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Democrats need a new Clinton The Republicans are far from invulnerable

Happier times (Photo by PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty Images)

Happier times (Photo by PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty Images)


November 15, 2024   5 mins

A shattered Democratic incumbent. A rambunctious Republican outsider. An election marred by economic turmoil and the usual destabilising violence in the Middle East. A campaign of contrasts, of relentlessly negative liberals, dismissing their rival as extremist, and conservatives pushing forward with buoyant optimism. And then, the results: a dramatic realignment, of traditional constituencies abandoning the Democrats and moving firmly towards the GOP, and a nation revived by a resurgent, reforming Right.

I’m talking, of course, about the 1980 election. Though I could mean 2024. For in their Republican triumph and desolate Democratic failure, the contests are remarkably similar. That’s clear wherever you look, from the focus on hostages, variously in Iran or Gaza, to how Trump and Reagan tapped into the concerns of young people and the middle class while Harris, like Carter, relied on exhausted (and exhausting) invective while offering nothing more substantive themselves.

Not, of course, that smart historical dovetail is merely a matter for historians. On the contrary, it offers hints about how the defeated Left-wing of American politics may yet revive. For just as the Democrats absorbed the lessons of 1980, readjusting their message, returning to the White House, and ultimately dominating the political scene until Trump’s first victory in 2016 — so too must their modern successors relearn the practical policies that made their forebears so potent.

That earlier Democratic revival, culminating in the liberal dominance of the Nineties, wasn’t really about any single policy. Rather, to quote former party activist Ted Van Dyke, it was about “being more in tune with the voters’ thinking”. Unlike the miserable Harris campaign, or indeed those waged by Carter, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale, what became the New Democrats focused not on vague appeals to “values” or “joy”, but on winning. With brilliant communicators like Bill Clinton, as well as the early Al Gore or Gary Hart providing youthful energy, they spoke both common sense and empathy, managing to reach New York liberals and hard-nosed Southern bubbas.

What a contrast with today’s Democratic Party, led by a senile old man, and stalked by progressive mediocrities such as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Living in their own universe, they have little idea of what Main Street thinks, drawing instead on the progressive culture increasingly dominant in classrooms, offices, the media, and indeed the government bureaucracy itself. Their outreach to the masses consisted largely of tapping hyper-partisan celebrities. It’s a message that fell on fallow ground everywhere from suburbs and exurbs to smaller cities — basically anywhere in America that looks set to grow over the coming decades.

Far more even than Obama, in short, people like Clinton understood Americans in ways reminiscent of Truman and Reagan. That, in turn, was reflected in the post-Eighties policy agenda. Turning away from Carter’s missives about national malaise or arguments for green austerity, they instead embraced economic growth, personal responsibility and colourblind racial policies. Rather than back the policies of green lobbies or civil rights activists, they embraced a kind of Fabian liberalism. As a fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute, I witnessed this approach first-hand, as we attacked Democratic Party bromides on issues such as racial quotas, criminal sentencing, trade and education, often to the consternation of traditional party constituencies.

What of Democratic policy in more recent times? Biden’s huge expansion of government did boost some special interests, notably green and race grifters, as well as wealthy stock and property owners. But Bidenomics failed to lift up the bulk of the working and middle class, even as inflation hit hardest among the least affluent. One-in-four Americans fears losing their job over the next year, even as roughly half now think the vaunted “American Dream” of home ownership has become unattainable, particularly in coastal cities.

This divergence, of both policy and personnel, has had stark consequences. By shifting to the centre, Clinton undermined Reaganism while once more becoming competitive in parts of the South and Midwest. These days, though, the Democrats are electoral poison across much of the country. That’s clear enough when you consider the success of their opponents. Trump more than doubled his margin among working-class voters, enjoying a lead over Harris of more than 10%. He also gained among other traditional Democratic voters, including Jews, Asians and even some African Americans. Perhaps 45% of Latinos, arguably the most critical voting bloc in the land, stumped for Trump too. That’s a record for a Republican: in 2012 the GOP candidate managed under 30%.

And if that should make grim reading for liberals, surely the most galling thing is that many Democrats don’t even seem willing to face facts. With their base in the professional classes, the federal bureaucracy and the media, the party now operates with almost Stalinist conformity, using influencers to lambast their opponents with a ferocity even the Man of Steel would have appreciated. Party supporters seem out-of-touch too: a recent poll of urban professionals found their views on everything from meat consumption to freedom of speech differs drastically from those of most Americans.

This Manichean mania has led progressives not to rethink but assail. As Van Jones, a long-time Democratic operative has observed, once voters choose wrongly, they’re dismissed as racists and fascists. It goes without saying that this kind of selective scapegoating is not a workable political strategy.

Not that the situation is hopeless. Look backwards to the Eighties and contemporary Democrats will find a clear roadmap for the future. First, they should move away from identity politics. To regain primacy, they’ll need to row back on progressive ideas such as transgenderism, reparations and racial quotas, all backed by no more than 30% of Americans. Second, they must focus on economic growth and opportunity. Unlike Biden, Clinton understood that expanding government for the sake of it is pointless. Rather, he favoured tax policies that would spark growth, and poured billions into law enforcement to address the popular concerns over crime.

“The most galling thing is that many Democrats don’t even seem willing to face facts.”

Whatever one thinks of them, meanwhile, redistribution of income, universal healthcare and higher taxes on the corporate elite are all popular ideas. Especially given Trump will doubtless oppose these measures, they seem like good ways of peeling off his base.

None of this will be easy to achieve in practice. Nowadays, reformers face an ever more strident progressive base — one whose whole raison d’être is destructive identity politics. MSNBC’s Joy Reid, whose inanity epitomises an entire ideology, is already blaming white women for failing Harris. Activist Democratic women, for their part, blame the vice president’s defeat on misogyny among the multi-racial unwashed.

In the first instance, then, the Democrats must find their Clinton, someone who can bridge the gap between more radical progressives and the big money people who fund the party. Fortunately, there are signs that new leaders are emerging, politicians brave enough to break with the progressives on issues such as immigration and fracking. That includes John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro, both Pennsylvania senators, as well as the New York congressman Ritchie Torres. Together with Andy Beshear in Kentucky, they’re far better harbingers of a revived party than rich boy virtue signallers like Gavin Newson (California) or J.B. Pritzker (Illinois), both of whom have done a masterful job of undermining their own economies.

There’s other good news for the Democrats, with much of the country clearly primed for a return to the centre. Los Angeles, Oakland, St Louis, San Francisco, Buffalo, Seattle — in all these cities, far-Left candidates have been squashed by more moderate alternatives. So too were Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, two members of the “Squad” decisively beaten by more traditional Democrats. A dozen Soros-funded district attorneys, ominously radical in their approach to criminal justice, were similarly turfed out.

No less important, the Democrats must realise that their Republican rivals are far from invulnerable — this is the first time in 20 years that they have won the popular vote. No less than the Left, the Right is plagued by its own lunatic fringe, particularly on issues like book bans, guns, and abortion, which in different ways tend to alienate independent voters. The record of the cacophonic GOP House majority is hardly enviable.

Trump, being Trump, is bound to make things easier for reasonable Democrats. His grave personal faults will make a repeat of Reagan’s “morning in America” unlikely. More to the point, Trump will struggle, as did Biden, with increasing global instability and the country’s bewildering concentration of wealth. Trump, then, may offer bigger profits and lower taxes, but as the heir to fortune and worshipper of mammon, he remains an unlikely leader of a “people’s party” that reflects what most people actually need and aspire to. As their electoral successes vividly prove, the New Democrats understood just that.


Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, the University of Texas at Austin.

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William Woods
William Woods
26 days ago

The best hope for the Democrats appears to be Shapiro. And he’s a long way from presidential material. Especially when you consider the much more experienced Desantis fell flat in the primaries this year. What Clinton had was a mix of intelligence, acumen and charisma. In spite of his endless character flaws this was enough, combined with the ability to connect to regular voters to win. But the dems have to get rid of the nut jobs first. Right now the lunatics have established a dictatorship at the asylum.

Jim Haggerty
Jim Haggerty
25 days ago
Reply to  William Woods

Shapiro is a worthy opponent but given the discord over Israel it may present a challenge for him. Beshear in Kentucky seems most likely now…

T Bone
T Bone
26 days ago

As a fan of Friedman and Von Hayek, I welcome the return of wonky debates on tax policy vs the Identarian nonsense.  But I would caution. When Kotkin talks about the popularity of income redistribution, universal healthcare and higher taxes on the corporate elite, he should consider whether those debates lead right back to Manichean Identarianism…at least in America. 

I can’t speak for the UK with its long tradition of non-revolutionary, Fabian Socialism.  But as Brits know, Americans for better or worse, have a greater desire for autonomy from government.  A universal health system by nature has to be heavy handed intervening in personal decisions to reduce the cost for members in the universal insurance pool. 

So what happens when some “working class” people decide they’d prefer their private insurance and don’t necessarily think the income tax is the fairest kind of tax? I have a hard time believing that a high tax, universal health care system won’t lead right back to the group disparity debate. It has to because a debate about pooling everyone together inevitably leads to who benefits most.  With all the data analytics out there, are we really to expect Identarianism not to play a role?

People like Musk, Rogan, Tulsi and Kennedy are liberals.  They should be in the Democratic Party. They could redeem the Party. A better option would be for Democrats to open up to their old buddies and then we wouldn’t have nearly all the top, reasonable minds on one side of the debate.  That kind of competition would create a more flourishing nation.

RA Znayder
RA Znayder
25 days ago
Reply to  T Bone

I think that government overreach was produced precisely by the people who argued that “government is the problem”. On the one hand they preached “freedom”, market discipline, tax cuts and the removal of regulation against financial cowboys, while on the other hand a ‘socialism for the rich’ nanny state was part of the neoliberal design from the start. Fundamentally we do see a state engaged in trillions of wealth transfer, only it is from the bottom to the top. Hayek always criticized Friedman for suggesting centralized pseudo-Keynesian monetary intervention and even allegedly called him a “socialist”.

T Bone
T Bone
25 days ago
Reply to  RA Znayder

How much do you want the government tinkering in the economy? Should they be setting production targets for electrical vehicles for instance?

Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
26 days ago

Whatever one thinks of them, meanwhile, redistribution of income, universal healthcare and higher taxes on the corporate elite are all popular ideas.

They also Make Things Worse for ordinary middle-class people.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
25 days ago

Do they? In the post war years until the Reagan/Thatcher reforms I’d argue the standard of living improved much more for the working and middle classes than they have done in the decades since

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
25 days ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Yes, the standard of living improved under Reagan but he did not push for universal health care, redistribution schemes, or higher taxes.

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
25 days ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

You’d be wrong. But I suspect that is not what you mean

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
25 days ago

Kotkin makes some good points, but he’s still stuck in the old left/right political paradigm and I’m not sure that’s even relevant anymore. Trump isn’t a traditional conservative or Republican, he’s a nationalist, albeit a mild one, nor can the Democrats realistically be called a leftist party in the traditional sense of the word either. They are globalists committed to global causes, like racial conflict, climate change, inequality, etc.

The Democrats will have to do some soul searching here. They can either embrace the new paradigm and be the party of idealistic global utopians or they can turn populist and move towards the Sanders model of direct wealth redistribution and attempting to use taxation to compensate for the problems created by global economic patterns, thereby attempting to reestablish the old right/left paradigm with a less ambitious plan of globalism that de-emphasizes racial and universalist rhetoric in favor of a more grounded and less aspirational common sense approach.
I will say that regardless of what they choose, they need to back away from woke nonsense and identity politics. Those are just millstones they need to discard at the first opportunity. I will also say that as a Kentuckian, I can assure you that Andy Beshear isn’t going to move the needle much, regardless of which way the party goes. He only really has his position as governor because his father, Steve Beshear, was a wildly popular and effective governor, and basically a Democrat in name only, laser focused on state level issues and rarely venturing into the national political conversation or paying any attention to the national party. Without the name, Andy would probably be a minor democratic operative or a lawyer in Louisville. Andy is, regrettably, more aligned with the national party and obedient to the whims of the Democratic machine than his father was. He was on the short list for the VP nomination, both because he’s obedient to the national party machine and because he serves no real purpose in his current position given the legislature overrides almost everything he does. The Republicans have a supermajority in the state legislature and can easily overturn his vetoes, and they have regularly done so. I believe he has the record for most vetoes overridden in the state’s history, and Kentucky didn’t have term limits for most of that time. Everybody in the state who followed politics at all knew this by the time he came up for re-election so there wasn’t much riding on the governor’s race either way. People just voted for who they liked better mostly. Whatever the question happens to be, Beshear isn’t the answer.

D Walsh
D Walsh
25 days ago

If you were a smart white man like Bill Clinton, why would you join the 2024 version of the Democrats, you know they don’t want or like you, why waste your time

It’s not the 90s anymore

Mangle Tangle
Mangle Tangle
25 days ago
Reply to  D Walsh

You’re right. Clinton would now join MAGA.

D Walsh
D Walsh
25 days ago
Reply to  Mangle Tangle

JD Vance

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
25 days ago
Reply to  D Walsh

The paradox of Clinton, of course, is that he laid the groundwork for the horrors we’re witnessing now when he transferred the allegiance of the Democratic Party from the inner cities and labour unions to Wall Street and the wealthy suburbs and it became the plaything of Soros and the corrupt NY billionaire class. Just take a look at the donor list from 2020 and you’ll understand everything that followed.

Obama continued this transformation when he sacrificed his own inner city constituency by agreeing not to prosecute those responsible for the sub-prime fraud, despite having promised repeatedly to do just that.

Norfolk Sceptic
Norfolk Sceptic
25 days ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

So true, but irony is quite common at UnHerd.

Douglas Redmayne
Douglas Redmayne
25 days ago

Republicans are likely to gerrymandering electoral boundaries to keep themselves in power indefinitely. The best hope for Democrats to attain power is to arrange the secession of the coastal states that voted blue last week. This would be made more likely if a National abortion ban is attempted.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
25 days ago

The republicans don’t have a monopoly on gerrymandering. It’s an equal opportunity sleazeball practice.

Douglas Redmayne
Douglas Redmayne
25 days ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

I am not denying that tne Democrats haven’t done the same but now the Republicans have a trifecta plus the supreme court they could hard wire a permanent dominance into tne system. If they then use that to implement a national abortion ban it will be seen in Blue states as illegitimate and may fuel secession.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
25 days ago

Trump won’t institute a national abortion ban. The whole point of returning the question to the states is to remove it from the national debate and deprive the Democrats of their strongest issue.

Jim Haggerty
Jim Haggerty
25 days ago

National abortion ban is another strawman argument used to stir fear. Trump has repeatedly said he will take no action on abortion and would veto a ban. The Supreme Court clearly stated in Dobbs that it is a state issue…

Douglas Redmayne
Douglas Redmayne
25 days ago
Reply to  Jim Haggerty

Perhaps but wait and see.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
25 days ago

There will be no abortion ban. Trump has never favored that. By the way, he was for gay marriage long before Obama or Biden or the Clintons. But continue with the fear porn.

Peter B
Peter B
25 days ago

How do you propose the Republicans gerrymander the state boundaries ? Can’t quite see how this is possible myself.

Douglas Redmayne
Douglas Redmayne
25 days ago
Reply to  Peter B

They can allow the Republican part of California to beve a separate state with a large number of electoral college votes and increase the EC votes for Florida and Texas. Their controlled supreme court will comply and ratify.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
25 days ago

No, they can’t. States don’t just split up on a whim. What are you talking about?

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
25 days ago

Have any states attempted to cede before and if so what happened?

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
25 days ago

In Douglas World, it’s 1861 all over again

T Bone
T Bone
25 days ago

You sound unhinged, dude.

michael harris
michael harris
25 days ago

Josh Shapiro is not a Pennsylvania SENATOR. He is that State’s GOVERNOR. I pay more attention than you (or your editor),Joel Kotkin, and I am not paid for my words.

Mangle Tangle
Mangle Tangle
25 days ago

‘Democrats need a new Clinton.’ ??

Like a hole in the head…

AC Harper
AC Harper
25 days ago

So the Democrats need to swing towards more populism? They will have to relax their elitist ways – and I’m not sure that’s an easy task with so many activists (on both ends of the political spectrum) trying to establish themselves by encouraging polarisation.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
25 days ago

The Democrats need a new corrupt, womanising, rapist liar?

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
23 days ago

So some people think that Clinton is not a corrupt, womanising, rapist liar?

Michael Daniele
Michael Daniele
25 days ago

Unlike Biden, Clinton understood that expanding government for the sake of it is pointless. Rather, he favoured tax policies that would spark growth, and poured billions into law enforcement to address the popular concerns over crime.
Clinton was forced into this posture by the Republicans who controlled the House and the Senate, and went directly to the public with their agenda. Remember Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America?
If the dems had controlled both chambers Clinton would have been just another tax and spend liberal.

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
25 days ago

It is apparent that the America electorate likes divided government. It is the only way government overreach is held at bay, which is really what we want. Get out of our way and let us live our lives.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
25 days ago

Before they can “find” anything or anyone, Dems have to stop lying to themselves about what happened. The question is whether the party is capable of learning or not. At the moment, the evidence says not: https://alexlekas.substack.com/p/horses-and-water
The positions deemed important by the party core, and virtually no one else, are entrenched in an almost religious zeal. This is not a party so much as a religion, one that views any deviation from the dogma as heresy, one that excommunicates its members for daring to challenge even a single tenet of the orthodoxy, and one that offers no forgiveness or path to redemption.
Dems have corrupted their primary process in three consecutive election cycles, effectively disenfranchising their own voters and turning the nomination process into a Soviet-style Politburo process where the DNC and select insiders choose who will run. Also by 2028, Dems will have to do better than hating Trump, even though they will use the same insults on the next GOP nominee just as they did with the ones preceding Orange McBadman.

Craig Woerpel
Craig Woerpel
25 days ago

“John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro, both Pennsylvania senators” Uh, one of them is.

RA Znayder
RA Znayder
25 days ago

The author makes a lot of reasonable points but I don’t think the Democrats need another Clinton. The world is a vastly different place, in an important way because the system Reagan and Clinton introduced and upheld, ultimately failed.
Many presidents were simply dealing with international phenomena. People also seem to have forgotten that their policies in many cases never matched their rhetoric.
Carter was already dealing with an abolished Bretton Woods system because US industry was no longer able to compete with Europe and Japan. Smaller government and less public spending was never achieved under Reagan. Also none of the liberal ‘growth oriented’ free market president was actually able to match the growth of the postwar economy. Clinton rode the wave of global Post-Cold War optimism and boom of the 90s. However, his drive to deregulate finance and offshore industry arguably produced the private debt bubbles which caused the eruption of the .com bubble and ultimately the GFC 2008. Every president after that has been dealing with a stagnant zombie-economy and the “everything bubble”, made worse by the pandemic, and we are still in the middle of this.
So in some ways – as far as the economy goes – they may actually need an anti-Clinton.

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
25 days ago

Sorry. I’m just OD’ed at this point on politics. It’s enough already.
The simple truth is that the scepter passes back and forth like the ball in a tennis match. That’s all.

Diane Rodio
Diane Rodio
25 days ago

And yet, it’s funny how out of fashion Clinton has become. I assume the same will happen for Obama over the next 10 years. We’ve become very fickle in this country. I guess if the Democrats can find someone who can “feel our pain” a la Clinton, they can be popular for a decade or so.

Sisyphus Jones
Sisyphus Jones
25 days ago

What the Democrats really need right now is a serial rapist and criminal sociopath who knows how to read the polls and work with the opposition party. It’s their best chance of bringing about an era of smart pragmatism like Bill Clinton managed and few other criminal sociopaths in national politics have ever been able to match.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
25 days ago
Reply to  Sisyphus Jones

Trump is the only president to have been legally adjudicated guilty of rape.
Clinton, despite the insane conspiracy theories that you people live on, has never even been charged with anything.
Do try to keep up!

Sisyphus Jones
Sisyphus Jones
25 days ago

Trump clearly doesn’t have the talent of a brilliant criminal sociopath. I wonder if you could find it in your heart to smear Juanita Broaddrick? It won’t hurt your stock.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
25 days ago
Reply to  Sisyphus Jones

You finally found a rape victim (alleged) that you do believe! Isn’t it just a crazy coincidence that she is making allegations (unproven) against someone you hate and fear!

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
25 days ago

The evidence against Clinton is a lot stronger than any against Trump. You can’t have it both ways.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
25 days ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Or perhaps you can …

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
25 days ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Then no doubt Clinton will have faced criminal charges? Or a civil complaint?
Oh. None of that happened? Weird!
Trump was proven in a court of law to have sexually assaulted his victim. I don’t need it both ways, sport, its right there in black and white.
What part of that don’t you understand? The Trump cult is strong in you, laddie!

ChilblainEdwardOlmos
ChilblainEdwardOlmos
24 days ago

A verdict from civil trial doesn’t actually denote legal criminality. Try again.

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
25 days ago

After 2 years of chaos and mismanagement by Trump and the clowns that he seems think are qualified for cabinet level positions we will see the pendulum swing back hard. In 4 years there will be a democrat back in the white house – Shapiro, Newsom or someone yet to emerge.
In a decade the republican party may start to recover form the Trump virus and return to some semblance of a political party rather than a cult. We’ll see. Maybe you have lost your minds permanently?

T Bone
T Bone
25 days ago

Glad to see you’re back after Harris Landslide Victory, CS!

You’ve been on fire with the predictions. Any weather or stock predictions for the upcoming year??

Champagne Socialist
Champagne Socialist
25 days ago
Reply to  T Bone

Back? I never went away, slick!
I predict utter chaos in the US for the next two years. Check in with anytime and we’ll see how its going!

Tom Condray
Tom Condray
25 days ago

A comic strip from some decades ago captured today’s politics in America when one of the characters declared, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Although Democrats and Republicans have been the two main parties for decades, for most of that time the difference between the members of their parties who were actually elected tended to be quite small. Liberal Republicans from the northern states over found themselves on the left side of Conservative Democrats who ruled the Post-Civil War south (Recall that it was a Republican President and Congress who crushed the Confederacy, so no post-Civil War politician would dare to be a Southern Republican).
This mish mash led to a spectrum of politicians who were grossly overrepresented in the center of the political fray. That’s why staunch Republican President Ronald Regan could chat easily over a beer with fellow Irishman Speaker of the House: lifelong Democrat Tip O’Neill. They had more in common than their political affiliations would suggest.
What happened?
As media in all its forms became larger the competition increased. As the internet and cable television offered more ways for Americans to spend their leisure time, anyone hoping to capture the eyes and attention of the general public had to work harder. And working harder meant more “Breaking News” stories, more “Shocking Investigative Reports”, and–ultimately–more “news” that was merely unresearched and undocumented alarmist hyperbole masquerading as essential information or captivating scandals.
The utterly cynical manipulation of the viewing public entered into a new phase where, if it bleeds it leads, regardless of the facts.
And now we find ourselves with a Fourth Estate composed of news providers whose integrity is lower even than that of the elected officials they claim to report about.
All of this will continue until it no longer pays. Already we are seeing a decline in viewership of the major broadcast news outlets, and the concomitant decline in influence upon the outcomes of general elections. Their transition from trusted news sources to hyper-partisan flacks for the Democratic party is all the more ironic considering their utter failure to assist in the election of the Democrats’ latest favored presidential candidate, and the attendant retinue of congressional Democratic minions.
Regardless of what happens during the Trump administration, expect a continued increase in the irrelevance of the Main Stream Media.
What comes next?
Who knows?
But, it’s safe to say it will not be a realist centrist presidential candidate of either party because the extremists driving the Left and Right these days remain the loudest voices. Only they can generate the fear, anxiety, and anguish news reports vital to retaining the viewership print and video news media must have to stay in business.

Matt B
Matt B
25 days ago

Hopefully without throwing missiles at Sudan – for no other reason than to save his (4)skin. I attended a press conference with Sudan’s Foreign Min, who correctly informed everyone that the attack was baseless.

charlie martell
charlie martell
24 days ago

The thing is though, as here, almost the whole of the MSM has bought into the nutcase left wing extremism seen naked in the Democrats, and tragically for us in the UK, seen naked in an incompetent, corrupt and venal Labour party, who have a massive majority on 33.7% of the vote.
The MSM won’t enjoy being told to be moderate in the cause. They have all drank the Koolaid and most will defend the extremism with whatever they have got.
Can you imagine CNN, or the BBC saying that it is actually okay to use natural gas, which after all is super abundant and pretty clean, until other options assert themselves by their actual worth rather than by government force and subsidy? Or that DEI is not only wrong, but pernicious and very bad for society generally?
I can’t either. And there are dozens of other examples of the same.

Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
24 days ago

The Dems need to ditch the “progressive “ agenda. Same goes for Labour. I’m convinced that trans activism was a huge part of why people turned away from the Dems. I didn’t vote in the uk election because I didn’t trust Labour to leave trans activists out of government. And I didnt want to vote for a party that made Boris and Liz truss leader.
I still don’t trust Labour but let’s see.

Agnes Aurelius
Agnes Aurelius
24 days ago

And Clinton was popular despite being a “p***y grabber”

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
24 days ago

Surely Clinton was part of the Democrat’s problem not its salvation.

denz
denz
24 days ago

The problems of tomorrow are not going to be solved by the solutions of yesterday