I love this article! One of the things about the young white "progressives" that pisses me off the most is how they entitle themselves to be the spokespeople for huge blocks of people, without ever asking the people in those blocks what they think or want, let alone getting authorization to represent them. This obnoxious arrogant behavior is not about the "marginalized, disadvantaged" people at all. It is a moralizing behavior that is intended to increase the power of the white "progressives" over other white people. White, "progressive," "very online," activists have acquired a ridiculous level of control over the rest of the U.S. and Western European population in exactly this way.
I have come to the conclusion that the reason why so many liberal white people talk about their "privilege," is because they mostly are snobs from the higher socioeconomic strata. "Confessing" their privilege constantly is the new way of bragging about how much money their families really do have.
The Democratic Party no longer seems to care about working class voters, because they do not. Would lawyers, lobbyists, actors, pro athletes, journalists, and their ilk, cheer Dems, if they, purposefully, imported 10 million workers, each with their same skills, ready to accept half wages, and no perks, without complaint?
If every Dem mover and shaker, had to give up their gated communities, personal security, and shop in the same stores as working class America, how long would they cheer, defunding the police, bail reform, liberal DAs and Judges?
If school choice disappeared for the wealthy, how long would Dems tolerate their own progeny in public schools, that fail more kids, then they educate?
Yesterday, Blue Governors and Mayors, sprinted for podiums to inform the entire US, Trump will have to pry, convicted, illegal, migrant criminals, from their cold dead hands. There was no talk of assisting ICE, with the removal of violent criminals, while protecting, otherwise law abiding undocumented maids, 20 years, in the US. Only a blanket refusal to help deportation in any way, and impede ICE removals, when possible. All, on the same day Laken Riley's murderer was quickly convicted.
Dems do not need better messaging. The need a reformation. Reformations require a Martin Luther, perpetually, screaming about Dem indulgences, and their actual effect, on working class voters.
The next Dem to take the WH, absent a major Rep fail, will visit poor Hispanic residents, in a Denver apartment complex, now under Venezuelan gang control, or working class whites, in a Blue Collar rental in Springfield, Ohio, and then explain to America, what dwelling in such places, entails. They will walk to urban public elementary schools, stepping over the same homeless and addicts, working class 3rd graders, endure daily. They will attend a State Championship girls track meet , where a few trans athletes win half the events. Then they will truthfully, explain why their own kids are in private schools, despite residing in million dollar neighborhoods.
The successful Dem candidate, will ask Black urban residents, how inflation effected their living standards and how mass migration, changed their neighborhoods. They will speak to unemployed Blue Collar workers, whose jobs disappeared with Dem DC Climate regs. They will sit with the grieving parents of young people, who took one wrong pill, one time, and never awoke. They will show up at the funerals of those killed, by criminals repeatedly allowed to walk, after former crimes.
Then, and only then, will voters consider their return to power.
Actually, for all of its posturing and myth-making, the Democratic Party at best has had a checkered past. For most of the 20th century, it's greatest strength was in the Jim Crow segregated South, and it opposed such landmark legislation as the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts, school desegregation and more.
Today its most radical faction claims the mantle of progressivism even as it champions transgender sports and public restrooms, political kawfare among its inane Woke initiatives.
Barrack Obama claimed elections have consequences. Its his Party's turn to take that lesson to heart and take heed when Americans speak as loudly as they did in this month's national elections referendums.
Obviously, this is what happened and is the main lesson of the election. However, as I pointed out almost a year ago, the Democrat coalition was suffering from two civil wars, neither of which has been rectified yet: the Hamas/Pale vs. Jews/Israel civil war (Arabs in MI voted for Trump in much larger numbers, contributing to his victory there while Jews haven't moved, despite virtually no concessions at all from Biden; and the illegal alien vs. inner city resident civil war in the cities. Eric Adams is one of the few gravitating toward the Trump admin policies, possibly because he is hoping Trump's DOJ calls off the dogs in his case. But there is a third civil war NO ONE is mentioning, not even you, Ruy, and it is the forthcoming techhie vs. green civil war. There is no---zero---solar/wind/battery magic on the horizon that can provide even a fraction of the grid power needed for AI, which is the techhie's new hobby horse. This will slowly force the techhies, despite their green inclinations, toward nukes and coal/oil with the Trump administration. This is an onrushing train that no Democrats that I know of have even mentioned.
AI seems to be the straw, if not anvil, that will break the camel's back otherwise known as our power grid. We were already in pretty bad shape just keeping the lights on and fridges running. You are correct that going nuclear is the only serious way to upgrade our power grid while reducing emissions.
The early polls about the Jewish vote not shifting are being highly questioned. There are apparently Jewish neighborhoods showing a strong shift towards Trump.
Tech is interesting in that there are civil wars in each party on it. Trump is keeping the dogs at bay for now, but there is an inherent tension between tech bros that don't want any regulation, and moral majority types who want protections for kids and are just distrustful of tech in general.
It would be wisdom, but the Democrats won’t do it. How can they? The very positions cited have become tenets of their religion. Make no mistake, they have created a new religion, or perhaps, turned back to an ancient one.
I use to do consumer research for a major international consumer company. The mistake the Democrats made as outlined above is almost unbelievable. Getting your only information from a non representative group is political malpractice. However in one sense it is not like the information was not available telling them that this was going to lead to catastrophe. The data on many of the points above have been obvious to anyone with half a brain and for all the things I think about the Democratic party I don’t think they are mentally impaired. There are many very smart people. So why in the heck did those very smart people allow this to happen. I can only come up with one answer there was absolutely no courageous leader that was willing to put their political career at stake to challenge this awful track they were on. They were a bunch of cowards. So that leaves me with the conclusion they deserved what they got.
"...there was absolutely no courageous leader that was willing to put their political career at stake to challenge this awful track they were on." Can you blame them? You saw what happened to Seth Moulton - did you see one other member of the Dem party come forward to support him? Bunch of cowards.
Dems raise $1B for a presidential campaign, yet seem to have so little understanding of what actual voters want or messaging to appeal to them. Where did the money go?
To avoid having to reckon with the horrible economic plans Democrats have given us through globalization and NAFTA, they labeled people who were griping about the hollowed out American dream as "white" and set to work trying to show all other groups that they weren't concerned about White people and would not be working with them. In other words, they actively distracted us by trying to pit us against one another. What they didn't understand is that economic issues and being able to work and afford a decent life isn't a race issue. Some people were voting Democrat out of habit because they still thought they were represented. This year, they signaled they are not. In order to appeal to the working-class, you have to forget race because we are all out here working for something better. They won't listen to you, most likely, but they'll be irrelevant if they don't.
The fetishization of viewing the Democratic coalition as a jigsaw puzzle of groups comes from the long-held and fully obsolete belief that once a group joins the coalition, it will never leave. This drives the two main practices the Democratic Party uses to maintain its coalition: depicting life outside the coalition as an apocalyptic hellscape driven by evil forces and tossing each constituent group of the coalition a bone from time to time. As Ezra Klein points out, the party "strategists" picking out the bones to toss have little or no idea about what the respective groups actually want - to torture the metaphor, they keep consulting the French bulldogs on their couches instead of spending time in the fields and kennels with the working dogs.
However, Adam Jentleson's phrasing is off when he says, "Democrats cannot [achieve electoral dominance] as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power." If the Democrats focus on a desire for power rather than a set of policies that address the needs of the broad American electorate, they will come off as fake and grasping. Seth Moulton can talk about not wanting biological boys playing sports against his daughters, but he co-sponsored the Transgender Bill of Rights in 2022 and 2023; his Damascene conversion on the issue isn't genuine and it shows him to be an opportunistic hypocrite.
Well, Seth Moulton was just doing a bit of virtue signaling, because both the House and the Senate resolutions (not laws, so just a bit of higher-order virtue signaling there) went anywhere but committees, where they died. No actions taken, just died. It's hard to call that opportunistic, given the amount of dreck that's been flung his way -- and which he should have known was coming. Find someone else to pick on.
If a political party is to have any point other than GAMP it must have a set of principles that animates its actions. Back on Nov 7, you articulated a set of 16 principles that you would like to see a reorganized Democratic party follow. Of those, I think 13 are a better fit with the MAGA faction of the Republicans than with the Democrats as the party currently exists and the other 3 are ties. Your views may vary but there seems to be a disconnect between you party affiliation and your principles.
I think there may be a trust issue at play here. Either a belief that Trump is somehow dangerous even though he was President before or a fear that the GOPe will reestablish control after Trump, banish MAGA and go back to being a creature of Wall Street. The latter is a real fear that I share and Democratic thought leaders like yourself can help in repelling. It is time for the leaders to get back in front of their followers who are heading in a new direction.
"liberal institutions from universities to media organizations to nonprofits cathartically swung left"
But realistically, how do you disengage from this? The Democratic Party cannot control liberal professors and the ACLU. And these institutions are intertwined with the party. Sure, you don't have to adopt their ideas, but does the average voter make a distinction between a Dem pol and a crazy liberal activist Fox News or TikTok puts in front of your eyes?
I'm also wondering how the GOP has avoided this despite their institutions swinging far to the right with very unpopular ideas as well?
Not sure I agree with that, it's not hard to find far right influencers and talking heads on Fox News very stridently peddling some deeply unpopular policy ideas like banning abortion and IVF, arguing women shouldn't work or even vote, that Christianity should be taught in public schools, opposing any kind of common sense gun control, that entire federal agencies should be axed. I think Harris tried to tie to these to Trump with the Project 2025 stuff, but the messaging didn't seem to land.
As for your second point, I think Biden's incumbency in a bad economic vibes times is probably the biggest explanation for anything. Much as I would like to see the Democratic party disengage from some of the Groups, the impact was probably a distant second place to lingering resentment to COVID/inflation.
Well, let's look at the "deeply unpopular policy ideas."
Gallup says 51% of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, 45% in some or no cases. So not that unpopular.
They also say 82% approve of IVF, but only 51% approve of getting rid of the unused embryos -- apparently not realizing that this makes IVF uneconomical if embryos have to be stored permanently in liquid nitrogen, a rather expensive proposition. Besides, I don't recall any Republican coming out against IVF.
No one seriously advocates women shouldn't work or vote.
I don't want Christianity taught in public school -- because they would make a bad job of it.
I would be in favor of common sense gun control -- as long as it doesn't infringe the Second Amendment. Those who don't like the rights given us by the Second Amendment argue we should ignore it. No. Amend it out of existence, if you can. Until then, it's the supreme law of the land.
Federal agencies? Do you want to go to bat for every one of the 441 Federal agencies?
Sure, Biden had bad economic times -- but he caused a good chunk of them by first, such moves as ending drilling leases and second, pouring stimulus money -- buying power -- into an economy that had no goods to sell and wasn't making any, which drove up prices. He made it worse by first denying it, then calling it transient, then, finally, taking the choke collar off and bragging how employment was high and inflation was low.
Right now, the percentage of Americans working is lower than it was in 2019, the unemployment rate is higher, inflation is higher, prices have gone up 20.1% since Biden took office but pay is up 17.4%, so the average worker is 2.7% worse off -- and he had to take a big bite out of savings to stay afloat during COVID.
Refusal to acknowledge these facts and insisting that everything is All Right made Harris sound callously out of touch.
The Biden Administration's economic strategy of investing in infrastructure, addressing climate change by building job-creating businesses in the United States and recognizing the defining importance of advanced semi-conductors in the future economy was and is the right direction for the U.S. A policy of massive deportation and trade wars with allies and adversaries alike is a loser. The communication by Biden and Harris around this fundamental difference was very poor for multiple reasons.
A great big chunk of the reason the voters weren't grateful for all those compassionate and enlightened programs is that they haven't happened.
Infrastructure investment? How many miles of road, how many bridges, how many ports have actually been built? Climate change? What has actually been done? How many more windmills, how many more solar fields have been constructed? Semiconductors? How many more foundries, how many more fabs are there than when Biden got into office?
The reason for all these failures is that Biden's administration has been putting all its energy into creating the bureaucracies to administer the programs and frosting the contracts to carry them out with irrelevant or harmful DEI demands to employ the unemployable and locate the plants in impossible places.
Example? How about NEVI, the five-billion-dollar project to build EV charging stations. A billion dollars a year over the last three years has been appropriated for NEVI. How many charging stations have been built? Seven. Why? Because the requirements are so stringent, meaning silly, that getting the money is almost impossible. I have a strong notion that if Elon Musk had been given the three billion bucks, we'd be awash in charging stations -- but because of the rules (and the screams for his scalp among liberals) he isn't in the least interested.
The Republican Congress may makes some tweaks to the IRA but the Infrastructure Law and the Chips and Science Act will be unscathed. How well did Tariff Man do in getting China to buy $200 Billion of soybeans and LNG?
$200 million? Pfft. A rounding error in international trade. How well has Biden done in selling our allies LNG, after insisting he wouldn't do it because it would contribute to global warming -- I mean, climate change?
The United States exported 11.9 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in 2023, which was a 12% increase from 2022. Norway exported approximately 116.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2023, with the majority of this being piped through pipelines to Europe. But I think you missed the point of my comment.
Nope, I got your point. Now deal with the fact that Biden promised to cut oil and gas production and blocked the construction of new LNG terminals and pipelines right up to the point where he collapsed and endorsed both. The man has no brain and no spine.
You still missed my point about the campaign messaging. Trump was for they/them (the billionaires) and Harris/Biden is for you (working America). On the secondary issue of the future of fossil fuels Biden supported more oil and gas production to counter Russia while laying the groundwork for the phasing out of fossil fuels.
The Democrats have a future, but only if they really want one. That takes will, drive, and hurting people's feelings, especially if that is necessary to get the job done.
I love this article! One of the things about the young white "progressives" that pisses me off the most is how they entitle themselves to be the spokespeople for huge blocks of people, without ever asking the people in those blocks what they think or want, let alone getting authorization to represent them. This obnoxious arrogant behavior is not about the "marginalized, disadvantaged" people at all. It is a moralizing behavior that is intended to increase the power of the white "progressives" over other white people. White, "progressive," "very online," activists have acquired a ridiculous level of control over the rest of the U.S. and Western European population in exactly this way.
In my experience, “obnoxious arrogant behavior” and self-defined “progressive” status exhibit a very strong correlation.
I have come to the conclusion that the reason why so many liberal white people talk about their "privilege," is because they mostly are snobs from the higher socioeconomic strata. "Confessing" their privilege constantly is the new way of bragging about how much money their families really do have.
The Democratic Party no longer seems to care about working class voters, because they do not. Would lawyers, lobbyists, actors, pro athletes, journalists, and their ilk, cheer Dems, if they, purposefully, imported 10 million workers, each with their same skills, ready to accept half wages, and no perks, without complaint?
If every Dem mover and shaker, had to give up their gated communities, personal security, and shop in the same stores as working class America, how long would they cheer, defunding the police, bail reform, liberal DAs and Judges?
If school choice disappeared for the wealthy, how long would Dems tolerate their own progeny in public schools, that fail more kids, then they educate?
Yesterday, Blue Governors and Mayors, sprinted for podiums to inform the entire US, Trump will have to pry, convicted, illegal, migrant criminals, from their cold dead hands. There was no talk of assisting ICE, with the removal of violent criminals, while protecting, otherwise law abiding undocumented maids, 20 years, in the US. Only a blanket refusal to help deportation in any way, and impede ICE removals, when possible. All, on the same day Laken Riley's murderer was quickly convicted.
Dems do not need better messaging. The need a reformation. Reformations require a Martin Luther, perpetually, screaming about Dem indulgences, and their actual effect, on working class voters.
The next Dem to take the WH, absent a major Rep fail, will visit poor Hispanic residents, in a Denver apartment complex, now under Venezuelan gang control, or working class whites, in a Blue Collar rental in Springfield, Ohio, and then explain to America, what dwelling in such places, entails. They will walk to urban public elementary schools, stepping over the same homeless and addicts, working class 3rd graders, endure daily. They will attend a State Championship girls track meet , where a few trans athletes win half the events. Then they will truthfully, explain why their own kids are in private schools, despite residing in million dollar neighborhoods.
The successful Dem candidate, will ask Black urban residents, how inflation effected their living standards and how mass migration, changed their neighborhoods. They will speak to unemployed Blue Collar workers, whose jobs disappeared with Dem DC Climate regs. They will sit with the grieving parents of young people, who took one wrong pill, one time, and never awoke. They will show up at the funerals of those killed, by criminals repeatedly allowed to walk, after former crimes.
Then, and only then, will voters consider their return to power.
Excellent comment, nice job!
The most brilliant thing Ron DeSantis ever did was to send illegals to Martha’s Vineyard.
Actually, for all of its posturing and myth-making, the Democratic Party at best has had a checkered past. For most of the 20th century, it's greatest strength was in the Jim Crow segregated South, and it opposed such landmark legislation as the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts, school desegregation and more.
Today its most radical faction claims the mantle of progressivism even as it champions transgender sports and public restrooms, political kawfare among its inane Woke initiatives.
Barrack Obama claimed elections have consequences. Its his Party's turn to take that lesson to heart and take heed when Americans speak as loudly as they did in this month's national elections referendums.
Obviously, this is what happened and is the main lesson of the election. However, as I pointed out almost a year ago, the Democrat coalition was suffering from two civil wars, neither of which has been rectified yet: the Hamas/Pale vs. Jews/Israel civil war (Arabs in MI voted for Trump in much larger numbers, contributing to his victory there while Jews haven't moved, despite virtually no concessions at all from Biden; and the illegal alien vs. inner city resident civil war in the cities. Eric Adams is one of the few gravitating toward the Trump admin policies, possibly because he is hoping Trump's DOJ calls off the dogs in his case. But there is a third civil war NO ONE is mentioning, not even you, Ruy, and it is the forthcoming techhie vs. green civil war. There is no---zero---solar/wind/battery magic on the horizon that can provide even a fraction of the grid power needed for AI, which is the techhie's new hobby horse. This will slowly force the techhies, despite their green inclinations, toward nukes and coal/oil with the Trump administration. This is an onrushing train that no Democrats that I know of have even mentioned.
AI seems to be the straw, if not anvil, that will break the camel's back otherwise known as our power grid. We were already in pretty bad shape just keeping the lights on and fridges running. You are correct that going nuclear is the only serious way to upgrade our power grid while reducing emissions.
Not to mention the EV lunacy.
The early polls about the Jewish vote not shifting are being highly questioned. There are apparently Jewish neighborhoods showing a strong shift towards Trump.
Tech is interesting in that there are civil wars in each party on it. Trump is keeping the dogs at bay for now, but there is an inherent tension between tech bros that don't want any regulation, and moral majority types who want protections for kids and are just distrustful of tech in general.
It would be wisdom, but the Democrats won’t do it. How can they? The very positions cited have become tenets of their religion. Make no mistake, they have created a new religion, or perhaps, turned back to an ancient one.
I use to do consumer research for a major international consumer company. The mistake the Democrats made as outlined above is almost unbelievable. Getting your only information from a non representative group is political malpractice. However in one sense it is not like the information was not available telling them that this was going to lead to catastrophe. The data on many of the points above have been obvious to anyone with half a brain and for all the things I think about the Democratic party I don’t think they are mentally impaired. There are many very smart people. So why in the heck did those very smart people allow this to happen. I can only come up with one answer there was absolutely no courageous leader that was willing to put their political career at stake to challenge this awful track they were on. They were a bunch of cowards. So that leaves me with the conclusion they deserved what they got.
"...there was absolutely no courageous leader that was willing to put their political career at stake to challenge this awful track they were on." Can you blame them? You saw what happened to Seth Moulton - did you see one other member of the Dem party come forward to support him? Bunch of cowards.
Dems raise $1B for a presidential campaign, yet seem to have so little understanding of what actual voters want or messaging to appeal to them. Where did the money go?
To avoid having to reckon with the horrible economic plans Democrats have given us through globalization and NAFTA, they labeled people who were griping about the hollowed out American dream as "white" and set to work trying to show all other groups that they weren't concerned about White people and would not be working with them. In other words, they actively distracted us by trying to pit us against one another. What they didn't understand is that economic issues and being able to work and afford a decent life isn't a race issue. Some people were voting Democrat out of habit because they still thought they were represented. This year, they signaled they are not. In order to appeal to the working-class, you have to forget race because we are all out here working for something better. They won't listen to you, most likely, but they'll be irrelevant if they don't.
The fetishization of viewing the Democratic coalition as a jigsaw puzzle of groups comes from the long-held and fully obsolete belief that once a group joins the coalition, it will never leave. This drives the two main practices the Democratic Party uses to maintain its coalition: depicting life outside the coalition as an apocalyptic hellscape driven by evil forces and tossing each constituent group of the coalition a bone from time to time. As Ezra Klein points out, the party "strategists" picking out the bones to toss have little or no idea about what the respective groups actually want - to torture the metaphor, they keep consulting the French bulldogs on their couches instead of spending time in the fields and kennels with the working dogs.
However, Adam Jentleson's phrasing is off when he says, "Democrats cannot [achieve electoral dominance] as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power." If the Democrats focus on a desire for power rather than a set of policies that address the needs of the broad American electorate, they will come off as fake and grasping. Seth Moulton can talk about not wanting biological boys playing sports against his daughters, but he co-sponsored the Transgender Bill of Rights in 2022 and 2023; his Damascene conversion on the issue isn't genuine and it shows him to be an opportunistic hypocrite.
Well, Seth Moulton was just doing a bit of virtue signaling, because both the House and the Senate resolutions (not laws, so just a bit of higher-order virtue signaling there) went anywhere but committees, where they died. No actions taken, just died. It's hard to call that opportunistic, given the amount of dreck that's been flung his way -- and which he should have known was coming. Find someone else to pick on.
If a political party is to have any point other than GAMP it must have a set of principles that animates its actions. Back on Nov 7, you articulated a set of 16 principles that you would like to see a reorganized Democratic party follow. Of those, I think 13 are a better fit with the MAGA faction of the Republicans than with the Democrats as the party currently exists and the other 3 are ties. Your views may vary but there seems to be a disconnect between you party affiliation and your principles.
I think there may be a trust issue at play here. Either a belief that Trump is somehow dangerous even though he was President before or a fear that the GOPe will reestablish control after Trump, banish MAGA and go back to being a creature of Wall Street. The latter is a real fear that I share and Democratic thought leaders like yourself can help in repelling. It is time for the leaders to get back in front of their followers who are heading in a new direction.
Good luck with these ideas. The Dems will need it.
"liberal institutions from universities to media organizations to nonprofits cathartically swung left"
But realistically, how do you disengage from this? The Democratic Party cannot control liberal professors and the ACLU. And these institutions are intertwined with the party. Sure, you don't have to adopt their ideas, but does the average voter make a distinction between a Dem pol and a crazy liberal activist Fox News or TikTok puts in front of your eyes?
I'm also wondering how the GOP has avoided this despite their institutions swinging far to the right with very unpopular ideas as well?
Their ideas aren't as unpopular and their spokespersons aren't as strident -- and they aren't responsible for Biden's massive policy bellyflops.
Not sure I agree with that, it's not hard to find far right influencers and talking heads on Fox News very stridently peddling some deeply unpopular policy ideas like banning abortion and IVF, arguing women shouldn't work or even vote, that Christianity should be taught in public schools, opposing any kind of common sense gun control, that entire federal agencies should be axed. I think Harris tried to tie to these to Trump with the Project 2025 stuff, but the messaging didn't seem to land.
As for your second point, I think Biden's incumbency in a bad economic vibes times is probably the biggest explanation for anything. Much as I would like to see the Democratic party disengage from some of the Groups, the impact was probably a distant second place to lingering resentment to COVID/inflation.
Well, let's look at the "deeply unpopular policy ideas."
Gallup says 51% of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, 45% in some or no cases. So not that unpopular.
They also say 82% approve of IVF, but only 51% approve of getting rid of the unused embryos -- apparently not realizing that this makes IVF uneconomical if embryos have to be stored permanently in liquid nitrogen, a rather expensive proposition. Besides, I don't recall any Republican coming out against IVF.
No one seriously advocates women shouldn't work or vote.
I don't want Christianity taught in public school -- because they would make a bad job of it.
I would be in favor of common sense gun control -- as long as it doesn't infringe the Second Amendment. Those who don't like the rights given us by the Second Amendment argue we should ignore it. No. Amend it out of existence, if you can. Until then, it's the supreme law of the land.
Federal agencies? Do you want to go to bat for every one of the 441 Federal agencies?
Sure, Biden had bad economic times -- but he caused a good chunk of them by first, such moves as ending drilling leases and second, pouring stimulus money -- buying power -- into an economy that had no goods to sell and wasn't making any, which drove up prices. He made it worse by first denying it, then calling it transient, then, finally, taking the choke collar off and bragging how employment was high and inflation was low.
Right now, the percentage of Americans working is lower than it was in 2019, the unemployment rate is higher, inflation is higher, prices have gone up 20.1% since Biden took office but pay is up 17.4%, so the average worker is 2.7% worse off -- and he had to take a big bite out of savings to stay afloat during COVID.
Refusal to acknowledge these facts and insisting that everything is All Right made Harris sound callously out of touch.
The Biden Administration's economic strategy of investing in infrastructure, addressing climate change by building job-creating businesses in the United States and recognizing the defining importance of advanced semi-conductors in the future economy was and is the right direction for the U.S. A policy of massive deportation and trade wars with allies and adversaries alike is a loser. The communication by Biden and Harris around this fundamental difference was very poor for multiple reasons.
A great big chunk of the reason the voters weren't grateful for all those compassionate and enlightened programs is that they haven't happened.
Infrastructure investment? How many miles of road, how many bridges, how many ports have actually been built? Climate change? What has actually been done? How many more windmills, how many more solar fields have been constructed? Semiconductors? How many more foundries, how many more fabs are there than when Biden got into office?
The reason for all these failures is that Biden's administration has been putting all its energy into creating the bureaucracies to administer the programs and frosting the contracts to carry them out with irrelevant or harmful DEI demands to employ the unemployable and locate the plants in impossible places.
Example? How about NEVI, the five-billion-dollar project to build EV charging stations. A billion dollars a year over the last three years has been appropriated for NEVI. How many charging stations have been built? Seven. Why? Because the requirements are so stringent, meaning silly, that getting the money is almost impossible. I have a strong notion that if Elon Musk had been given the three billion bucks, we'd be awash in charging stations -- but because of the rules (and the screams for his scalp among liberals) he isn't in the least interested.
The Republican Congress may makes some tweaks to the IRA but the Infrastructure Law and the Chips and Science Act will be unscathed. How well did Tariff Man do in getting China to buy $200 Billion of soybeans and LNG?
$200 million? Pfft. A rounding error in international trade. How well has Biden done in selling our allies LNG, after insisting he wouldn't do it because it would contribute to global warming -- I mean, climate change?
The United States exported 11.9 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in 2023, which was a 12% increase from 2022. Norway exported approximately 116.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2023, with the majority of this being piped through pipelines to Europe. But I think you missed the point of my comment.
Nope, I got your point. Now deal with the fact that Biden promised to cut oil and gas production and blocked the construction of new LNG terminals and pipelines right up to the point where he collapsed and endorsed both. The man has no brain and no spine.
You still missed my point about the campaign messaging. Trump was for they/them (the billionaires) and Harris/Biden is for you (working America). On the secondary issue of the future of fossil fuels Biden supported more oil and gas production to counter Russia while laying the groundwork for the phasing out of fossil fuels.
The Democrats have a future, but only if they really want one. That takes will, drive, and hurting people's feelings, especially if that is necessary to get the job done.
"the A.C.L.U. pushed her to articulate a position on surgeries for transgender prisoners"
I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU, but how on earth is this a civil liberties issue?
Everything is a civil liberties issue to the ACLU.