrats both suffer from the same dilemma. Those they choose to court in pursuance of indentitarian purity might be enough to win the argument within their own membership but they are not enough to win an election. But for many that is a secondary consideration.
And I suspect it may get worse-the huge swing to Trump by the Hispanic demographic may be followed by other “people of colour” who are sick of the Democrats patronising attitude-its the same in the UK -witness Jeremy Corbyn’s “Only Labour can be trusted to unlock the talent of Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority people”.so don’t be surprised to see a similar swing in blighty.
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
Democratic voters care about racial justice but they are focused on the present and the future, not on litigating the past. Keep telling yourself that, right along with the canard that the party has a place for liberals. The party is now comprised of leftists who are wiling do illiberal things such as doxxing, cancel culture, and outright shutting down of any opinion contrary to their own. When a liberal like Glenn Greenwald notices – and excoriates his own side for it, to the point of leaving a media outlet he founded – it’s a brave new world for left-leaners.
Joe Biden ran a ‘non-campaign’. It was laughable if not so pathetic.
Nigel Clarke
3 years ago
FFS…another “Orange-Man-Bad” piece…
“A significant factor in the Democrats’ defeat (in 2016), I argued, was a style of politics that prevented them from developing an ambitious vision of America’s future”
Or it might be to do with the Dems just not engaging in any sort of recognisable politics, and instead of trying to win they tried to get Trump to lose. And now, after another 4-years of trying to get Trump to lose the Dems are going to lose again.
Both parties are owned by the ‘Donors’! There is only one path to office in 99% of cases, and that is on a party ticket supported by campaign funds from the political donor class, what we call the ‘Global Elites’ Once you take their shilling you are their man, and you have made your pact with the devil.
This is why Trump is so exciting, he is the less than one percent who bypassed them!
I think you’re right. I’ve often wondered about the institutional vitriol hurled at him by the media and cultural establishment. It’s been a constant daily barrage. I can only think that he was never supposed to be elected, and that him becoming president ruined someone’s plans.
The D is pulling further left but to say that the R is stationary under Trump is delusional. Trump’s entire modus operandi is to foster division and hatred. I’ve never seen a president like him. Having said that, the finger pointing of who started it gets us nowhere. Biden is, by any measure, a centre left politician. It’s time for the R to grow up, return to the centre ground and put the good of the country ahead of political ambition.
Trump’s entire modus operandi is to foster division and hatred. Trump’s MO was/is to use the left’s playbook against them. Tell me which side is behind cancel culture, turned much of media into campus-style groupthink outlets, and attacks people who dare wear MAGA hats? Hint: it’s the same side that has been rioting for months in cities across the country.
If you are concerned about hatred and division, assault and mayhem are odd ways of showing it. So is calling anyone who disagrees a racist or a nazi or whatever else.
“Relative drift.” To the left which is moving left, it APPEARS that the right is moving right.
Miro Mitov
3 years ago
The way things are looking up with the votes still being counted, it may be that the Democratic Liberals’ focus on identity movements as a means to gain power will be vindicated. A Biden/Harris election victory will probably serve to cement the idea that focusing on historical grievances is the way forward and we will be seeing more of the same in the years to come. I fear that the author’s plea will increasingly sound like a voice lost in the wind of triumphant wokeism. Trump did make the Democrats sweat for their potential victory, yet it will probably be too much to hope that this would lead to any soul-searching and reevaluation of priorities.
Please explain why you think Trump is the worst president in history. He is the first president not to start any wars, or invade somewhere, since Carter. He has instigated various peace deals in the ME and killed a couple of very nasty global terrorists.
Before Covid he had delivered the highest ever levels of employment for black and hispanics, while giving their colleges record funding and releasing them from jail under the First Steps program.
He has deported far, far fewer people than Obama (who deported four million) and taken steps to reduce the flow of drugs and trafficked kids etc into the country.
And he has done all this while fighting wicked and fake allegations of Russian collusion and a grotesquely fake impeachment.
I can only assume you are part of the political-military-pharma elite that he has upset so much.
The man is a complete buffoon. And a bully. And a liar. And a serial abuser of spray tan products. (Though probably not a dictator, a fascist, or a racist.)
On a number of issues (trade, immigration, China, Iran), Trump has identified issues where the consensus was (in my opinion) wrong. He’s come up with some policies to address those issues, though not necessarily always successfully. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s the kind of jerk who makes fun of people for being disabled.
Yes, he may be all these things, but he’s still better than the Democrat party. Personally, I’d rather vote for a man everybody hates than a party that hates me.
Notice I said ‘party’. Joe Biden seems affable enough, but I’m doubtful as to whether he can control the more ideological factions of his party who seem to hate America, and people with pale skin in particular.
When I asked him a logical question, he told me I was fat and challenged me to a push-up competition.
Then he lumped me into a racial category and tried to disband the police in my neighborhood. “I tell you if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,” -Joe “Idiot” Biden
You forgot ‘self-serving’. The defining characteristic of Trump is his complete lack of concern about anyone or anything other than his own wealth and success. He couldn’t care less for disenfranchised white America. His campaign slogan should be “What’s in it for me?”
If by making fun of the disabled you mean the reporter who has an arm with very little mobility, Trump’s actions weren’t to make fun of him for that. Rather, they were to indicate that the journalist was a coward for not taking on those who would promote untruths. Had the then-candidate wanted to make fun of the disability, he would have stood with one arm falling limply by his side rather than flailing both arms. Besides, Trump was most likely unaware that the man had a handicap.
Surely the title “worst President in history” must belong to Mr James Madison?
He who lost the War of 1812, allowed ‘us’ to sack and burn the White House and all the Public buildings of Washington DC, wipe the USN from the face of the earth etc etc.
Perhaps Biden will do better and sell you out to Fu Manchu, Oo Flungdung & Co?
“Soul-searching and reevaluation of priorities”(?!) It seems that the only people required to undergo that dubious process are white Americans. Historical grievances acknowledged rather than questioned ““ that would be just too insensitive and could well stir up outrage among those groups for whom victimhood is a badge of honour and an alibi for failure.
Better to just acquiesce. Then you can pile up votes from a youthful electorate who consider themselves politcally aware (or “woke” to use the current term).
You’d best get in touch with BLM/Antifa if you want an answer to that one. They have set themselves up as the final arbiters of who qualifies as a victim of racism. A word to the wise though ““ an activist’s definition of victimhood tends to be flexible and highly opportunistic. You’ll need to keep your wits about you!
Such contrast in last 4 years: Repubs- hope, security, prosperity for all, pride (MAGA), industry, responsibility… with a tactless, but courageous, President Dems- division, endorsed violence, unfair attribution, false accusation, history-bashing, speech-condemning, disrespectful (e.g., Kavanaugh and Barrett hearings), reparation-demanding (“equity”, racial and sexual-based quotas), and now electioneering… with a senile career politician (by proxy) and ultra-left senator leading them
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
3 years ago
ML is the heart of the problem. His writing drips with condescension, and piety. He is plainly not capable of entertaining the possibility that there is an alternative to his values and self-serving assumptions. The core agenda of the DP is toxic and it seems that all ML wants to do is sneak it past the electorate by putting lipstick on it.
steve eaton
3 years ago
This article is a joke. While Democrats are installing Marxists announcing their intentions of changing the entire basis of the US system from 3 separate but equal parts into a Top down one party system, openly announcing their intentions to pack the supreme court, change our Republic into a mob rule raw Democracy, and form a “Truth Commission” to find and re-educate those who disagree with this, you have the nerve to accuse the Republicans of becoming increasingly radical?
I used to think it was ‘evil’. I have a high IQ and my wife tells me that because of that I’m unable to comprehend stupidity in others, which means when someone acts in a way I find indefensible, I often attribute that to malicious intent. One day I said as such to my wife about somebody, and she turned around and said: “they’re not evil, they’re just stupid.” It shouldn’t have been, but it was an eye-opener to me. Unless perhaps, stupidity is evil.
IQ and stupidity go hand in hand, but in a strange way. There is no question that some people are smarter than others, nor that some are more opportunistic and un-empathetic than others
Stupidity is not evil. It’s not clear to me even that stupidity is an inferior state of being. Stupidity might well be an advantage when your life is going to be 60 years of slogging through a rice paddy, or putting a screw in a part on assembly line 10 hrs. every day. However stupid people are very often manipulated and used as weapons by evil people. I too am in the 99th percentile, and kind of agree. I do understand it in a theoretical sense, but I cannot really put myself in their mental shoes. It would be like a normal trying to imagine life as a squirrel monkey. You can see it and even catalog it…but you just can’t feel it.
Another way to look at ‘stupidity & evil’ : IQ is measured on a ‘bell curve’, with half the population under 100 and half over 100 IQ. So when I bump into ‘stupidity’ that curve comes to mind which in a sense helps to explain what I am observing. Then again, it is possible that stupidity might just ‘be evil’.
There are abhorrent aspects of both party’s extremes. The denial of systematic court manipulation by republicans (denying 100s of Obama appointments, and hypocrisy on supreme court appointments) is the one fundamental shift that matters. McConnel is the true one disloyal to the constitution.
How is McConnell violating the constitution? I hope you are not referring to filling the Ginsberg seat on the SC because there was nothing even remotely shady about that. Sure,they could have not filled the seat out of some disconnected sense of fairness I suppose, but that would have been a nonsensical move. No party has done that, that has had a choice. Out of I think it is 29 times this situation has come up so far, 26 the party in power made the pick. the 3 times they didn’t was because the Senate was not in session and couldn’t be reconvened in earlier times.
The Republicans are under no obligation whatsoever to validate Obama’s court appointees. No one would expect them to. As Obama said, elections have consequences. But I get it. The Dems will talk about the unfairness and then use that as their excuse to do the same thing to Trumps picks. See that way it’s a bad thing for Republicans to do, but entirely justified when the Dems do exactly the same.
The Republicans are doing nothing at all different than what the Democrats have done in the past and will do in the future. The Dems simply cannot abide to be treated like they treat others. They expect cooperation and chivalry when they are at the mercy, but swoop in like vultures the second they sense a vulnerability.
As far as hypocrisy goes. I can’t tell if you are joking here? Hypocritical politicians, you must be joking. Good thing there is no hypocrisy from the Democrats eh?
I don’t argue hypocrisy for what it is worth. We are all hypocrites and it is only brought up in an argument as a straw man when the actual facts seem too difficult to argue.
Who denied ‘100’s of Obama appointments’? Obama left 155 open court seats when he left office. He neglected to fill them in.
billhickey105
3 years ago
In 2011 Thomas Edsall wrote a famous article in The NY Times where he revealed that the Democrats had finally abandoned their formerly strongest supporters, the white working class, in favor of the new, minority-based “Coalition of the Ascendant.”
Unfortunately for the Republicans of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, that tired leadership group didn’t know what to do with this gift. In 2015 Donald Trump, on the other hand, said “Thank you very much!”
Today, no matter the final results of the presidential vote tallies, the revitalized GOP of the working middle classes which Trump has formed, now including the rising Hispanics (who have no time for the campus race frolics of the Democratic culture warriors), is fundamentally transforming the characters of both parties.
You’re going to be hearing a lot from a reformed Marco Rubio, and others like him, in the next few years.
When someone gives you their lunch, eat it.
Albireo Double
3 years ago
The Left is getting nowhere because authoritarian sanctimony makes people very, very angry.
As long as they continue with it they will continue to lose everywhere. But as others have said, many on the Left don’t really want power anyway.
Those who want to get somewhere need to ditch the student radicals and get serious.
But that, and the welfare population (bought and kept by taxpayer money), makes up most of their voting block!
Ian Thompson
3 years ago
Let’s get it straight; the Democrats are no longer a party of “liberal” thought, but of marxism and socialism, and to say otherwise is denial. They clearly want to change our economy and institute strict compliance measures for [climate, COVID, health, vaccination, education, speech, religion or lack thereof, “equity”/welfare/redistribution/racism], and are willing to conduct devious political practices to do so. Ergo the D-governors instituted endless lockdowns, stripping people’s rights to assembly, facilitating violence and defunding of our protective services, and welcoming media tyranny to suppress free speech. The Uni-party of big-govt Dems/Neo-cons advocates for more spending, more central control, more payouts to their “contributors” (banks and industries), less influence by the local governments, and unipolar domination; they both establish large government programs and dangle tax-theft money as carrots in order to lure states into compliance. This is not “liberal” thought, but enslavement and totalitarianism; our resources have been stolen by a corrupted government that does not have our interests as a priority, but their own power and elite status. Truly, Libertarians have more liberal thought than Democrats, i.e., they have an understanding of the role of government and the relationship of people to it. I would assume that our Libertarians took most of their 1% from the Repubs (who either hate Trump or big govt) and could not see the greater damage that will be wrought by D-control of the US. Maybe there are no “liberal” thinkers here in US politics after all.
You wrote “Let’s get it straight; the Democrats are no longer a party of “liberal” thought, but of marxism and socialism, and to say otherwise is denial. ” Even Sanders and Warren want top implement social reforms common in Western Europe, even leaving aside Scandinavia. Would you say W Europe is Marxist or even socialist?
i believe that Western Europeans would vigorously deny that. They’d likely retort that they have a welfare state superstructure on a capitalist base. (To use Marxist – possibly originally Hegelian – terms such as “superstructure” and “base”. in this context.) Whether or not the WS is too large is another matter, but it’s not full-blown socialism by most people’s standards, or at least I suspect most people would reject the term as applied to WE.
Venkatraman Anantha Nageswaran
3 years ago
Coming from the ‘Left’, Prof. Lilla gets it mostly right except to call the protests peaceful. There, he falls quite short and fails badly. Otherwise, one can still agree with what he is writing even when one does not agree with his overall ‘Left’ philosophy. He should follow what Sir Keir Starmer is doing in the UK.
John Gleeson
3 years ago
”What we back then genteelly called “populism” has degenerated on the Right of the Right into a reactionary force of poorly-educated whites with their own identitarian agenda”.
Even when writing an unflinchingly introspective and honest article the author can’t help himself from displaying the core contempt, dismissiveness, lack of accurate understanding, and the arrogant attitude of superiority that is so inherent and sub-conscious in so-called progressives that they’re not even aware of it.
All the other factors the author pointed out play their part in the rise of Trump and others, but pale in comparison to that one attitude displayed there as the primary driver of what is perjoratively labelled as ‘populism’.
The gross dismissal of the concerns of the white working class, non-Left wing males as simply being the product of their lack of education (and by extension their assumed stupidity and lack of intelligence), and the implication that if they were educated, like Liberals, then they wouldn’t be so stupid and think like they do, does not sit well with people who, despite the idiotic prejudice of Liberals that cut from the very same cloth of racist attitudes of the past towards the supposed inferior intelligence of black people, have far more wisdom, life experience, understanding and decency than they are ever given credit for in many cases (not all because of course, stupid, irrational, emotional led people filled with biases, false beliefs, ignorance and a lack of understanding are the majority in most demographic categories, of course)
Their views and concerns are never taken seriously, never seen as valid, never properly understood or listened to, always blithely dismissed in the most patronising way. Their views are always written off a ‘lack of education’. The same with Brexit (the media started propagating the worst extremes of this attitude with a rabid, unrelenting, malicous fervour, right after the vote here and it’s continued since). And although the author might claim, if he was pressed, that he was not talking about all people on the right, but just a certain group, that is not the case. The white working class males share the same views as some of the most educated, intelligent, most powerful people in society. They just happen to be the group that Leftists hate the most as they are the one group that levelling the most vile, demeaning, rude, obnoxious abuse, ridicule, vitriol and class-prejudice against is perfectly acceptable.
The reality is that in today’s society higher education institutes are caldrons of liberal and progressive brainwashing. Most teachers and professors are ultra-Left wing, and have been indoctrinating rather than educating for decades. So students going to Uni actually believe that higher education, which they believe is the clearist sign of a person’s intellectual prowess and a signifier of superior intelligence over the masses (which is not true in many cases), is synonymous with the whole New-Left identity politics, social justice jihadis, progressive, globalist ideology. The two things are one and the same in their minds.
This state of affairs is not by accidenct by any stretch of the imagination. The ‘founding fathers’ of the New Left movement were explicit in their aims to spread their ideology through embedding into the education system, and to say they were highly successful with it is a profound understatement.
”I went to university don’t you know. That means my perspective and world-view is always correct and beyond reproach, particularly in regard to the peasant classes who went straight to work after high-school, making their worldview automatically inferior to mine’.
If Trump gets another fours years, and Liberals start screaming and wailing at the sky again in despair, unable to understand why, then that attitude I just outlined there, which is so prevelant in the media and political classes, and straight-forward and basic as it may seem, is why.
The writer could have just used ‘Deplorables and saved a sentence. I am from London, and lived around the world, am highly educated, and make my living in USA as a tradesman, I know the trades class, the construction workers, they are who I work with. They are not very educated, not worldly, but are very sharp in many ways, beyond Liberals. They learned on the job how to do very hard and skilled work to raise families. They work hard and smart, and are people I would trust to make decisions making the nation strong and successful as that is what keeps them. They also have a very strong patriotism, which I believe is man’s noblest quality. There is no group I would rather have deciding on the Nation”s leadership.
I emigrated to the US rural south from Europe (although I’m British-born). You mirror my sentiments exactly. I work with both liberals and conservatives. If liberals all disappeared tomorrow, life would continue on as normal. If conservatives disappeared we would have a national crisis on our hands.
There are doers and talkers in this world and I much prefer the doers. When I went to uni at 36 years of age, a lecturer told an enthusiastic audience of budding students that we were in the top 5% of intellectuals is the nation (Australia). From having worked with tradesmen and even labourers I knew this was nonsense and stood up and said so. I found uni to be full of arse kissers, liars and sheep. And yes: I got my degree, the hard way and that meant being honest and using actual critical thinking rather than the critical thinking prescribed by the various lecturers. I took a much lower paying job than my degree might suggest, because I was not prepared to do the arse kissing and lying expected at uni which was obviously going to continue in the profession I was considering.
I am similar to you in my admiration of those same working people. And I immigrated here.
But I saw the difference in healthcare systems – My Mother who worked through the war like a slve taken care of for free (rightfully) in her old age. In the pre-Obama system would have been left to suffer and die – or drain any child that had progressed of all their wealth. Think about this alone.
Then on the Identity politics, it’s a USA issue and obviously wrong, it’s class and status that count. Devestated white poor kids have no part in ‘repartion issues – it’s nonsense. Those behind that have as much responsibilty for keeping the wrongs happening.
G Harris
3 years ago
Resolute conservative Republican Jim Rickards, who perhaps not that surprisingly predicts a Trump win and did so in 2016, made a rather interesting and amusing point in a Triggernometry interview last week regarding how a significantly greater number of Americans, 56% to be precise, felt better off over the last four years in relation to the previous administration when polled recently.
This is a question apparently long beloved of pollsters which when put usually elicits a far greater negative response, as evidenced by all of Trump’s encumbent predecessors all consistently inviting lower numbers.
When Biden was asked in an interview about this higher than usual figure for Trump, his response was, ‘well, if they think that then they probably shouldn’t (vote for me).’
Going on, a few seconds later, he added, ‘if 54%(sic) of American people think they’re better off economically than they were under our (Obama/Biden) administration, then their memory’s not very good, quite frankly….’
Rickard rather wickedly makes the aside, not in the slightest bit partisanly I’m sure, and clearly forgetting the electoral college he was at pains to explain earlier, that effectively ‘encouraging’ 56% of an electorate NOT to vote for you in these circumstances is probably not the wisest of moves, but it certainly looks like a lot more people took Joe at his word that most Democrats would have liked.
simon taylor
3 years ago
I`d rather have a night out with Donald than a Horlicks with Joe.
Jordan Flower
3 years ago
This election, Trump increased in nearly every demographic”black, brown, cuban, LGBT”except white males. Identitarian critical theory poisonous fundamentalism is losing its grip. They can’t ignore these numbers. The woke priesthood has already been observed twisting themselves into impossible contortions to keep their race-grifting careers in tact.
Like Charles Blow, “LGBT people of color don’t really trust the white gays. Yes, I said what I said. Period.
Nicole Hannah Jones: “whiteness is not static. it’s expandable and adaptable”
That’s convenient.
cjhartnett1
3 years ago
As we speak, the likes of Mark will doubtless be ensuring that evidence of voter fraud and suppression that social media are showing will be deleted or glossed over like Hunters laptop or FBI phones, Hillary’s server. The Transition Integrity Project and the Colour Revolution’ tactics that the One Love Global Luvvies practice to cement uprisings and delegitimise democratically elected leaders , are well known. And this handwringing ,false flag call to not look into how Trump is getting cheated out of his victory is not wanted. We need the Supreme Court asap. Not Democratic efforts to be reasonable as they burn ballots, shutter up windows, ban Republican poll watchers from scrutiny and use their Soros payroll to bully and dissemble until Lord Gaga is pushed into dotage by Legzup .
rad rave
3 years ago
I’m getting to the point of just ignoring self-described liberals. Their smugness aside, their views are now solidly in the dustbin of history. The stuggle now is between national populism and global corporate oligarchy. Either of these these may contain elements of the old-fashioned liberal values, but not as a core belief.
Agree. As long as everyone is distracted with whatever the latest smokescreen is, ‘racism’, Covid hysteria, etc, the Globalists are smug and happy.
sheraton1959
3 years ago
This column feels like just another leftist academic who likely doesn’t know any Trump supporters. Harris and Biden ran a campaign based on “policy, competence, and basic decency …”? Seriously?!? Oh wait ” I’ve been brainwashed by Fox News, right? And so were the other 70 million or so people who voted for Trump. This is standard leftist propaganda. Yawn.
es
3 years ago
Totally the wrong conclusion to draw from this election. Young people of color delivered the win to Biden and the party absolutely can’t survive without them. The evidence is right in front of you. Progressives kept their seats. The Lincoln Project was a failure. Movements ARE the source of political power. Americans DO want a reckoning. AOC is showing Democrats how they can have a future, but they insist on clinging to a shameful past that paved the way for Trump while blaming the left for their failures. Young people are fed up and building alternatives to the dusty politics of establishment Dems. Thousands of Americans are dying every week and that’s the only thing that kept Biden from losing badly. The party will be obsolete if it doesn’t learn from its mistakes. 2016 should have been the wake up call but instead they doubled down on a losing strategy. You’re so scared of “identity politics” that you’re missing the fact that progressive demands are actually popular and win elections. Democrats already followed the advice in this article and almost lost again. They’re just incredibly out of touch.
The ‘progressive’ demands come from a small minority who have disproportionate representation in the media and are, for reasons difficult to fathom, being backed up financially by organisations who should know better as well as by people who want them to cause division and unrest in order to further their (the sponsors) aims. The BLM narrative is based entirely on false premises and is aimed at targets which have nothing to do with enabling any of the minorities. The XR movement is based on a false representation of the causes of climate change and a pipe dream of reliable, affordable green energy, regardless of the havoc caused to the environment in the attempt to achieve it. The ‘progressive’ demands of these and other minority groups (LGB etc) are damaging societal harmony and will not stop because a geriatric nonentity and a mixed race (but neither race black) woman happen to have ‘won’ the White House. These people have no concept of the idea that they could be wrong in any way; even if the people they claim to represent tell them they are, they find ways to deny it. Worse, so sure of their rectitude are they that they will stoop to any tactics to further their aims. If reports are to be believed, the BLM, allegedly protesting against disproportionate use of force on black people by the police, have themselves used disproportionate force on black people to the extent of murdering several, including a number of children.
David Waring
3 years ago
Perhaps as the Times Radio suggested Biden and Trump should run a Presidential job share?
Not a bad idea. The way things look at the moment, it’s 50/50 for Trump and Biden. Maybe split the US up by states.
Cathy Carron
3 years ago
The Democrat supported ‘Great Awokening’ is going to continue to smother American cultural life, especially because there is no articulate or compelling leadership, including Biden & Harris, to tamp down it’s corrosive ideology.
Dave Tagge
3 years ago
There’s a borderline throwaway comment about protecting black Americans’ right to vote in the deep red South.
In the stats I could find with a quick Google search –
Here are the 5 highest states for black voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election:
Colorado Maine North Carolina Mississippi Kentucky
and the 5 highest in the 2018 midterm elections:
Idaho Mississippi Georgia Oregon Illinois
Here are the 5 lowest states for black voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election:
Washington state Idaho South Dakota North Dakota Vermont
and the 5 lowest in the 2018 midterm election:
Vermont Hawaii Utah North Dakota South Dakota
There’s no evidence in these numbers of low black voter turnout in Southern states, with Mississippi (twice), North Carolina, Kentucky, and Georgia all appearing on the “highest” list. There does seem to be – for whatever reason – lower black voter turnout in some small states where blacks account for a low percentage of the population. That low turnout appears across some states that are generally run by Republicans (North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah) and Democrats (Vermont, Hawaii). And, perhaps showing that government policy isn’t a driver, Idaho moved from among the lowest states to among the highest between 2016 and 2018.
In conclusion, I’d ask Mr. Lilla to provide evidence to back up his claim, because the numbers on actual black voter participation appear to contradict it.
Kiran Grimm
3 years ago
Funny how in just a matter of weeks Biden has transformed from an uninspiring presidential candidate with memory problems and an uncertain grasp of facts to a “statesmanlike” figure who will restore America to safety, stability and (that catch-all) UNITY after the divisive Trump years.
Safety and stability are an unlikely outcome now that BLM/Antifa thugs and their MSM cheerleaders have seen how moral bullying is such an effective way of intimidating Democrats (and just about everybody else) into aquiescence. They see the Democrat victory as popular support for their far Left agenda and will continue to make increasingly extreme demands. As for “unity” ““ has any non-totalitarian ever been able to deliver that?
The SJWs are not pacified ““ they are emboldened. They want a revolution and they are determined to make it happen. Unless they are confronted with an EFFECTIVE intellectual/moral challenge the USA could well be reduced to a fractious, quasi-socialist mess of competing victimhoods and chimerical causes that will take a generation or more to mend.
Anybody looking at the WEF, Soros etc and the Great Reset? Biden and his cronies will be a pushover for their machinations. Davos delayed till June. New strain of Covid in Danish mink. This show will run and run while the puppet masters look on and rub their hands.
Mick Jackson
3 years ago
The biggest lasting achievement of the Democrats under Obama was Obamacare. This is a huge expansion in the improvement of life for Americans following only Social Security and Medicare on importance. I do not see ID politics, gender politics or racial politics in that great achievement.
Perhaps, but the architectural structure of Obamacare was more than faulty and so it is crumbling as a result which is why it needs to be readdressed. Obamacare costs were never reigned in, nor did everyone ‘win’ with the program; folks were not ‘allowed to keep their doctor’ as Obama promised, nor did each family save ‘$2,500 per year’ as promised.
Jeremy Smith
3 years ago
All parties (especially in USA) are a coalition of different groups. As of Friday morning Democrats are winning the Presidential election by almost 4m votes.
Yes, but those ‘extra Democrat millions’ sit primarily in one state on the coast – ripe for its own analysis. Trump made historic gains gains into just about every minority category, including the LGBT community (about a third voted for Trump) and held onto ‘white women’ which was unexpected. Trump did not ‘lose the suburbs’, but rather kept white-married women; single-white-women stuck with the Dems. Ergo, ‘Trumpism’ is here to stay. The midterms, two years away, will be fascinating. We’re all hoping Biden will now tell us what he plans to do, other than ‘make nice’.
Biden won’t know what he is going to do until his puppet masters tell him, and it won’t be too long until the instructions are to go back to bed and let Harris sit at the big shiny desk and pretend to be in control.
Susan Campbell
3 years ago
So I’m so excited for the kumbaya…. it’s all going to start now… yah..???
Susan Campbell
3 years ago
my UK friends I hear that you to too are becoming more divided… is this true?
Peter Mott
3 years ago
It is important to see the traditional class war behind the culture war. This tweet sums it up for the UK. https://twitter.com/Goodwin…
Paul Hunt
3 years ago
Don’t know if anyone saw the new Spitting Image but their most biting bit was Nancy Pelosi’s “pander-itis” where she mimicked and pandered to every minority who came into line-of-sight. When they put a mirror in front of her so she could mimic herself, she turned into amorphous Blue Blob absorbing every righteous cause in the country. Biting jab at the uselessness of just being right-on as a primary political identity.
Michael Cavanaugh
3 years ago
C’mon, Lilla, don’t lose the fire in your belly! That 2016 piece was spot-on — you, and Joseph O’Neill, have got the DNC/DLC dead to rights.
clinton57
3 years ago
Team D has become the clerisy party. Not wanting to be left out, Church Lady from SNL converted. “Why I was a conservative Christian, people called me a hectoring scold. But now that I’m woke, I’m a woman of moral clarity bringing meaningful change!”
Pete Kreff
3 years ago
on the Right of the Right into a reactionary force of poorly-educated whites
Is their educational attainment relevant here? If it is, you fail to explain why. Are you suggesting that they are poorly educated and therefore wrong? Given how many well educated white Americans seem to be in favour of communism, that would seem a misguided point of view.
You may describe these people as poorly educated, but it is actually correct to say that “whiteness” and white males and “deplorables” have come in for a lot of flak recently. A whole range of different positions held by white people have recently been simplistically conflated into “white supremacism” and “fascism”. Paradoxically, well educated white people can’t see that (or are too dishonest to admit it).
Now that I’m thinking about it, the reference to “poorly educated” is even more troubling. African-Americans on average have lower educational attainment, but you wouldn’t refer to a movement of African-Americans with a reference to their poor education, would you?
You tell me. If they’re in their mid-twenties, it’s likely they got their education under Obama.
But that’s largely irrelevant. The point is that, given that people are in primary and secondary education when they are still children, they should not be blamed if they didn’t get a good education.
Hi. Sorry, I have just realised I was totally unclear in my meaning. I meant it is the fault of the educators, not the children. Thanks for pointing out my vagueness.
Scott Powell
3 years ago
It will be fun watching the Democrats tear each other apart in coming years. The hypocrisy running up to this point has been staggering, and it’s got far too much momentum to stop. Once they don’t have Orange Man to find fault in, they’ll find it within their own number.
It will be fun watching the Democrats tear each other apart in coming years.
Please God!!!!!!
The one hope for the world is that they do what Blair did for the Labour party here, make themselves untouchable; but, hopefully they will only take on term to do it!
Daniel Björkman
3 years ago
An excellent analysis. This is something that the left seems to have entirely forgotten. It’s all well and good to look out for the rights of minorities, but to win in a democracy you actually need to get the majority on your side – that is, after all, rather the whole point. And since not everyone’s on board with self-flagellation, that means that you have to offer the majority something, even if it’s just the right for it to feel good about itself. The left used to offer that, but it hasn’t for a very long time now.
The money and guns are always on the conservative side. Liberals win when they manage to hold the moral high ground. I think most liberals would in fact agree with me on that, and would argue that that’s precisely what they’re doing. But to me it also seems obvious that the moral high ground is held by the one who has respect and concern for everyone. Being hateful and judgmental makes you look, at the very least, as bad as the other side… and if both sides are equally bad, people are going to choose to be on the one that at least has all the money and guns.
‘The money and guns are always on the conservative side’
The money has been on the side of the Dems for three or four elections now, including this one, by a very large margin. They are now the party of Wall St. If the Dems win they will certainly aim to ensure that the guns are on their side, by removing them from everyone else.
Who’s more likely to raise taxes for the wealthy? Who’s more likely to put in more regulation forbidding the wealthy from doing precisely what they feel like? That both parties suck up to the rich is undeniable, but one party has it as part of their actual platform. In fact, one party has produced a president who’s the living embodiment of screw-the-rules-I’ve-got-money.
And as for the guns, which is the side of “abolish the police”? Oh, don’t get me wrong, that’s a terrible policy and part of why they’re losing. But it’s also not the policy of someone who expects to rule by brute force.
I fully admit, and lament, the multitude failings of the current Democratic party, but the idea that Republicans have somehow turned into the champions of the little guy is frankly laughable.
The wealthy will not pay any more taxes under Biden. Even if he imposes taxes, they will find ways to avoid them, Moreover, Obama did nothing to prevent the banks etc doing whatever they wanted, and he crushed Occupy with extreme prejudice. Hillary would have been no different.
Even relatively rational Austin saw a 40% increase in homicides this year after shaving just 20 million from the police budget. In all the areas where Democrats run law and order, crime is rampant.
Trump cut taxes for more or less everyone and he did not send people to fight in any new wars. He also started to bring a few manufacturing jobs back. Under him the Republicans did, for a while, become the party of ‘the little guy’.
You mean ‘relatively Liberal Austin’ don’t you, and obviously believe the two things are synonymous? The astonishingly arrogant delusion of ‘liberals’ today, the self-deception, the self-adoring narcissism, the hateful, spiteful, deeply malicious contempt, the dismissal and dehumanization of opponents, mirrors the worse believers in the supremacist religions we have today; the same jaw-dropping inability to listen to others in order to at least properly understand opposing arguments and the reasoning and rationale behind them soundly and rationally before disagreeing, and the same extreme, infantile and ever-present mischaracterization of opposing view-points and the same ascribing to the them the most nefarious, slanderous motives, it’s truly on a par with the worst religious fanatics of a certain religion. It’s identical in all aspects apart from the ideology they believe in. The underlying psychology, the axiomatic, a priori belief in their own absolute supremacy in intellect and morals and contempt for opposition of any kind, despite being completely delusional, is one and the same.
This is why today they are so loathed that millions are willing to vote people like Trump in because he is willing to oppose them and face them down with a disdain they aren’t used to and can’t deal with, and the more they melt down and become ever more absurd with their p***y hats and their public wailing and sobbing at the sky, and in trying to destroy him, the more he stands his ground and the more his support grows. Their attempt to do to Trump what they do with everyone and anyone else in their ideological, cannibalistic witchhunts, where being political ”incorrect” has replaced Witchcraft as the basis for their mania and neurosis, just don’t work. The media lost their iron grip on the minds of the majority of the masses a long time ago, but their arrogance and delusions make them oblivious to this fact and they carry on as they before they were busted
The disgusting tactics used to smear and destroy opponents and their character has the opposite effect on a billionaire like Trump who has superior confidence in himself. And the public, the average person outside of the little New Left bubble that surrounds most of the media, govermental, and educational institutions, has more than had enough too and loathe these so-called ‘progressive liberals’.
The people going around today claiming to be Liberals are not rational. They are very opposite. Only they cannot see it.
The Democrats lost all claim to the moral high ground (and much of the huge Catholic vote, which traditionally tends to votes Democrat) by their widespread support for late-term abortion. In Colorado, where both parties have agreed on a 22-week upper limit, the Democrats appear to have done well, significantly better than in 2016
The money and guns are always going to be in the conservative side? 1. Dems outspent Republicans this year. 2. What the heck do guns have to do with an election?
Is govt-funded abortion, pharmaceutical payouts, permissive violence, false accusations, political pseudo-science, religious persecution, and suppression of dissenting opinion “moral high ground”?
How much did Dems spend on this campaign? The money is in big govt, of which the Dems are “all in”.
If you had bothered to read what I actually wrote, you might have noticed that I said that the left wins when it has the high ground. It’s having trouble right now because it doesn’t.
Government-funded abortion is definitely the moral high ground as I see it, though, and what you call “religious persecution” I suspect that I would call “not getting to act like a Bronze Age savage.” Also not sure which false accusations you’re referring to – I’d say that where there’s smoke there’s usually fire, though exceptions do exist. But in general? Yeah, the left hasn’t been acting in such a way as to hold the moral high ground, and it needs to start doing that if it wants to start winning again. *That was my whole point.* But don’t let that stop you from screeching at me because I don’t agree with you 100% on everything.
Jerry Stensland
3 years ago
Interesting analysis with a lot of truth, but let’s not forget one simple truth. If Obama was running against Trump it would not be even be close, Obama wins in a landslide.
Not so fast…in the aftermath of Obama’s departure, many blacks have voiced disappointment in that Obama did little or nothing for their communities. Trump has done more for the black community than Obama, I.e. prison reform, funds for black colleges, empowerment zones (Sen. Tim Scott)…
Hillary Clinton lost the last Election because of the electoral college, she won almost 3 million more votes than Trump, in spite of voter suppression. Biden will get more votes than Trump, even with voter suppression. If he losses the election, it will be down to a combination of the electoral college and voter suppression. The US must sort out it’s democracy, so that every US citizen has a vote, if necessary introduce compulsory voting, and end the Gerrymandering where states set up their own electoral boundaries.
When you have sorted out your democracy, then you talk about policies. These are what the democrats should be campaigning on.
Voter suppression can take various forms, but would you not consider Trump’s alleged legal threat to prevent the inclusion of many, many thousands of legitimate postal votes in Pennsylvania in its official count a form of it?
Mail-in voting is hardly reliable and, for that matter, neither is the post office. There is no way to verify that the name on the ballot matches the person who filled it out, and there were numerous stories about multiple ballots being sent to the same address.
Voter suppression is routine in various places, every election. Going back to Gore – Bush. The access roads to the main hwy corridor with likely Democrat voters was blocked by police vehicles. forget the chads, that block alone held back many 1000’s of votes
The electoral college is what it is. No different really to FPTP in the UK. When you enter a game knowing the rules, you can’t complain afterwards that you would have won if they were different, because both sides would change their tactics. If you manage your campaign to a set of rules that you think should be there instead of what is there, you probably shouldn’t be in power anyway.
Your arguments are void. Gerrymandering? Look at MD. Dem states are case in point. Intimidation- there is a reason the polls are wrong: because Repubs feel obligated to hide who they voted for out of fear of retribution. Yeah… the Tea Partiers and MAGAs (positive, lawful assemblies of all hues, education, and backgrounds) are intimidating aren’t they? Not.
Frank – back up your voter suppression claims. Where are votes are being suppressed? And why is a requirement to show a photo ID – made known well in advance of an election – any sort of barrier to voting? How are people functioning in modern U.S. society without state-issued photo ID’s?
All too often these claims end up as laughable, with cited examples such as long lines at polling places in a few heavily Democratic areas. U.S. elections are ultimately administered by county-level officials. If the Democratic officials of some largely Democratic counties can’t figure out how to administer elections efficiently, how does that in any way reflect on the Republican party?
“They want to build America, not indict America. Democratic leaders must make it crystal clear that they feel the same way.”
The Dems have had four years to disavow the toxic divisiveness of identity and grievance politics but have clearly decided not to.
They could have called out the anarchists that have been vandalizing and burning for months , but they chose not to.
They could have set a clear tone of unity that ALL Americans matter by reaching back to MLK’s “character not colour” message.
But they chose not to.
They’ve done little or no self-reflection of their own failures of 2016 but rather spent four years blaming ‘low information’ voters, dreaming up conspiracy theories and engaging in “don’t worry – we’ll fix this mistake” political machinations.
They just won the Presidency by a record of numbers of vote – 4m more votes.
How bad is that?
Er…. not quite, you see, perhaps there is something you should know. Donald J Trump, has just set up the greatest “sting” in history. The Dept of Homeland Security had quietly watermarked and digitally block-chained every single ballot paper in the election, and any ballot paper that does not conform is automatically disqualified. They also have a complete record of every shipment, and who it was sent to.Expect many Democratic leaders to end up in Gitmo very shortly. They’ve been busted.
Lock her up, lock them up, oh yes!
QAnon conspiracy, debunked
You may not like this information Eileen, but it’s true. I can also tell you that the CIA director Gina Haspel was caught in Frankfurt Germany on election night, manipulating the dominion voting machines. A battle ensued between her CIA body guards, and US special forces, She was shot and wounded, but is now in custody. 5 US special forces were killed in the operation, but Trump has all the servers..
That wee bit of bull**it was exposed as a fiction early in December.
.
Because no Republicans in Bokum County OK will have been tempted to stuff boxes if they think the Donkeys are doing it?
And 71 million voted for DJT…we’re out, we’re proud and aren’t going anywhere…take away CA and NY, DJT wins popular vote. Biden’s winning margins in swing states were as narrow as Trump’s in ’16…Republicans keep the Senate and close gap in House. Dems can get thrown out of power in all but the presidency in two years. They’re too stupid and arrogant to realize this, so they’ll overreach…see Obama’s first term.
And Trump got the second highest number of votes ever ….
Terrible!
The “swamp” will just refill, and it’s back to square one.
Bad, kinda. Matt Taibbi nails it: if American politics were realistic, it would consist of 99% chasing a couple of obnoxious bankers through the Upper West Side; instead it’s 45%/45% fighting over a 10% slice of the undecided. And, in this case, ending up almost 50/50! And then Kasich has the audacity to say: the progressive left should shut up and crawl back under their rocks, they almost cost the election.
As the Socialist Jimmy Dore says, the Democrats are now even more corrupt, and bigger war mongers, than the Republicans. In this election they were the party of Wall St and they put forward a ailing, aged candidate who is bought and sold by China. The whole thing stinks.
Mark Lilla then talks about the ‘right wing media’ when we all know that almost all the mainstream media in the US (and the UK) is fanatically liberal-left. Even Fox is going that way under their new owner.
“…aged candidate who is bought and sold by China.”
And Ukraine.
The “right wing media” fantasy is a consequence of the weird conception of the Overton window that currently afflicts the chatterati.
…the Hunter Biden tapes have yet to be litigated, stay tuned…
Pay no attention to the guy with the funny Polish name.
Who is the new owner of Fox News?
Google still thinks it’s Murdoch.
Are you perhaps thinking of SKY?
Disney.
As I understand it at Fox, the old man checked out and gave the kids the car keys.
Jimmy Dore is half a clown.
You are correct, even the BBC and Sky were in on the fraud.
It’s been reported that the Murdoch outlets are advising Trump to fold gracefully. Smelling which way the wind blows, as usual. Dore is interesting, a member of a minority group who, while excoriating the Republicans, find little or nothing good in the current incarnation of Democratic leadership.
When will my fellow liberals learn? – Answer: they won’t. They believe in their own sense of moral superiority which means anyone who doesn’t agree with them must be wrong. That means they refuse to enter into debate, which is where cancel culture comes in.
Once you refuse to enter debate you can never understand other peoples point of view and you can never formulate a policy response to help them or refute their opinion.
Liberals have lost sight of the political spectrum!
So, so true.
Not just wrong but frequently evil – or, in Hillary Clinton’s words, “deplorable” and “irredeemable”.
This sort of language from those in power helped fuel the Brexit vote. Expressing contempt for a large volume of the voters cannot help your cause; however ‘stupid’ they are, they will eventually notice. Let’s hope a large number of Americans wake up before 2024.
“While the Biden campaign was not overly distracted by these psychodramas…”
Huh?
Harris was specifically chosen as the Vice President candidate (essentially gifted the Presidency given the circumstances) based entirely on her race and gender. Did they think no one would notice?
I broadly agree with the author’s thesis, but he’s not playing it out to the conclusion. The Democratic Party is now no more than a vehicle for the wealthy to divide and rule. They don’t come up with policies and candidates with broad appeal because they don’t want to. Simple as that.
I’d argue that the Democratic Party has become a ‘political machine’ party. That is it expects and relies on their traditional support while not doing anything about their concerns, happy to sit at the top table and enrich themselves.
Machine parties appear powerful… until a party with fresh ideas comes along. In the UK Labour lost out to the SNP, the Conservatives had to adjust themselves to respond to UKIP/Brexit. I suspect the bipartisan politics of the USA is too entrenched to support a different party, but Trump is arguably a Republican ‘adjustment’ and an existential threat to the Democratic machine party.
“I’d argue that the Democratic Party has become a ‘political machine’ party. That is it expects and relies on their traditional support while not doing anything about their concerns, happy to sit at the top table and enrich themselves.”
Can you think of anything else they have in common with the UK Labour Party?
Another essay I read elsewhere stated that the ‘donor class’ of Democrats is much more liberal than the average Democrat, and the donor class for Republicans is more liberal than the average Republican. The ability of the wealthy (along with the lobbyists) means that only a broad movement of the discontented (e.g. Tea Party) can move government back to the center-right.
What about the burning and looting, and ‘defund the police’ and the increasing perception that the law does not protect the poor (of any race)?
The Wokehadi NY Times journalists who bully their fellow employees on Slack think that if they ignore it, it didn’t happen. Or maybe it did happen, but it wasn’t a big deal. Or it was a big deal, but the oppressors deserved it and only hate speech is “violence” anyway. They’ve floated a number of delusions.
The Democrats are making the same mistake Labour has made here. They are adopting policies which attract middle class activists while repelling their traditional base. It’s difficult to ride two horses at the same time but if you can’t manage it what are you doing in a circus.
Taki made the same point after Trump whooped Hilary in 2016.
‘Whooped’ her by getting 2.9m fewer votes.
Trump lost both elections on the popular vote.
The difference being that in the US it might still win them the election.
I think there’s distinct a difference between the Dems and Labour.
Labour was actually intending to implement their cloud cuckoo-land ideas.
A Sanders lead party would have had a Labour-sounding agenda but the DNC clearly wasn’t going there – their Wall St friends wouldn’t allow it.
Corporations and Israel would have nothing to fear from a Biden presidency.
Labour, oddly, didn’t have any extreme left-wing proposals. They would have rolled back only 5 of the 80+ privatisations which have occurred under primarily Conservative administrations since 1980: the most popular, being rail franchises and water supply companies, Royal Mail, energy distribution grids, and fibre broadband.
Other than that, proposals centred on increased age 2+ nursery/ early education provision, a return to free University tuition, and a sizable home-building programme.
Reading this I feel pretty gloomy when considering real ‘issues’ in the ‘new normal’ covid world where none of this is possible.
I believe they also would like to bias the vote even more in their favour by reducing the voting age to 16 (or 6 if they thought they could get away with it 🙂
The Dems cut loose that working class horse and sent it to the knackers.
With respect, you might be a wee bit guilty of that yourself.
When you write “Democrats have had four years to ponder their defeat as America crumbled around them.” you state as fact something that many would see as partisan opinion.
You suggest that America has “crumbled”. The Democrats would have walked into the White House with a landslide if most Americans felt that it had.
I appreciate a lot of what you say but, as much as people might think America is ‘crumbling’ out of their sheer antipathy towards Trump, actually many voters feel as though the last 4 years has been good for them and the country. The only “crumbling” they see is leftist activists rioting and looters destroying and burning cities.
Exactly. Not to mention the damage that has been done / is being done to our public institutions by corporate leftism.
‘…….leftist activists rioting and looters destroying and burning cities.’
Those cities which, I believe, are mainly run by the Democrats.
The whole focus on racial groupings lies at the heart of the problem, so you yourself are only two steps away from the blunders you excoriate. Rather than talking of African-Americans you should speak of working class Americans – which is what Trump did, from time to time. Suggesting that there are historic grievances of a racial character all over the States and then proposing racially targeted measures to tackle them puts you right back in hard left territory. Identity politics is only not divisive when the identity embraces the majority; the left’s sponsorship of minority identity politics is nothing but a destabilising trick, much the same as its sponsorship of separatism in the old Russian Empire, which it followed up with brutal suppression once it got control. There are three ways forward: one, towards a ghettoised future in which the old majority of the west becomes a passive, declining victim; two, a ghettoised future in which all groups are treated equitably, with particular privileges and rights; and three, a renewal of the Classical Liberal assimilationist dream. That there is no consensus as to which of these is preferable is the most dangerous circumstance of all.
Black Americans (by any respectable study) have different problems (single parent family) than any other group in the country. To pretend otherwise is absurd.
The economic of interest of Latinos in Texas (many small business owners) are very different from the economic interest of blacks which are most likely to be unskilled workers.
Are you suggesting that single parent family life is an inherent racial characteristic? No? Then it should be addressed as a problem in itself and not as part of some spurious “racial” profile.
A problem arises if there is a high correlation between a trait and a group; how do you characterise that? Perhaps not so much ‘racial’ as ‘cultural’, which is the basis of many of the differences between groups.
But many of the problems experienced by the working class of one “group” are exactly the same as those of the working class of another. For instance, the two cohorts most likely to under achieve in UK schools are black and white working class boys. The problem, as the sadly late Lord Sacks used to say, is one of de-moralisation, the collapse of the family and – implicitly – of the religious and cultural traditions which held it together. Charles Murray has made the same point at greater length. The focus on “race” is therefore a massive distraction engineered by extreme “liberals” to prevent the natural conclusion – that culture counts and that the gospel of irresponsibility is either unsustainable or leads to the imposition of state fetters. Chesterton’s remark that ignorance of Golden Rules brings on the Rule of Iron is relevant here.
I do agree with your point about shared problems, but is there a greater incidence of single parents among the black population than other populations? In other words, is that particular problem specific to a group? If so, one assumes the answer may need to be tailored to that group, and this would apply to any problem demonstrably specific to a group – much as a particular pathology would need to be applied to a specific group of people who showed a propensity to suffer from a particular illness.
This has bureaucratic plausibility – in that an easily identified group is then the recipient of government assistance – but it remains a mistake. Why? Because by linking racial character with behavioural tendencies it reinforces separatism and even chauvinism among the targeted group: “If this is how we behave, then we’ll damn well go on behaving in this way!” It also creates an incentive to behave badly, in that it gets you noticed, pitied and funded; and it creates resentment among persons not so assisted, thanks to the possession of the “wrong” ethnicity. Finally, it gives a growing pile of ammo to those who would stigmatise the group in question. Surely, if the problem is behavioural, social, to do with incentives and circumstances, we can leave the “racial” element out altogether, can’t we?
Good points.
As ever, Jeremy doesn’t respond to devastating rebuttals.
I’d be careful about picking this as a reason why black Americans are different, because single parent families are very hard to blame on society and very easy to blame on personal irresponsibility.
Mark, you say you cannot help anybody if you don’t hold institutional power. Did you not hear what Ronald Reagan said forty years ago? “The nine most frightening words in the English language – ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help'”?
Amen. Govt is only supposed to do for people what they cannot do for themselves; it is not a substitute for morality, humanity, and charity… nor for work which people must do for themselves.
Yes, as Friedrich Hayek once said: Socialism only for the very poor and vulnerable.
Govt is supposed to do what is done better by Govt than by individuals. In the UK even Conservatives accept that that includes providing healthcare.
Govt’s role also includes rectifying market failure, ie when corporations externalise costs while internalising returns, so that actions which are non-‘economic’ (ie the costs to society exceed the benefits) are nonetheless ‘commercial’ (because the benefits are visible on the balance sheet but some of the costs are externalised).
‘……that includes healthcare.’
Seriously? The NHS? It has now failed us twice over Covid (and please do not blame the government or underfunding) and we have been asked to surrender more and more of our freedoms and/or die without fuss of non covid illnesses in order to save it.
I have spoken to nurses who have no idea what the problem is with covid and cannot understand why their places of work are running at reduced capacity.
Even without covid it screams every winter. It needs massive reform; will the government deliver this? I doubt it.
In Mark’s title, “When Will My Fellow Liberals Learn,” the words “my fellow” are redundant. The author was being a bit presumptive in excluding himself.
The Democrats have a problem. The highly educated elites, such as Lilla, are their base, and you cannot alienate your base. But if your base alienates everyone else, what do you do?
Yes, they now have a base very similar to that of the Labour Party in the UK. Namely, the woke, liberal city dwellers. I used to be one myself, and still am to some extent, but even I have come to hate them/us.
You’re a woke liberal? I thought you were the most right-wing commenter on Unherd!
No – with all due respect to Fraser, that’d be me (smiling emoji sadly not available).
No, I’m spartacus.
I’m Spartacus.
Democrat voters do not care about ‘fair play, open debate, and legitimate differences of opinion’, because the party they are voting for doesn’t care about them either. Haven’t you been paying attention? Liberals and the Fascist Left are all about suppression, bias, bullying and misinformation. They can’t be trusted under any circumstances and will do and say anything to get what they want, regardless of the chaos they cause. Voting for these people makes you part of the problem, not the solution.
“Democrats have had four years to ponder their defeat as America crumbled around them.”This sort of biased jingoism litter most of these vote articles. I would say. ‘As Trump kept America from crumbling around them’.
Both parties are part of the problem; “bigger govt” has not worked; what we need is “bigger morality”. That cannot be mandated by govt (nor by industries serving the idol of wealth), but only by People serving a higher good.
I completely agree, but won’t happen while ‘cultural relativism’ is a popular concept. Without some sort of universal values to bind them together (like Christianity), people will fall into bickering and factionalism.
To be fair, there was also a lot of bickering and factionalism within Christianity, often with lethal consequences.
Much that this comment says can be posed to social democratic parties in most countries. In the UK the Labour Party, after a 5 year experiment in identitarian politics managed to alienate enough of their once core vote to gift their opponents a majority of 80. Since winning but losing they have elected a new leader whilst clinging on to much of the core policies that apparently ‘won the argument’ whilst managing to lose seats. But of course the argument they won was around positions not central to the concerns of voters in the seats they lost. In the places that mattered, the cities, the university towns, amongst the young and particularly politicised BAME groups, they won the internal argument they were largely having amongst themselves and which continues after the election of Starmer and the backwash of the EHRC report. And yet the Government still commands significant support in England whilst Labour flails around trying to hold on to their preferred constituency even though it is not large enough to deliver them a majority. And best not to mention Scotland. Labour and the Democrats both suffer from the same dilemma. Those they choose to court in pursuance of indentitarian purity might be enough to win the argument within their own membership but they are not enough to win an election. But for many that is a secondary consideration.
And I suspect it may get worse-the huge swing to Trump by the Hispanic demographic may be followed by other “people of colour” who are sick of the Democrats patronising
attitude-its the same in the UK -witness Jeremy Corbyn’s “Only Labour can be trusted to unlock the talent of Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority people”.so don’t be surprised to see a similar swing in blighty.
Democratic voters care about racial justice but they are focused on the present and the future, not on litigating the past.
Keep telling yourself that, right along with the canard that the party has a place for liberals. The party is now comprised of leftists who are wiling do illiberal things such as doxxing, cancel culture, and outright shutting down of any opinion contrary to their own. When a liberal like Glenn Greenwald notices – and excoriates his own side for it, to the point of leaving a media outlet he founded – it’s a brave new world for left-leaners.
And AOC is already compiling her hit list…
…..while Biden tells us he will govern for all.
I know who is more likely to represent the attitude of the ‘liberals’.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ran a rather old-fashioned campaign based on policy ..”
Seriously? It must be some other campaign that I missed.
Joe Biden ran a ‘non-campaign’. It was laughable if not so pathetic.
FFS…another “Orange-Man-Bad” piece…
“A significant factor in the Democrats’ defeat (in 2016), I argued, was a style of politics that prevented them from developing an ambitious vision of America’s future”
Or it might be to do with the Dems just not engaging in any sort of recognisable politics, and instead of trying to win they tried to get Trump to lose.
And now, after another 4-years of trying to get Trump to lose the Dems are going to lose again.
Both parties are owned by the ‘Donors’! There is only one path to office in 99% of cases, and that is on a party ticket supported by campaign funds from the political donor class, what we call the ‘Global Elites’ Once you take their shilling you are their man, and you have made your pact with the devil.
This is why Trump is so exciting, he is the less than one percent who bypassed them!
I think you’re right. I’ve often wondered about the institutional vitriol hurled at him by the media and cultural establishment. It’s been a constant daily barrage. I can only think that he was never supposed to be elected, and that him becoming president ruined someone’s plans.
Look at WEF aims and who they revere (hint, look east)
As accurate as so many Republican comments.
“…following the murder of George Floyd in May…” has the trial taken place? Or has the presumption of innocence been abandoned in the US?
The case could be made that fentanyl and not the cops killed Floyd.
Increasingly radical Republican Party? Hogwash. Since the 1980’s it has been increasingly conservative. Do you understand the difference?
Indeed. D is pulling further and further left, while pointing at the stationary R and shouting: See how they’re drifting right!!
The D is pulling further left but to say that the R is stationary under Trump is delusional. Trump’s entire modus operandi is to foster division and hatred. I’ve never seen a president like him. Having said that, the finger pointing of who started it gets us nowhere. Biden is, by any measure, a centre left politician. It’s time for the R to grow up, return to the centre ground and put the good of the country ahead of political ambition.
Trump’s entire modus operandi is to foster division and hatred.
Trump’s MO was/is to use the left’s playbook against them. Tell me which side is behind cancel culture, turned much of media into campus-style groupthink outlets, and attacks people who dare wear MAGA hats? Hint: it’s the same side that has been rioting for months in cities across the country.
If you are concerned about hatred and division, assault and mayhem are odd ways of showing it. So is calling anyone who disagrees a racist or a nazi or whatever else.
Jobs… for ALL.
Education… for ALL (e.g., school choice).
Protection… for ALL.
Freedoms… for ALL.
Yeah, that “ALL” is really divisive.
I’ll believe it when I see it. Biden has made b*gger all difference in his first 47 (?) years; even as VP.
“Relative drift.” To the left which is moving left, it APPEARS that the right is moving right.
The way things are looking up with the votes still being counted, it may be that the Democratic Liberals’ focus on identity movements as a means to gain power will be vindicated. A Biden/Harris election victory will probably serve to cement the idea that focusing on historical grievances is the way forward and we will be seeing more of the same in the years to come. I fear that the author’s plea will increasingly sound like a voice lost in the wind of triumphant wokeism. Trump did make the Democrats sweat for their potential victory, yet it will probably be too much to hope that this would lead to any soul-searching and reevaluation of priorities.
If the race is this close when the Democrats are facing the worst President in history, that’s not a good thing.
Please explain why you think Trump is the worst president in history. He is the first president not to start any wars, or invade somewhere, since Carter. He has instigated various peace deals in the ME and killed a couple of very nasty global terrorists.
Before Covid he had delivered the highest ever levels of employment for black and hispanics, while giving their colleges record funding and releasing them from jail under the First Steps program.
He has deported far, far fewer people than Obama (who deported four million) and taken steps to reduce the flow of drugs and trafficked kids etc into the country.
And he has done all this while fighting wicked and fake allegations of Russian collusion and a grotesquely fake impeachment.
I can only assume you are part of the political-military-pharma elite that he has upset so much.
The man is a complete buffoon. And a bully. And a liar. And a serial abuser of spray tan products. (Though probably not a dictator, a fascist, or a racist.)
On a number of issues (trade, immigration, China, Iran), Trump has identified issues where the consensus was (in my opinion) wrong. He’s come up with some policies to address those issues, though not necessarily always successfully. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s the kind of jerk who makes fun of people for being disabled.
Haha
Have you ever read about how Joe Biden handled the confirmation hearings for Bork and Thomas?
Yeah, Trump is a jerk but Biden is a nasty piece of work, too.
Yes, he may be all these things, but he’s still better than the Democrat party. Personally, I’d rather vote for a man everybody hates than a party that hates me.
That’s interesting. Why do you think Joe Biden hates you?
Notice I said ‘party’. Joe Biden seems affable enough, but I’m doubtful as to whether he can control the more ideological factions of his party who seem to hate America, and people with pale skin in particular.
When I asked him a logical question, he told me I was fat and challenged me to a push-up competition.
Then he lumped me into a racial category and tried to disband the police in my neighborhood. “I tell you if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,” -Joe “Idiot” Biden
All right, a man who represents a group that hate people like me.
You forgot ‘self-serving’. The defining characteristic of Trump is his complete lack of concern about anyone or anything other than his own wealth and success. He couldn’t care less for disenfranchised white America. His campaign slogan should be “What’s in it for me?”
He may change. While his rhetoric is questionable, his actions haven’t proven him to be any worse than previous presidents.
If by making fun of the disabled you mean the reporter who has an arm with very little mobility, Trump’s actions weren’t to make fun of him for that. Rather, they were to indicate that the journalist was a coward for not taking on those who would promote untruths. Had the then-candidate wanted to make fun of the disability, he would have stood with one arm falling limply by his side rather than flailing both arms. Besides, Trump was most likely unaware that the man had a handicap.
Surely the title “worst President in history” must belong to Mr James Madison?
He who lost the War of 1812, allowed ‘us’ to sack and burn the White House and all the Public buildings of Washington DC, wipe the USN from the face of the earth etc etc.
Perhaps Biden will do better and sell you out to Fu Manchu, Oo Flungdung & Co?
“Soul-searching and reevaluation of priorities”(?!) It seems that the only people required to undergo that dubious process are white Americans. Historical grievances acknowledged rather than questioned ““ that would be just too insensitive and could well stir up outrage among those groups for whom victimhood is a badge of honour and an alibi for failure.
Better to just acquiesce. Then you can pile up votes from a youthful electorate who consider themselves politcally aware (or “woke” to use the current term).
What is the limit on melanin/pigmentation to be considered “white”?
We are all shades of brown.
You’d best get in touch with BLM/Antifa if you want an answer to that one. They have set themselves up as the final arbiters of who qualifies as a victim of racism. A word to the wise though ““ an activist’s definition of victimhood tends to be flexible and highly opportunistic. You’ll need to keep your wits about you!
Such contrast in last 4 years:
Repubs- hope, security, prosperity for all, pride (MAGA), industry, responsibility… with a tactless, but courageous, President
Dems- division, endorsed violence, unfair attribution, false accusation, history-bashing, speech-condemning, disrespectful (e.g., Kavanaugh and Barrett hearings), reparation-demanding (“equity”, racial and sexual-based quotas), and now electioneering… with a senile career politician (by proxy) and ultra-left senator leading them
ML is the heart of the problem. His writing drips with condescension, and piety. He is plainly not capable of entertaining the possibility that there is an alternative to his values and self-serving assumptions.
The core agenda of the DP is toxic and it seems that all ML wants to do is sneak it past the electorate by putting lipstick on it.
This article is a joke.
While Democrats are installing Marxists announcing their intentions of changing the entire basis of the US system from 3 separate but equal parts into a Top down one party system, openly announcing their intentions to pack the supreme court, change our Republic into a mob rule raw Democracy, and form a “Truth Commission” to find and re-educate those who disagree with this, you have the nerve to accuse the Republicans of becoming increasingly radical?
Tell me, is it mental illness or stupidity?
,
I used to think it was ‘evil’. I have a high IQ and my wife tells me that because of that I’m unable to comprehend stupidity in others, which means when someone acts in a way I find indefensible, I often attribute that to malicious intent. One day I said as such to my wife about somebody, and she turned around and said: “they’re not evil, they’re just stupid.”
It shouldn’t have been, but it was an eye-opener to me. Unless perhaps, stupidity is evil.
IQ and stupidity go hand in hand, but in a strange way. There is no question that some people are smarter than others, nor that some are more opportunistic and un-empathetic than others
Stupidity is not evil. It’s not clear to me even that stupidity is an inferior state of being. Stupidity might well be an advantage when your life is going to be 60 years of slogging through a rice paddy, or putting a screw in a part on assembly line 10 hrs. every day.
However stupid people are very often manipulated and used as weapons by evil people.
I too am in the 99th percentile, and kind of agree. I do understand it in a theoretical sense, but I cannot really put myself in their mental shoes. It would be like a normal trying to imagine life as a squirrel monkey. You can see it and even catalog it…but you just can’t feel it.
Another way to look at ‘stupidity & evil’ : IQ is measured on a ‘bell curve’, with half the population under 100 and half over 100 IQ. So when I bump into ‘stupidity’ that curve comes to mind which in a sense helps to explain what I am observing. Then again, it is possible that stupidity might just ‘be evil’.
Actually, some are right at 100, so almost half are under, nearly 50% over. A pedantic point, perhaps, but it seems to me to be of some relevance.
There are abhorrent aspects of both party’s extremes. The denial of systematic court manipulation by republicans (denying 100s of Obama appointments, and hypocrisy on supreme court appointments) is the one fundamental shift that matters. McConnel is the true one disloyal to the constitution.
How is McConnell violating the constitution? I hope you are not referring to filling the Ginsberg seat on the SC because there was nothing even remotely shady about that. Sure,they could have not filled the seat out of some disconnected sense of fairness I suppose, but that would have been a nonsensical move. No party has done that, that has had a choice. Out of I think it is 29 times this situation has come up so far, 26 the party in power made the pick. the 3 times they didn’t was because the Senate was not in session and couldn’t be reconvened in earlier times.
The Republicans are under no obligation whatsoever to validate Obama’s court appointees. No one would expect them to. As Obama said, elections have consequences. But I get it. The Dems will talk about the unfairness and then use that as their excuse to do the same thing to Trumps picks. See that way it’s a bad thing for Republicans to do, but entirely justified when the Dems do exactly the same.
The Republicans are doing nothing at all different than what the Democrats have done in the past and will do in the future. The Dems simply cannot abide to be treated like they treat others. They expect cooperation and chivalry when they are at the mercy, but swoop in like vultures the second they sense a vulnerability.
As far as hypocrisy goes. I can’t tell if you are joking here? Hypocritical politicians, you must be joking. Good thing there is no hypocrisy from the Democrats eh?
I don’t argue hypocrisy for what it is worth. We are all hypocrites and it is only brought up in an argument as a straw man when the actual facts seem too difficult to argue.
Who denied ‘100’s of Obama appointments’? Obama left 155 open court seats when he left office. He neglected to fill them in.
In 2011 Thomas Edsall wrote a famous article in The NY Times where he revealed that the Democrats had finally abandoned their formerly strongest supporters, the white working class, in favor of the new, minority-based “Coalition of the Ascendant.”
Unfortunately for the Republicans of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, that tired leadership group didn’t know what to do with this gift. In 2015 Donald Trump, on the other hand, said “Thank you very much!”
Today, no matter the final results of the presidential vote tallies, the revitalized GOP of the working middle classes which Trump has formed, now including the rising Hispanics (who have no time for the campus race frolics of the Democratic culture warriors), is fundamentally transforming the characters of both parties.
You’re going to be hearing a lot from a reformed Marco Rubio, and others like him, in the next few years.
When someone gives you their lunch, eat it.
The Left is getting nowhere because authoritarian sanctimony makes people very, very angry.
As long as they continue with it they will continue to lose everywhere. But as others have said, many on the Left don’t really want power anyway.
Those who want to get somewhere need to ditch the student radicals and get serious.
But that, and the welfare population (bought and kept by taxpayer money), makes up most of their voting block!
Let’s get it straight; the Democrats are no longer a party of “liberal” thought, but of marxism and socialism, and to say otherwise is denial. They clearly want to change our economy and institute strict compliance measures for [climate, COVID, health, vaccination, education, speech, religion or lack thereof, “equity”/welfare/redistribution/racism], and are willing to conduct devious political practices to do so. Ergo the D-governors instituted endless lockdowns, stripping people’s rights to assembly, facilitating violence and defunding of our protective services, and welcoming media tyranny to suppress free speech. The Uni-party of big-govt Dems/Neo-cons advocates for more spending, more central control, more payouts to their “contributors” (banks and industries), less influence by the local governments, and unipolar domination; they both establish large government programs and dangle tax-theft money as carrots in order to lure states into compliance. This is not “liberal” thought, but enslavement and totalitarianism; our resources have been stolen by a corrupted government that does not have our interests as a priority, but their own power and elite status. Truly, Libertarians have more liberal thought than Democrats, i.e., they have an understanding of the role of government and the relationship of people to it. I would assume that our Libertarians took most of their 1% from the Repubs (who either hate Trump or big govt) and could not see the greater damage that will be wrought by D-control of the US. Maybe there are no “liberal” thinkers here in US politics after all.
You wrote “Let’s get it straight; the Democrats are no longer a party of “liberal” thought, but of marxism and socialism, and to say otherwise is denial. ” Even Sanders and Warren want top implement social reforms common in Western Europe, even leaving aside Scandinavia. Would you say W Europe is Marxist or even socialist?
Yes. I would say that WE is at least Socialist.
i believe that Western Europeans would vigorously deny that. They’d likely retort that they have a welfare state superstructure on a capitalist base. (To use Marxist – possibly originally Hegelian – terms such as “superstructure” and “base”. in this context.) Whether or not the WS is too large is another matter, but it’s not full-blown socialism by most people’s standards, or at least I suspect most people would reject the term as applied to WE.
Coming from the ‘Left’, Prof. Lilla gets it mostly right except to call the protests peaceful. There, he falls quite short and fails badly. Otherwise, one can still agree with what he is writing even when one does not agree with his overall ‘Left’ philosophy. He should follow what Sir Keir Starmer is doing in the UK.
”What we back then genteelly called “populism” has degenerated on the Right of the Right into a reactionary force of poorly-educated whites with their own identitarian agenda”.
Even when writing an unflinchingly introspective and honest article the author can’t help himself from displaying the core contempt, dismissiveness, lack of accurate understanding, and the arrogant attitude of superiority that is so inherent and sub-conscious in so-called progressives that they’re not even aware of it.
All the other factors the author pointed out play their part in the rise of Trump and others, but pale in comparison to that one attitude displayed there as the primary driver of what is perjoratively labelled as ‘populism’.
The gross dismissal of the concerns of the white working class, non-Left wing males as simply being the product of their lack of education (and by extension their assumed stupidity and lack of intelligence), and the implication that if they were educated, like Liberals, then they wouldn’t be so stupid and think like they do, does not sit well with people who, despite the idiotic prejudice of Liberals that cut from the very same cloth of racist attitudes of the past towards the supposed inferior intelligence of black people, have far more wisdom, life experience, understanding and decency than they are ever given credit for in many cases (not all because of course, stupid, irrational, emotional led people filled with biases, false beliefs, ignorance and a lack of understanding are the majority in most demographic categories, of course)
Their views and concerns are never taken seriously, never seen as valid, never properly understood or listened to, always blithely dismissed in the most patronising way. Their views are always written off a ‘lack of education’. The same with Brexit (the media started propagating the worst extremes of this attitude with a rabid, unrelenting, malicous fervour, right after the vote here and it’s continued since). And although the author might claim, if he was pressed, that he was not talking about all people on the right, but just a certain group, that is not the case. The white working class males share the same views as some of the most educated, intelligent, most powerful people in society. They just happen to be the group that Leftists hate the most as they are the one group that levelling the most vile, demeaning, rude, obnoxious abuse, ridicule, vitriol and class-prejudice against is perfectly acceptable.
The reality is that in today’s society higher education institutes are caldrons of liberal and progressive brainwashing. Most teachers and professors are ultra-Left wing, and have been indoctrinating rather than educating for decades. So students going to Uni actually believe that higher education, which they believe is the clearist sign of a person’s intellectual prowess and a signifier of superior intelligence over the masses (which is not true in many cases), is synonymous with the whole New-Left identity politics, social justice jihadis, progressive, globalist ideology. The two things are one and the same in their minds.
This state of affairs is not by accidenct by any stretch of the imagination. The ‘founding fathers’ of the New Left movement were explicit in their aims to spread their ideology through embedding into the education system, and to say they were highly successful with it is a profound understatement.
”I went to university don’t you know. That means my perspective and world-view is always correct and beyond reproach, particularly in regard to the peasant classes who went straight to work after high-school, making their worldview automatically inferior to mine’.
If Trump gets another fours years, and Liberals start screaming and wailing at the sky again in despair, unable to understand why, then that attitude I just outlined there, which is so prevelant in the media and political classes, and straight-forward and basic as it may seem, is why.
The writer could have just used ‘Deplorables and saved a sentence. I am from London, and lived around the world, am highly educated, and make my living in USA as a tradesman, I know the trades class, the construction workers, they are who I work with. They are not very educated, not worldly, but are very sharp in many ways, beyond Liberals. They learned on the job how to do very hard and skilled work to raise families. They work hard and smart, and are people I would trust to make decisions making the nation strong and successful as that is what keeps them. They also have a very strong patriotism, which I believe is man’s noblest quality. There is no group I would rather have deciding on the Nation”s leadership.
I emigrated to the US rural south from Europe (although I’m British-born). You mirror my sentiments exactly. I work with both liberals and conservatives. If liberals all disappeared tomorrow, life would continue on as normal. If conservatives disappeared we would have a national crisis on our hands.
There are doers and talkers in this world and I much prefer the doers. When I went to uni at 36 years of age, a lecturer told an enthusiastic audience of budding students that we were in the top 5% of intellectuals is the nation (Australia). From having worked with tradesmen and even labourers I knew this was nonsense and stood up and said so. I found uni to be full of arse kissers, liars and sheep. And yes: I got my degree, the hard way and that meant being honest and using actual critical thinking rather than the critical thinking prescribed by the various lecturers. I took a much lower paying job than my degree might suggest, because I was not prepared to do the arse kissing and lying expected at uni which was obviously going to continue in the profession I was considering.
I am similar to you in my admiration of those same working people.
And I immigrated here.
But I saw the difference in healthcare systems – My Mother who worked through the war like a slve taken care of for free (rightfully) in her old age. In the pre-Obama system would have been left to suffer and die – or drain any child that had progressed of all their wealth. Think about this alone.
Then on the Identity politics, it’s a USA issue and obviously wrong, it’s class and status that count. Devestated white poor kids have no part in ‘repartion issues – it’s nonsense. Those behind that have as much responsibilty for keeping the wrongs happening.
Resolute conservative Republican Jim Rickards, who perhaps not that surprisingly predicts a Trump win and did so in 2016, made a rather interesting and amusing point in a Triggernometry interview last week regarding how a significantly greater number of Americans, 56% to be precise, felt better off over the last four years in relation to the previous administration when polled recently.
This is a question apparently long beloved of pollsters which when put usually elicits a far greater negative response, as evidenced by all of Trump’s encumbent predecessors all consistently inviting lower numbers.
When Biden was asked in an interview about this higher than usual figure for Trump, his response was, ‘well, if they think that then they probably shouldn’t (vote for me).’
Going on, a few seconds later, he added, ‘if 54%(sic) of American people think they’re better off economically than they were under our (Obama/Biden) administration, then their memory’s not very good, quite frankly….’
Rickard rather wickedly makes the aside, not in the slightest bit partisanly I’m sure, and clearly forgetting the electoral college he was at pains to explain earlier, that effectively ‘encouraging’ 56% of an electorate NOT to vote for you in these circumstances is probably not the wisest of moves, but it certainly looks like a lot more people took Joe at his word that most Democrats would have liked.
I`d rather have a night out with Donald than a Horlicks with Joe.
This election, Trump increased in nearly every demographic”black, brown, cuban, LGBT”except white males. Identitarian critical theory poisonous fundamentalism is losing its grip. They can’t ignore these numbers. The woke priesthood has already been observed twisting themselves into impossible contortions to keep their race-grifting careers in tact.
Like Charles Blow, “LGBT people of color don’t really trust the white gays. Yes, I said what I said. Period.
Nicole Hannah Jones: “whiteness is not static. it’s expandable and adaptable”
That’s convenient.
As we speak, the likes of Mark will doubtless be ensuring that evidence of voter fraud and suppression that social media are showing will be deleted or glossed over like Hunters laptop or FBI phones, Hillary’s server.
The Transition Integrity Project and the Colour Revolution’ tactics that the One Love Global Luvvies practice to cement uprisings and delegitimise democratically elected leaders , are well known. And this handwringing ,false flag call to not look into how Trump is getting cheated out of his victory is not wanted.
We need the Supreme Court asap.
Not Democratic efforts to be reasonable as they burn ballots, shutter up windows, ban Republican poll watchers from scrutiny and use their Soros payroll to bully and dissemble until Lord Gaga is pushed into dotage by Legzup .
I’m getting to the point of just ignoring self-described liberals. Their smugness aside, their views are now solidly in the dustbin of history. The stuggle now is between national populism and global corporate oligarchy. Either of these these may contain elements of the old-fashioned liberal values, but not as a core belief.
Agree. As long as everyone is distracted with whatever the latest smokescreen is, ‘racism’, Covid hysteria, etc, the Globalists are smug and happy.
This column feels like just another leftist academic who likely doesn’t know any Trump supporters. Harris and Biden ran a campaign based on “policy, competence, and basic decency …”? Seriously?!? Oh wait ” I’ve been brainwashed by Fox News, right? And so were the other 70 million or so people who voted for Trump. This is standard leftist propaganda. Yawn.
Totally the wrong conclusion to draw from this election. Young people of color delivered the win to Biden and the party absolutely can’t survive without them. The evidence is right in front of you. Progressives kept their seats. The Lincoln Project was a failure. Movements ARE the source of political power. Americans DO want a reckoning. AOC is showing Democrats how they can have a future, but they insist on clinging to a shameful past that paved the way for Trump while blaming the left for their failures. Young people are fed up and building alternatives to the dusty politics of establishment Dems. Thousands of Americans are dying every week and that’s the only thing that kept Biden from losing badly. The party will be obsolete if it doesn’t learn from its mistakes. 2016 should have been the wake up call but instead they doubled down on a losing strategy. You’re so scared of “identity politics” that you’re missing the fact that progressive demands are actually popular and win elections. Democrats already followed the advice in this article and almost lost again. They’re just incredibly out of touch.
The ‘progressive’ demands come from a small minority who have disproportionate representation in the media and are, for reasons difficult to fathom, being backed up financially by organisations who should know better as well as by people who want them to cause division and unrest in order to further their (the sponsors) aims.
The BLM narrative is based entirely on false premises and is aimed at targets which have nothing to do with enabling any of the minorities.
The XR movement is based on a false representation of the causes of climate change and a pipe dream of reliable, affordable green energy, regardless of the havoc caused to the environment in the attempt to achieve it.
The ‘progressive’ demands of these and other minority groups (LGB etc) are damaging societal harmony and will not stop because a geriatric nonentity and a mixed race (but neither race black) woman happen to have ‘won’ the White House.
These people have no concept of the idea that they could be wrong in any way; even if the people they claim to represent tell them they are, they find ways to deny it. Worse, so sure of their rectitude are they that they will stoop to any tactics to further their aims. If reports are to be believed, the BLM, allegedly protesting against disproportionate use of force on black people by the police, have themselves used disproportionate force on black people to the extent of murdering several, including a number of children.
Perhaps as the Times Radio suggested Biden and Trump should run a Presidential job share?
Not a bad idea. The way things look at the moment, it’s 50/50 for Trump and Biden. Maybe split the US up by states.
The Democrat supported ‘Great Awokening’ is going to continue to smother American cultural life, especially because there is no articulate or compelling leadership, including Biden & Harris, to tamp down it’s corrosive ideology.
There’s a borderline throwaway comment about protecting black Americans’ right to vote in the deep red South.
In the stats I could find with a quick Google search –
Here are the 5 highest states for black voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election:
Colorado
Maine
North Carolina
Mississippi
Kentucky
and the 5 highest in the 2018 midterm elections:
Idaho
Mississippi
Georgia
Oregon
Illinois
Here are the 5 lowest states for black voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election:
Washington state
Idaho
South Dakota
North Dakota
Vermont
and the 5 lowest in the 2018 midterm election:
Vermont
Hawaii
Utah
North Dakota
South Dakota
There’s no evidence in these numbers of low black voter turnout in Southern states, with Mississippi (twice), North Carolina, Kentucky, and Georgia all appearing on the “highest” list. There does seem to be – for whatever reason – lower black voter turnout in some small states where blacks account for a low percentage of the population. That low turnout appears across some states that are generally run by Republicans (North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah) and Democrats (Vermont, Hawaii). And, perhaps showing that government policy isn’t a driver, Idaho moved from among the lowest states to among the highest between 2016 and 2018.
In conclusion, I’d ask Mr. Lilla to provide evidence to back up his claim, because the numbers on actual black voter participation appear to contradict it.
Funny how in just a matter of weeks Biden has transformed from an uninspiring presidential candidate with memory problems and an uncertain grasp of facts to a “statesmanlike” figure who will restore America to safety, stability and (that catch-all) UNITY after the divisive Trump years.
Safety and stability are an unlikely outcome now that BLM/Antifa thugs and their MSM cheerleaders have seen how moral bullying is such an effective way of intimidating Democrats (and just about everybody else) into aquiescence. They see the Democrat victory as popular support for their far Left agenda and will continue to make increasingly extreme demands. As for “unity” ““ has any non-totalitarian ever been able to deliver that?
The SJWs are not pacified ““ they are emboldened. They want a revolution and they are determined to make it happen. Unless they are confronted with an EFFECTIVE intellectual/moral challenge the USA could well be reduced to a fractious, quasi-socialist mess of competing victimhoods and chimerical causes that will take a generation or more to mend.
Anybody looking at the WEF, Soros etc and the Great Reset? Biden and his cronies will be a pushover for their machinations.
Davos delayed till June. New strain of Covid in Danish mink. This show will run and run while the puppet masters look on and rub their hands.
The biggest lasting achievement of the Democrats under Obama was Obamacare. This is a huge expansion in the improvement of life for Americans following only Social Security and Medicare on importance. I do not see ID politics, gender politics or racial politics in that great achievement.
Perhaps, but the architectural structure of Obamacare was more than faulty and so it is crumbling as a result which is why it needs to be readdressed. Obamacare costs were never reigned in, nor did everyone ‘win’ with the program; folks were not ‘allowed to keep their doctor’ as Obama promised, nor did each family save ‘$2,500 per year’ as promised.
All parties (especially in USA) are a coalition of different groups.
As of Friday morning Democrats are winning the Presidential election by almost 4m votes.
Yes, but those ‘extra Democrat millions’ sit primarily in one state on the coast – ripe for its own analysis. Trump made historic gains gains into just about every minority category, including the LGBT community (about a third voted for Trump) and held onto ‘white women’ which was unexpected. Trump did not ‘lose the suburbs’, but rather kept white-married women; single-white-women stuck with the Dems. Ergo, ‘Trumpism’ is here to stay. The midterms, two years away, will be fascinating. We’re all hoping Biden will now tell us what he plans to do, other than ‘make nice’.
Biden won’t know what he is going to do until his puppet masters tell him, and it won’t be too long until the instructions are to go back to bed and let Harris sit at the big shiny desk and pretend to be in control.
So I’m so excited for the kumbaya…. it’s all going to start now… yah..???
my UK friends I hear that you to too are becoming more divided… is this true?
It is important to see the traditional class war behind the culture war. This tweet sums it up for the UK.
https://twitter.com/Goodwin…
Don’t know if anyone saw the new Spitting Image but their most biting bit was Nancy Pelosi’s “pander-itis” where she mimicked and pandered to every minority who came into line-of-sight. When they put a mirror in front of her so she could mimic herself, she turned into amorphous Blue Blob absorbing every righteous cause in the country. Biting jab at the uselessness of just being right-on as a primary political identity.
C’mon, Lilla, don’t lose the fire in your belly! That 2016 piece was spot-on — you, and Joseph O’Neill, have got the DNC/DLC dead to rights.
Team D has become the clerisy party. Not wanting to be left out, Church Lady from SNL converted. “Why I was a conservative Christian, people called me a hectoring scold. But now that I’m woke, I’m a woman of moral clarity bringing meaningful change!”
Is their educational attainment relevant here? If it is, you fail to explain why. Are you suggesting that they are poorly educated and therefore wrong? Given how many well educated white Americans seem to be in favour of communism, that would seem a misguided point of view.
You may describe these people as poorly educated, but it is actually correct to say that “whiteness” and white males and “deplorables” have come in for a lot of flak recently. A whole range of different positions held by white people have recently been simplistically conflated into “white supremacism” and “fascism”. Paradoxically, well educated white people can’t see that (or are too dishonest to admit it).
Now that I’m thinking about it, the reference to “poorly educated” is even more troubling. African-Americans on average have lower educational attainment, but you wouldn’t refer to a movement of African-Americans with a reference to their poor education, would you?
If they are poorly educated, whose fault is that?
You tell me. If they’re in their mid-twenties, it’s likely they got their education under Obama.
But that’s largely irrelevant. The point is that, given that people are in primary and secondary education when they are still children, they should not be blamed if they didn’t get a good education.
Hi. Sorry, I have just realised I was totally unclear in my meaning. I meant it is the fault of the educators, not the children. Thanks for pointing out my vagueness.
It will be fun watching the Democrats tear each other apart in coming years. The hypocrisy running up to this point has been staggering, and it’s got far too much momentum to stop. Once they don’t have Orange Man to find fault in, they’ll find it within their own number.
It will be fun watching the Democrats tear each other apart in coming years.
Please God!!!!!!
The one hope for the world is that they do what Blair did for the Labour party here, make themselves untouchable; but, hopefully they will only take on term to do it!
An excellent analysis. This is something that the left seems to have entirely forgotten. It’s all well and good to look out for the rights of minorities, but to win in a democracy you actually need to get the majority on your side – that is, after all, rather the whole point. And since not everyone’s on board with self-flagellation, that means that you have to offer the majority something, even if it’s just the right for it to feel good about itself. The left used to offer that, but it hasn’t for a very long time now.
The money and guns are always on the conservative side. Liberals win when they manage to hold the moral high ground. I think most liberals would in fact agree with me on that, and would argue that that’s precisely what they’re doing. But to me it also seems obvious that the moral high ground is held by the one who has respect and concern for everyone. Being hateful and judgmental makes you look, at the very least, as bad as the other side… and if both sides are equally bad, people are going to choose to be on the one that at least has all the money and guns.
‘The money and guns are always on the conservative side’
The money has been on the side of the Dems for three or four elections now, including this one, by a very large margin. They are now the party of Wall St. If the Dems win they will certainly aim to ensure that the guns are on their side, by removing them from everyone else.
Who’s more likely to raise taxes for the wealthy? Who’s more likely to put in more regulation forbidding the wealthy from doing precisely what they feel like? That both parties suck up to the rich is undeniable, but one party has it as part of their actual platform. In fact, one party has produced a president who’s the living embodiment of screw-the-rules-I’ve-got-money.
And as for the guns, which is the side of “abolish the police”? Oh, don’t get me wrong, that’s a terrible policy and part of why they’re losing. But it’s also not the policy of someone who expects to rule by brute force.
I fully admit, and lament, the multitude failings of the current Democratic party, but the idea that Republicans have somehow turned into the champions of the little guy is frankly laughable.
The wealthy will not pay any more taxes under Biden. Even if he imposes taxes, they will find ways to avoid them, Moreover, Obama did nothing to prevent the banks etc doing whatever they wanted, and he crushed Occupy with extreme prejudice. Hillary would have been no different.
Even relatively rational Austin saw a 40% increase in homicides this year after shaving just 20 million from the police budget. In all the areas where Democrats run law and order, crime is rampant.
Trump cut taxes for more or less everyone and he did not send people to fight in any new wars. He also started to bring a few manufacturing jobs back. Under him the Republicans did, for a while, become the party of ‘the little guy’.
And it’s usually ‘the little guys’ that fight and die in these wars whilst ‘the big guys’ who send them there sit on the sidelines and often profit.
”Even relatively rational Austin”
You mean ‘relatively Liberal Austin’ don’t you, and obviously believe the two things are synonymous? The astonishingly arrogant delusion of ‘liberals’ today, the self-deception, the self-adoring narcissism, the hateful, spiteful, deeply malicious contempt, the dismissal and dehumanization of opponents, mirrors the worse believers in the supremacist religions we have today; the same jaw-dropping inability to listen to others in order to at least properly understand opposing arguments and the reasoning and rationale behind them soundly and rationally before disagreeing, and the same extreme, infantile and ever-present mischaracterization of opposing view-points and the same ascribing to the them the most nefarious, slanderous motives, it’s truly on a par with the worst religious fanatics of a certain religion. It’s identical in all aspects apart from the ideology they believe in. The underlying psychology, the axiomatic, a priori belief in their own absolute supremacy in intellect and morals and contempt for opposition of any kind, despite being completely delusional, is one and the same.
This is why today they are so loathed that millions are willing to vote people like Trump in because he is willing to oppose them and face them down with a disdain they aren’t used to and can’t deal with, and the more they melt down and become ever more absurd with their p***y hats and their public wailing and sobbing at the sky, and in trying to destroy him, the more he stands his ground and the more his support grows. Their attempt to do to Trump what they do with everyone and anyone else in their ideological, cannibalistic witchhunts, where being political ”incorrect” has replaced Witchcraft as the basis for their mania and neurosis, just don’t work. The media lost their iron grip on the minds of the majority of the masses a long time ago, but their arrogance and delusions make them oblivious to this fact and they carry on as they before they were busted
The disgusting tactics used to smear and destroy opponents and their character has the opposite effect on a billionaire like Trump who has superior confidence in himself. And the public, the average person outside of the little New Left bubble that surrounds most of the media, govermental, and educational institutions, has more than had enough too and loathe these so-called ‘progressive liberals’.
The people going around today claiming to be Liberals are not rational. They are very opposite. Only they cannot see it.
The Democrats lost all claim to the moral high ground (and much of the huge Catholic vote, which traditionally tends to votes Democrat) by their widespread support for late-term abortion. In Colorado, where both parties have agreed on a 22-week upper limit, the Democrats appear to have done well, significantly better than in 2016
The money and guns are always going to be in the conservative side? 1. Dems outspent Republicans this year. 2. What the heck do guns have to do with an election?
Is govt-funded abortion, pharmaceutical payouts, permissive violence, false accusations, political pseudo-science, religious persecution, and suppression of dissenting opinion “moral high ground”?
How much did Dems spend on this campaign? The money is in big govt, of which the Dems are “all in”.
If you had bothered to read what I actually wrote, you might have noticed that I said that the left wins when it has the high ground. It’s having trouble right now because it doesn’t.
Government-funded abortion is definitely the moral high ground as I see it, though, and what you call “religious persecution” I suspect that I would call “not getting to act like a Bronze Age savage.” Also not sure which false accusations you’re referring to – I’d say that where there’s smoke there’s usually fire, though exceptions do exist. But in general? Yeah, the left hasn’t been acting in such a way as to hold the moral high ground, and it needs to start doing that if it wants to start winning again. *That was my whole point.* But don’t let that stop you from screeching at me because I don’t agree with you 100% on everything.
Interesting analysis with a lot of truth, but let’s not forget one simple truth. If Obama was running against Trump it would not be even be close, Obama wins in a landslide.
Not so fast…in the aftermath of Obama’s departure, many blacks have voiced disappointment in that Obama did little or nothing for their communities. Trump has done more for the black community than Obama, I.e. prison reform, funds for black colleges, empowerment zones (Sen. Tim Scott)…
OK, so is that why 90% of blacks still vote for Dems?
Seems racist, doesn’t it?
Hillary Clinton lost the last Election because of the electoral college, she won almost 3 million more votes than Trump, in spite of voter suppression. Biden will get more votes than Trump, even with voter suppression. If he losses the election, it will be down to a combination of the electoral college and voter suppression. The US must sort out it’s democracy, so that every US citizen has a vote, if necessary introduce compulsory voting, and end the Gerrymandering where states set up their own electoral boundaries.
When you have sorted out your democracy, then you talk about policies. These are what the democrats should be campaigning on.
What voter suppression? I keep hearing the claim but no one backs it up. What voter suppression?
And gerrymandering is hardly new; you’re just mad that some GOP states learned from Dems how to use it.
Voter suppression can take various forms, but would you not consider Trump’s alleged legal threat to prevent the inclusion of many, many thousands of legitimate postal votes in Pennsylvania in its official count a form of it?
Mail-in voting is hardly reliable and, for that matter, neither is the post office. There is no way to verify that the name on the ballot matches the person who filled it out, and there were numerous stories about multiple ballots being sent to the same address.
Voter suppression is routine in various places, every election. Going back to Gore – Bush. The access roads to the main hwy corridor with likely Democrat voters was blocked by police vehicles. forget the chads, that block alone held back many 1000’s of votes
The electoral college is what it is. No different really to FPTP in the UK. When you enter a game knowing the rules, you can’t complain afterwards that you would have won if they were different, because both sides would change their tactics. If you manage your campaign to a set of rules that you think should be there instead of what is there, you probably shouldn’t be in power anyway.
You could not be more “Political class” than Joe. He is the same as Hilary ( only male, and honest).
Your arguments are void.
Gerrymandering? Look at MD. Dem states are case in point.
Intimidation- there is a reason the polls are wrong: because Repubs feel obligated to hide who they voted for out of fear of retribution. Yeah… the Tea Partiers and MAGAs (positive, lawful assemblies of all hues, education, and backgrounds) are intimidating aren’t they? Not.
Frank – back up your voter suppression claims. Where are votes are being suppressed? And why is a requirement to show a photo ID – made known well in advance of an election – any sort of barrier to voting? How are people functioning in modern U.S. society without state-issued photo ID’s?
All too often these claims end up as laughable, with cited examples such as long lines at polling places in a few heavily Democratic areas. U.S. elections are ultimately administered by county-level officials. If the Democratic officials of some largely Democratic counties can’t figure out how to administer elections efficiently, how does that in any way reflect on the Republican party?