The Democrat Party is the oldest continuous political party in the world.
It claims to have been founded in 1828 by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, but the truth of the matter is that it’s older; Democrats claim to be the party of both Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. They can’t claim that without also claiming the heritage of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party which came to the fore around 1800.
Of course, today’s Democrats claim neither Jefferson nor Jackson, as both were slaveowners — and Jackson had the temerity to kill Indians (of the feather variety) who declared themselves enemies of America in the War of 1812.
Most institutions that openly despise their own heritage don’t last. But today’s Democrats have managed to stumble along for more than 200 years despite that palpable animus. And also despite the manifest and unquestionable failure of their policies, personages, and governance.
The Democrat Party destroys everything it touches. It’s becoming an excellent question why it hasn’t destroyed itself.
That question is one worth discussing now. Especially after the events of this weekend, when the Democrat in charge of staving off electoral annihilation in this fall’s midterms, Rep. Sean Maloney of New York, put on a conference aimed at survival.
Maloney’s confab came off an awful lot like what one imagines might have been a gathering of dinosaurs before that big rock fell on a place called Chicxulub in the Yucatan.
Democrat midterm campaign chief Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) over the weekend in Philadelphia said his party is the “problem” as to why they are having trouble relating to voters.
At the House Democrats’ retreat, Maloney, head of the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), said that as much as everyone says, “The problem is not the voters… The problem is us.” He made the statement during a part of the conference weekend that was supposed to be designed to forge unity, Washington Post reported.
“They think that we’re divisive and too focused on cultural issues. They think that we’re preachy. They think that we act like we know better than parents when it comes to their kids in schools,” he added. Democrats appear to be noticing their chances of holding the majority through the midterms are not great.
This comes as the Democrats are having trouble with messaging on a national level for the last year, if not longer. Breitbart News has chronicled issues within the Democrat Party, including midterm strategies, defunding the police, infrastructure, Cuba, and even wanting change within the White House. Maloney, himself, has even had problems with messaging on rising gas prices, fundraising concerns, and has even attacked his party’s vulnerable members. At the same time, the DCCC included factual inaccuracies in their Kyle Rittenhouse reaction statement.
However, Maloney and the party seem to want to focus on President Joe Biden and “embrace Biden’s style,” according to the Post, even though his poll numbers have been tanking over the past year. But, not all of the members agree with his “Biden’s style” assessment.
No, you don’t have a messaging problem. You have a policy problem and a character problem.
The folks think you’re too divisive and too focused on cultural issues because you can’t stop pushing bats**t crazy cultural aggressions, because your allies in the cultural institutions are pushing outright anti-Americanism, anti-white racism, transgenderism, normalization of pedophilia, and the kind of militant third-wave feminism which is so destructive it’s actually putting the future of the human race in jeopardy as marriage and birth rates dive to levels far below what’s needed to replace the population.
You’re making Americans miserable. Your ideology and politicization of everything doesn’t just irritate Republicans and independents, but your own supporters are profoundly unhappy and dysfunctional. An unbelievable 56 percent of white liberal women under the age of 30 have been diagnosed with some sort of clinical mental or emotional condition, which is not to say that the 44 percent who haven’t aren’t running around with undiagnosed conditions as bad or worse.
In short, the only thing today’s Democrats are capable of making is misery.
What would America look like if there was no Democrat Party?
And yes, we can start to ask that question.
I could spend another 500 or 600 words showing poll after devastating poll indicating the American people are turning — quickly — against the Left in advance of the coming midterms. The money is moving hard away from the Democrats. Republican coffers are filling at record rates.
As this column has noted, the GOP is doing absolutely nothing to earn this shift, of course. They’re literally acting like trick-or-treaters at Halloween, waiting for America to pour votes and money into their little plastic pumpkin pails. But so far that seems to be plenty enough; actually earning the public’s trust in advance of the election is something only the most ambitious of the party are interested in.
What happens if this midterm cycle is that asteroid hitting the Yucatan? What happens if it’s a 50-60 seat swing in the House and a 6-8 seat swing in the Senate? With some of the generic ballot numbers out there, that’s certainly possible, and it’s definitely possible if the issues being discussed are inflation, fuel shortages (think heating oil shortages with winter on the way, not just high gas prices), a severe economic recession likely to grip the country most of this year, supply chain challenges, continuing parent revolts against politicized and leftist school systems, and a worsening foreign policy situation.
There are no wins out there for Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer. Even the things they might be able to accomplish between now and election day are likely fleeting at best in terms of building political capital.
Ross Kaminsky’s column today is correct and a must-read, in that Ross is spot-on with a fundamental observation that could have Chicxulub-esque implications. He says the one thing a political party cannot do is abandon its base, no matter how small it is, because without a base it has nothing to build from.
The Democrats can’t abandon climate hysteria and pursue a full-tilt domestic energy strategy. They lose everything if they do.
They can’t abandon militant feminism and LGBTQ advocacy. Without that, feminists and the gay/lesbian/trans crowd would just look at them as the party who wants to raise their taxes, and since most of those people are at least middle class (they do pretty well for being so badly oppressed in America), there would be nothing holding them inside the Democrat tent.
They can’t abandon critical race theory. Not after decades of attempting to demonize Republicans and ordinary white people as racists and pandering to the black community as victims of “systemic racism.” Were that veil ever lifted, Black America would start asking about the on-the-field performance of the Democrats in governing the places most of them live.
Embrace a tough-on-crime strategy? Re-funding the police? Don’t think for one second that’s going to get the police unions back on board. That ship has sailed, and there will be repercussions on the Left if you do.
Dropping trans advocacy? You’re aware that Planned Parenthood is now dispensing puberty blockers to kids confused about their sexuality, right? Try being a Democrat who crosses Planned Parenthood and see how far that gets you.
They’re in a corner, because after years of pandering to fringe elements in an effort to create rent-seeking political clients, they can’t disengage from the people who have dragged them away from the political mainstream.
It wasn’t so long ago that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were no particular outliers. Now they’re politically homeless. And when the political Chicxulub comes, assuming it does, all of the Democrats trying to swim for the center are the ones who’ll be vaporized by the impact. They’ll be the ones representing swing districts and swing states, the electorates of which will be the angriest at their party.
This column frequently checks in with the weekly Biden approval ratings from the CIVIQS poll. This week he’s actually ticking up a little, at 37 percent nationwide, but that isn’t much to celebrate.
Particularly given what those ratings are in “swing” states.
39 percent in Colorado. 34 in Arizona. 33 in Georgia. 36 in Florida. 35 in Iowa. 36 in Michigan. 37 in Nebraska. 44 in New Hampshire. 36 in New Mexico. 36 in North Carolina. 34 in Ohio. 35 in Pennsylvania. 36 in Virginia.
Chicxulub.
To be a “centrist” Democrat in a “centrist” state or district means the public doesn’t believe you anymore and blames you for the catastrophe of the Biden administration. It means you lose.
When you’re gone from office, moreover, what’s left of the party is Cori Bush. And Ilhan Omar. And AOC. And Eric Swalwell. Not only are those people not sellable to the American people in general, they’re also not sellable to a large chunk of “moderate” Democrats.
And that’s how we can talk about the end of the Democrats. Because without a course correction Kaminsky correctly notes they cannot make, that party is in real danger of driving away enough of its membership as to make it nothing more than a rump gaggle of socialists despised by ordinary Americans.
This doesn’t even account for the possibility of a Republican Party which gets its act together and learns to govern effectively. Which is something a Ron DeSantis and Bill Lee, as examples, are currently doing at the state level. If you’ve been paying attention to the things Donald Trump is saying on the campaign trail (and that is very much what those rallies he’s conducting are), Trump is hovering over the target. He’s talking about a full dismantling of the federal bureaucracy and thus ripping the heart out of the Democrats’ ability to project unelected power.
At PJ Media Monday, Kevin Downey brought up the subject of the necessary death of the Democrat Party. Downey isn’t wrong.
Bring on that big rock. The political dinosaurs need to clear out so a new era can begin.
