As our regular readers are aware, I’m hard at work plowing away at a new political book. It’s a sequel to The Revivalist Manifesto, which though it’s now three years old has held up quite well; the new title is The Revivalist Revolution. The goal is to get this thing out into the world sometime in late April or early May.
One of the big themes of both books is that American political history has been marked by three distinct political eras and we’re now at the very beginning of the fourth. The Third Era — you’ll hear me refer to the Third and Fourth eras a lot in this and future columns — began with the 1932 election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president and the subsequent New Deal blizzard of (almost universally bad, but often quite popular) economic policy.
The Third Era ended with a thud on Nov. 5 of last year, and the Fourth Era, in which most if not all of the assumptions, policies, and pieties of the Third Era are due for a re-examination, is now underway. (RELATED: The Left’s Crisis Might Be Getting Started. Ours Is Actually Ending.)
Donald Trump has been compared a lot to Grover Cleveland, in that his second term is nonconsecutive in the way Cleveland’s second term was nonconsecutive. But Trump’s first few weeks in office since reoccupying the White House are much, much more reminiscent of FDR than of the comparatively sleepy Cleveland.
And though our modern culture barely even bothers to note the history, the feckless and ridiculous opposition to Trump is reminiscent in some ways of those poor stiffs trying to stand in Roosevelt’s way in those heady early days.
Republicans in 1933 weren’t trying to send deranged hooligans to heckle congressmen at town halls like the Democrats are doing now. They were filing court challenges to New Deal legislation; interestingly enough, so many wins were had that FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court in order to force his agenda through, and the threats were sufficient that an anti-New Deal judiciary soon knuckled under.
But the most important thing to note about the GOP then was how utterly discredited the party was with the American people.
That didn’t get better anytime soon. Republicans wouldn’t win a presidential election again until 1952, and when Dwight D. Eisenhower did, he challenged very little of the fundamental precepts of the Roosevelt domestic agenda.
In fact, the only thing Republicans were known for in the 1930s was isolationism in foreign policy, something which didn’t age well given the rise of Soviet communism, Italian fascism, German nazism, and Japanese militarism during that time. The GOP in 1933 had nothing to work with politically after the utter disaster that was Herbert Hoover’s presidency. Worse, contrary to public thought which held that Hoover was a do-nothing, laissez-faire capitalist whose inattention brought on the Great Depression, most of Roosevelt’s economic agenda was already in place in some form or other thanks to the panicked actions of Hoover.
Meaning that small-government conservatives no longer trusted the Republican Party, and everybody else saw FDR’s dog’s breakfast of government programs as a shiny object. The Democrats haven’t quite fallen out among each other just yet, but you can easily see where those fissures will emerge as the pressure of losing mounts.
Sure, we can be honest — the circumstances of 2025 are much different than those of 1933. We’re on the cusp of ending a relatively major war rather than watching the run-up to another one, or at least that’s our hope. We’re in a mediocre economy at best, but it’s certainly not a 20 percent unemployment crisis like we saw in 1933. America is a considerably different country than it was back then, in ways both good and bad.
But the basic utter ineffectiveness of the opposition party? That’s a real similarity.
Republicans in 1933 had no answers. They lost 10 Senate seats in 1934 — nine to Democrats and one to someone from the Progressive Party — and nine House seats. Midterm elections almost always go against the party in power, but not when the opposition is so flat on its back. Things got so bad that by 1937, Democrats had a 75-17 advantage in the Senate and a 334-88 majority in the House.
And by that point, the GOP was so riven with internal divisions that it barely had a coherent message to offer.
Will things ever get that bad for the Democrats now? Probably not, but they don’t really need to.
Democrats are anxious to rebuild their party on the heels of President Trump’s victory in November. But they have a major problem as they try to refashion their brand: The money isn’t there.
Democratic donors — from bundlers to small dollar donors — say they are still angry about the election results and uninspired by anything their side has put forward since then.
“I’ll be blunt here: The Democratic Party is f‑‑‑ing terrible. Plain and simple,” one major Democratic donor said. “In fact, it doesn’t get much worse.”
A second donor was equally as pointed. “They want us to spend money, and for what? For no message, no organization, no forward thinking. … The thing that’s clear to a lot of us is that the party never really learned its lesson in 2016. They worked off the same playbook and the same ineffective strategies and to what end?”
To attack the Trump administration by this route, Democrats need to identify its victims. To that end, they have erected a portal into which victims of Orange Man Bad’s evil policies and Elon Musk’s cruel DOGE can enter their tales of woe.
“Today, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-25), joined Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and House Democrats in announcing a new effort to hear directly from Americans harmed by the Trump Administration,” said the pair in a statement:
“If you lost your job, been denied important services, or face other impacts because of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s extreme, illegal, and unconstitutional actions, we need to hear directly from you,” said Wasserman Schultz. “This is one key way we can fight back, by sharing our story and standing together. House Democrats are also challenging Trump and Musk in Congress, the courts, and inside our communities. With your personal stories, we will be better able to fight to protect you and other Americans.”
Far be it from me to interrupt my enemies when they are wasting their time chasing their tails, but spoiler alert: it’s not going to work. Like screaming “Trump is Hitler!” “Threat to muh sacred democracy!” “Trans the kids or they’ll kill themselves!” and “This is just like the Handmaid’s Tale!” this tired tactic won’t change anyone’s mind, either. Americans have figured out the left’s game of “Do what we say or this adorable puppy gets it!”
When the public is finding out about alt-sex Reddits where federal employees discuss chemical castrations and aggressive sodomy on government servers and government time, and learning that a majority of federal workers can’t or won’t offer a simple email describing what they’re working on, federal-employee sob stories aren’t really going to move anybody. (RELATED: Federal Bureaucrats Launch Resistance Website)
Or there’s this stupid spectacle…
Can’t say this will help much, either…
Governor JB Pritzker (D-IL) said Tuesday on CNN’s “The Lead” that the Trump administration’s actions were like the early days of Adolf Hitler going from chancellor of Germany to the Nazi dictator.
Pritzker said, “We’re talking about the death of a constitutional republic. That’s what happened in Germany in 1933, 1934 and we’re seeing today that you’ve got an administration in Washington that’s ignoring court orders, literally ignoring when a judge says. You can’t do this. They’re going ahead and doing it anyway. The question is, where does that stop? The courts don’t have the ability to enforce their orders. And the president is supposed to obey them, but he’s not. So this is just one piece of a very long story that’s developed over the last six weeks of the ignorance of constitutional norms.”
He continued, “Indeed, disobeying the Constitution, announcing that we’re going to do away with birthright citizenship. That’s been established. Well, it’s in the Constitution, for goodness sakes.”
Pritzker added, “So I really think people need to wake up to what’s happening in Washington. I felt like, based on my own experience, I led the building of a Holocaust museum. I worked with Holocaust survivors for a decade to open that museum. I know what happened day by day, almost that led to the Holocaust. And I’m not suggesting that’s exactly where we’re going but I know what happened in the early 30s with the death of the German democracy, and that could happen in the United States.”
He’s got the year correct as a historical reference, but not the country. But that’s as good as it gets from Fatso Pritzker, who if he’s really lucky might end up being the Alf Landon of the 2028 presidential cycle.
In the interest of brevity, I’ll stop at four data points. I could offer 40.
Actually, I lied. I have a fifth data point. Here’s Breitbart’s John Nolte commenting on the Harvard-Harris poll which came out a few days ago…
Polling proves that Elon Musk and his DOGE initiative are wildly popular with the public. An incredible 77 percent agree that “a full examination of all government expenditures is necessary.”
Seventy percent of voters agree that “government expenditures are filled with waste, fraud, and inefficiency.” That includes 58 percent of Democrats, 78 percent of Republicans, and 75 percent of Independents.
A full 69 percent “support the goal of cutting $1 trillion of government expenditures.”
A whopping 72 percent “support the existence of a U.S. government agency focused on efficiency initiatives” — which is DOGE.
When asked specifically about DOGE, 60 percent said “DOGE is helping make major cuts in government expenditures.”
When asked if America’s current level of debt (over $30 trillion) is unsustainable, 67 percent said yes. When asked if they favor reducing government spending over raising taxes, 83 percent said yes.
This is what the Democrats are screaming over. This is their message. And it’s as fruitless and futile as the GOP’s plaintive wail about the New Deal at the beginning of the Roosevelt administration. (RELATED: The Democrats Are Hogging the Wilderness)
When the public has specifically rejected you, and that rejection only grows in intensity as you turn up the volume of your opposition, your problems become existential.
As they were for the GOP in the 1930s.
Joe Biden wasn’t the political second coming of Jimmy Carter. He was the second coming of Herbert Hoover. Or James Buchanan, whose catastrophic administration doomed the Democrats at the end of the first American political era.
They’re adrift. The longer they stay that way, the better the chances of a genuine American revival.
And that’s one of the key themes I’m writing about in The Revivalist Revolution.
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