Why Democrats Lost

It is not just that the Democratic Party lost a few elections last November. Its grandees are incapable of drawing any lesson from their defeats.

Recently, at a gathering of party leaders all of them concluded that Kamala Harris had lost because of racism and misogyny.That she was an incompetent buffoon seems not to have mattered. That the public repudiated her because they found the Biden administration to have been a failure did not register.

The Democratic party failed at the ballot box because it had failed to govern. Now, it is getting worse. The more people see President Trump engaged in the task of governance, the more they become aware of the fact that the Biden administration was incapable of doing the same.

The Democratic Party was all about identity politics. Its leaders imagined that the public would vote for Kamala because she was a minority female. It was a bad joke, and it systematically ignored the issues that mattered to people.

The New York Times explained:

Many Americans say they do not believe the Democratic Party is focused on the economic issues that matter most to them and is instead placing too much emphasis on social issues that they consider less urgent.

Asked to identify the Democratic Party’s most important priorities, Americans most often listed abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and climate change, according to a poll from The New York Times and Ipsos conducted from Jan. 2 to 10.

The issues that people cited as most important to them personally were the economy and inflation, health care and immigration, the poll found. The kinds of social causes that progressive activists have championed in recent years ranked much lower. [emphasis adny Americans say they do not believe the Democratic Party is focused on the economic issues that matter most to them and is instead placing too much emphasis on social issues that they consider less urgent.

The Democratic Party has failed at governance because it does not care to govern. It does not think that it needs to. It has a more lofty goal. It wants to own your mind. It wants to dictate what you think, how you feel and what you believe. It imagines that once you become a true believer in leftist ideology you will naturally vote the right way.

Its leaders aspire to become a priesthood promoting a dogma. That includes journalists, bureaucrats, academics and religious leaders. It excludes business leaders, soldiers, and builders.

On the contrary, President Trump has surrounded himself with people who notably get things done. Tycoons and tech bros-- this group, beginning with Elon Musk, are notable for functioning within the economy. They build things, and do not sit around whining about why they can’t get anything done.

The presence of such leaders provides a legitimacy that the Democrat Party now lacks. Many were formerly Democrats. When they found their status diminished, for not being sufficiently intellectual, they decamped for the other party. They preferred to be in the company of tech tycoons than subliterate reformed courtesans and tenured academics.