Democrats Prove They’re Out of Touch Elitists Chasing the Ghosts of the Past at the Expense of the Future

By Jacob Weindling  |  November 6, 2024 | 2:50pm
Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Elections Democratic Party
Democrats Prove They’re Out of Touch Elitists Chasing the Ghosts of the Past at the Expense of the Future

No one is more out of touch with modern America than the people in the Biden Administration and their sycophants. Over the last year, they proved they were out of touch with their own party, as significant majorities of Democrats wanted Biden to step down and it took a donor-driven pressure campaign to make it happen, and their full-throated support of genocide in Gaza did the unthinkable: it won the largest Arab American district in the country for Donald Trump and chased away young people and lefties who voted for him in 2020. On their stubborn refusal to see Bidenomics for how voters saw it, they proved they were out of touch with almost everyone else not already inside the Democratic Party’s echo chamber.

For years, many of us on the left of the party have criticized Democrats for failing to address voters’ economic concerns, and this election was their coup de grâce on that subject. I can’t summarize their political failure on the signature issue in this election better than this.

Whether the Biden administration’s economic policies were good (and many were!) is secondary to how people perceive them when elections roll around. Despite the underlying fundamentals of the economy being better than all of our Western peers coming out of the pandemic, prices are still much higher than they were in 2019. You are not stupid. The economy is much worse than it was before COVID in very tangible ways. People may not understand the nuances of how GDP gets calculated, but they do know what milk costs and how much money is in their bank account.

Liberals who spent the recovery poo-pooing personal concerns that voters raised about things becoming more expensive in retrospect were campaigning for Donald Trump. The economy is an incredibly complex thing, and just pointing to wide-ranging statistics like it’s still the 1990s and calling people naïve and tricked by social media narratives is both bad politics and bad economics. Kamala Harris’s “opportunity economy” attempted to bridge this gap the defensive Biden people took over his record, but like her entire campaign, by saying nothing big and bold, she appealed to no one other than who was already going to vote blue no matter who. Her timid style of Democratic politics got crushed by a forceful vision that while incoherent, addressed voters’ real material concerns directly and constructed a boogeyman to explain them. The Democrats simply got out-foxed by Donald Trump on the most important issue of the election.

People who point to this result and say “it’s obvious the Democrats have to move towards [my own political persuasion]” are being simplistic. There is no one silver bullet in an electoral rebuke this wide-ranging. The economic populism of the left is an obvious asset to pick up to try to rebuild the party, but so is some of the ickier cultural backlash on the right that was so effective. This doesn’t mean adopting anti-LGBTQ positions or moving one inch on abortion, but likely about more superficial political strategies like couching liberal values in a more masculine and assertive style of politics. There is a lot to learn from this election.

This kind of widespread repudiation of a politician who chose to strap herself to an incumbent so unpopular his party forced him to step down is a failure of politics as much as it is policy, and comparing the electorate from 2016 to 2020 to 2024 demonstrates the perils of assuming that anything lasts forever and all you need to do is play defense to win. You have to take risks to expand your coalition and win elections in this country’s ever-shifting political dynamics, and the Democratic default posture of valuing compromise as a virtue unto itself and not standing on what they believe in is simply bad politics that makes it look like everyone can push you around and no one can believe what you say. This kind of valueless moral compass makes it easy to abandon Democrats’ professed values at the drop of the hat in the name of supposed electoral expediency, like how they adopted Trump’s racist immigration plan as their own, and it also led Democrats to support a Hitlerian conquest of genocide in Gaza and Lebanon by one of Donald Trump’s greatest allies–all because supposedly that was how they had to win the election.

Except the Democrats lost fucking Dearborn, Michigan to fucking Donald Trump. I don’t want to hear these people with blood-soaked hands ever pretend they know shit about fuck ever again. They’re political luddites. Actual modern know-nothings. Trump could never reach these levels of abject stupidity.

The Democratic Party wholeheartedly supported Israel’s genocide, paraded Dick Cheney around like his endorsement proved they had the moral high ground, and promised more of an economic term that voters associated with inflation. This entire year was one big monument to Joe Biden’s ego and perpetual state of denial, as well as the centrist Democratic Party forces he has long been allied with who hide their broken ideology behind alleged political savviness as they drive us to hell on behalf of their donors. Bernie Sanders is right, the Democrats “have abandoned working class people” so why should they be so shocked when “the working class has abandoned them.”

This is what abandoning the working class to chase a non-existent constituency outside of cable news got the Democratic Party.

Jeet Heer wrote in The Nation today that “This Time We Have to Hold the Democratic Party Elite Responsible for This Catastrophe” and while I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, I think we need to go a step further and set up a small colony on the moon where we can relocate the Democratic National Committee and all of its Beltway lemmings for the rest of their lives. They have proven they are incompetent political operatives, as there is a clear liberal message that is winning and outrunning their unpopular candidates that they shove down our throats time and time again. They are the problem, and fixing it starts with getting them as far away from Democratic politics as humanly possible.

The Democrats have pursued a cable news constituency. The 2020 pandemic election gave us hope that broad-based coalition politics were back en vogue in the Democratic Party, but the Cheney bearhug of 2024 without a lefty primary proved that to be an aberration and primarily driven by lefties’ proven electoral strength that brought Joe Biden to the table. The Democrats have enthusiastically advertised themselves as representative of a narrow slice of the populace who watches CNN and MSNBC every day, and this is now what the party looks like in 2024. It’s getting a lot older and a lot whiter.

Exit polling indicating that yet again, more broadly, white people voted for Trump and non-white people voted for the Democrats, is proof of how there is a real multicultural coalition at the state level that can win elections, but they are being failed by a national party chasing an older, whiter, more educated group of voters at the expense of literally everyone else. They did make inroads with those groups and Ann Selzer’s Iowa poll that will go down as an all-time outlier still exposed the gains Democrats wound up making with women and voters over the age of 65, but it meant little in the face of Republican gains with every other demographic.

The Democrats have been exposed by the ever-widening education gap that now is manifesting in minority groups the Democrats have long paternalistically thought of as an inherent part of their base, and if your instincts are to say, “well of course less educated voters are going to vote for Donald Trump,” then congratulations, you are showcasing the snobbery inherent to the party’s vision of America that helped elect Donald Trump twice.

Only 22 percent of U.S. adults believe that the cost of college is worth it even if someone has to take out loans. Estimates range between 45 percent and 54 percent of Americans have a college degree. There is an entire half of the electorate who is not plugged in to the cloistered mainstream media diet that elite educated Democrats are, and they view the world in a very different light where our institutions are not seen as hallowed, but as burdens. The national Democrats proved this election that they are constitutionally incapable of talking to anyone who does not consistently read the New York Times and The Washington Post. “I’m not as bad as the other guy” can be an effective campaign strategy when the other guy is spearheading a calamitous response to a once in a generation pandemic, but when you’re in power, you actually need to offer people something.

And a disorganized suite of tax credits and cuts and all this other smarty pants working around the edges-style policy just doesn’t cut it, especially when the signature term you use for these policies is generally associated with inflation by voters. You can include all of those complex cuts and credits in a broader policy platform, but it needs a persuasive grand vision to tie it all together to easily communicate to voters, a la the Green New Deal. The politics of that electoral lightning rod aside, you know what that agenda stands for when you see it, and like it or not, it is an ambitious vision for the country.

The Democrats do not have an ambitious vision for the country. They are a status quo party in a world defined by its opposition to the status quo.

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008 where it became clear that there was so much widespread institutionalized fraud that no one knew what anything was actually worth, America has been exhibiting the characteristics of a collapsing empire and everyone can feel it. You could argue it began before it with the solen election of 2000 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq that set up the historic realignment of 2008, but the point is clear, as Slate’s Zachary Carter wrote today, Americans have been upset with America’s institutions for a long time.

So why the fuck would you run as trusted defenders and maintainers of it? Of the purveyors of Bidenomics and the inflation that people believe it creates? The politics have been very clear for a very long time on this—the Democrats even won big in 2020 in large part by embracing the economic messaging of the left—populism works. We know what kind of politics wins in post-2008 America, as evidenced by states like Missouri voting to raise the minimum wage last night and Indiana going blue in 2008. Not practicing a more populist style of politics that competes across the entire country in the 21st century is a choice made by a feckless group of conservative ideologues pretending to be savvy liberal political operators. Send them on a one-way trip to the DNC moon colony post-haste.

 
Join the discussion...