I think all of this will require the Dems to do an entire soul search for why they lost "convincingly". At least, I hope so:
For the past eight years, the Republican Party has been having an honest conversation about the real things that ail us: inflation, the hollowing out of rural America, the rise of China, the housing crisis, the opioid crisis, the chaos at our southern border; free speech; and the decline of American power.
Has the conversation been frenetic and, at times, weird and wrongheaded? Yes.
More to the point, it is what we care about, what the average American voter wants to talk about.
And the Democrats?
The Democrats haven’t been talking about any of these things. The reason that the culture wars are so profoundly offensive to so many voters is not that they’re racist or transphobic. It’s that voters want to know why reparations or gender fluidity is more critical than rescuing millions of Americans who have seen their way of life dissolve in the face of globalization, automation, and shifting labor markets.
The Democrats preferred to tell a self-congratulatory tale about how we arrived at this juncture: In 2016, the fascists took over the White House; in 2020, the party of democracy and justice took it back; over the past four years, that party has steered us back to normalcy; and, if they didn’t win in 2024, the fascists would come back, and this time it would be worse than ever. This time, the fascists really would lock up their political foes and abolish the Constitution, and it really would be the last election.
Except that, there’s very little, if anything, about the Democratic Party that is normal in 2024. It’s not just that the working man's party is now the party of the elite billionaires from Davos. Shedding its loyalty to the working and middle classes, the party has transformed into a corporatized, single-cell organism. It no longer appears to represent a true coalition of interest groups—the way parties usually do. It is made up of platform surfers building their social media audiences on the backs of the very people they claim to bleed for: marginalized peoples, birthing people, Gazans, whoever.
They didn’t lose because they didn’t spend enough money. They didn’t lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because their self-flattery consumed them, their sense of self-importance. They should have spent the past eight years learning from the Republicans’ candid, if flawed, conversation about the plight of America. But they insisted on talking to themselves about what made them feel morally superior.
They governed the way they swore their enemies would: shutting down free expression with their war on “disinformation,” politicizing the justice system.
Worst of all, They did not appreciate the glaring dishonesty at the heart of it all. They seemed to think that Americans wouldn’t mind that they had pretended Joe Biden was "sharp as a tack”, that they orchestrated a behind-the-scenes switcheroo, that the party that portrayed itself as the nation’s answer to fascism nominated its standard-bearer without consulting a single voter (can't get more fascist than that). They just figured that no one would mind, that most Americans would feel the way they felt—happy that they finally had a viable candidate to challenge Donald Trump.
It was insulting, and it was deeply dishonest. And a large majority of Americans looked right through it and saw is for what it really was.
The only way out of this cul-de-sac—the only way for Democrats to win once again—will be for the party to tune out MSNBC and the campus and the progressive identitarians and return, once again, to the same Americans it has made a habit of disparaging.
