Thank you for an EXCELLENT article. It really nails it.
One other dimension that we see is that progressives find conservative, rural, Republican, etc. voters as "icky" people. The things said about them in left-leaning publications are awful. They are often told what to believe (too stupid to figure it out themselves), and that they are too stupid to know that it's Democrats who are doing good things for them...i.e., "they vote against their best interest."
Progressives consistently slam white folks, baby boomers, males, and police officers.
.....and then wonder why they have lost two elections to Trump.
This is not the Democratic Party of old that we used to have such admiration for.
The working class is still a bigger percent of the Democratic voters than the college vote in 2020 according to Catalist, 2024 numbers aren't out yet. Also,,,in 2020 Democrats only lost the working class by 4%.
Still, the impetus in in the Republican direction year over year.
Not mentioned here is money. "The Economy" for many doesn't mean inverted yield curves of the bond market, or other esoteric measures, it means how much money I'm taking in, and does it pay the bills. For an increasingly huge portion of the working class there is no hope of a better job. No hope to buy a house, go on a vacation, pay college for the kids, no hope of bettering oneself or one's family.
Wages have to go up, a lot. Listening to tales of woe from laid off college DEI admins making mid six figures just doesn't do much for me. That plagiarist at Harvard is still on a near million dollar salary. What of the truck driver or forklift operator?
Immigration is a huge issue that even the most moderate Democrats won't touch, and to be relevant to the working class they have to. Immigration was the first or second most important issue prior to the 24 election, I'd argue it's the same issue as the economy. I've seen no mention of an alternative to Trump on immigration.
I live in a deep blue, highly educated suburb of a major city, and people here are absolutely oblivious to the working class. They are just the things that make the mail come or deliver heating oil.
They send around these AI-generated memes of MAGA working in sweatshops, completely missing the point that someone who is working at Dollar General making $17 an hour would kill for a steady 40 hour / week manufacturing job paying $25 an hour. That is who voted for Trump.
Yes, it's something the new administration has done exceptionally well.
Deportation is harder. I wish there was more effort in a gradual E verify and fewer headlines of ICE raids on apartment complexes. I believe Trump got the majority of the Hispanic male voters. Many don't understand that the jobs that are threatened are disproportionately Hispanic. The construction trades here especially.
The alternative to Trump on immigration is the bipartisan Senate Bill that was put together under the leadership of Oklahoma Senator James Lankford that Trump torpedoed when he was a candidate in early 2024. High profile deportations seem to be focused on college students who have student visas or green cards which the Secretary of State is trying to revoke without judicial review.
You don't really believe that Trump has enacted a comprehensive immigration policy through executive orders, tweets, photo ops and press releases. Trump will not deport anywhere near 1 M people this year, just as Mexico did not pay for repairs to the border fence during his first term.
With the birth rate in the U.S. near the mortality rate, the U.S. will depend on immigration for the foreseeable future. We need a long-range immigration policy. It is not clear that anyone in the White House wants one. They seem to prefer the drama of identifying international students who have said something they disagree with for high visibility deportation. This will result in a lot of litigation around the first amendment and due process under law.
It is my guess, free speech will be irrelevant in most students visa retractions. They will not need it.
Few Americans realize, the legal reasons to pull a student visa, are a mile long, and twice as wide. Was paperwork inaccurately presented, by error or untruthfulness? Was the arrest of a relative, inadvertently or purposefully not disclosed? Did the visa holder move, and neglect to inform the government, in a timely fashion? Did the student access welfare benefits? Traffic citation that might endanger other drivers, or pedestrians? Did the student borrow money, and not repay the loan?
Then there is the all encompassing "moral turpitude" that is basically anything you would not do, in front of your Grandmother. Hire a hooker? Have an affair? Allegations of abuse? Before this is all over, porn in a browser history, may well be relevant.
The above is a small sample of behaviors that can bounce a student visa holder, along with the fact Rubio is having a bad hair day, and feels like taking it out on a student visa holder. The fact Biden refused to enforce the student visa regulations, does not mean, they do not exist.
As for asylum seekers, when federal welfare and NGO payments dry up, which they will soon, sadly many migrants will have to choose between permanent homelessness and departing.
Arrests of illegals are done by uniformed ICE and border patrol agents.
Normally, holders of student and work visas or green cards are informed that their permission is in jeopardy and they need to respond, or that it has been revoked, and they have so many days to leave. Even the Oak Ridge Nazi, Carl Berger, accused of lying about his participation in the Holocaust, had several years of appeals before he was flown back to Germany.
No, these high profile street.abductions by plainclothes agents into unmarked cars and thence into an increasingly opaque detention system are aimed at eroding habeas corpus rights for anybody citizens included, that Trump is annoyed with.
Much is made of Trump's inspiration by Javier Milei, Argentina's President , who has taken a chainsaw to government budgets and red tape there. It looks as though, in this case, trump.is taking a leaf from another period of Argentinean history, the "Dirty War", in which many opposition candidates were disappeared.
All this makes me think of the poem by Martin Niemoller:
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
There was no bipartisan immigration bill. By the time it hit the Floor, not a single Rep voted for the law. That is because, when Gotaways and exemptions were included, the bill codified into law 2-3 million migrants a year, or more. Trump didn't kill the bill, Math did.
Combined with just the migrants that have arrived since 2020, by 2028 or so, Biden migrants, alone, would have comprised a landless 51rst state, larger in population than 48 other US states.
The mess we have is about to get much worse, and no one seems to care. Trump has ended all federal welfare for migrants, just as the billions of tax dollars sent to migrants thru NGOs, have permanently evaporated.
The US is a very high cost of living country. Most migrants are sparsely educated and skilled, working for low wages. It will take a while, but when the migrant subsidies disappear completely, if even 10% cannot feed and shelter themselves, the US homeless population will double, very quickly. Dems and Biden enticed millions of people to relocate where their skills and education, do not match the cost of living. The result is going to be tragic, on a mass scale.
For the past 50 years, ever since the first oil crisis in 1973 exposed the flaws in us manufacturing and woke us up to the fact that imported cars, tools, furniture, computers, etc were cheaper and often better than what we could make here, the status of us workers has been reverting to what it was before WW2. The thirty years from 1945 to 1975 were an anomaly resulting from America being the only nation to emerge unscathed from WW2. Everything since then has been an increasingly futile attempt to recreate the magic years when a man could graduate high school (or even not) and get a union job at a plant and make a middle class wage doing the kind of work that is now increasingly done by robots.
it is tempting to use protectionist tactics to protect the incomes of American workers but that won't work. Prices will rise to eat up any increase in wages and output will drop, unless there is massive automation, which will be accelerated by more expand labor. A good example of what might happen is to look at sweatshirts from American Giant, which has an all American supply chain. Hoodies from AG cost around $150, about four times what a comparable Bangladeshi product would cost in Wal-Mart.
The problem for the democrats is that labor is increasingly hard to represent effectively, whereas, intellectual workers, who are harder to replace and have money to donate, can drive campaigns.
There's a deep contempt and distrust most Americans feel toward what responsibly must not be called "liberal" but recognized for what it is: An emergent radical and out-of-touch Democratic Left. The uncompromising rigidity of their radical positions cannot be sugar-coated by calling themselves "progressives." Control and manipulation of the language is a hallmark of authoritarianism.
Fascinating. Every week, as Ruy keeps digging, the situation seems more dire. If the stats are correct, this will be the obituary of the Dem Party, if it remains, as is.
College educated white Dem voters favor redirecting police funds by 50 points, because most cops are racists? Fine, they should call each other, when someone is breaking into their home, in the middle of the night, rather than 911.
By 40 points they support trans girls and trans women in formerly, exclusively, female spaces. This pairs with the Dem proclivity to insist, preschoolers be instructed they may have been misgendered at birth, even as they are educated in the mechanics of various sexual relationships.
By 30 points, our educated betters, favor the end of fossil fuels? Even Sweden and Germany are beginning to realize, dependency on renewables, as they now exist, is the road to economic ruin, not salvation. How are the college educated White Dems unable to grasp, fossil fuels are the backbone of US food production and national defense, and will be, for decades to come?
White college educated liberals believe border safety is less important than welcoming migrants? Reuters polling shows between 750 million and 1 billion world residents would emigrate to the US, if allowed to do so. Are we expected to welcome them all?
Moreover, stories of violent migrant crime are no longer rare. A 3 year old crime, of a migrant driving 100 mph, drunk and stoned, hitting SoCal teens on a CA freeway with such force, the auto caring the teens immediately burst into flames, and immolated them, recently made the news yet again.
For burning two 19 year old Americans alive, the migrant felon, will be released this summer after serving 3.5 years for the deaths. For those without a calculator handy, that means CA values each teen life, as worth less than 2 years of migrant incarceration. Th felon is enjoying a 6.5 years early release. Until this morning, CA was still refusing to aid ICE with the immolator's deportation.
As Dems clutch their pearls, 90 days into the Trump term, sure tariffs are the end of the Republic and gang banging, wife beaters must, be adjudicated deportable thrice, not twice, to truly enjoy due process, they might consider NYC in the mid 1990s. Eventually, the city's Progressive policies rendered the metropolis so uninhabitable, one of the most liberal electorates in the US, elected the most conservative Prosecutor in the nation, Mayor, to clean up the mess.
Trump's election was America pulling the emergency break, on Progressive policies, just as New Yorkers did in 1993. To have a chance at winning future elections, Dems must purge the policies of White, college educated Progressives or they must pray, US voters suddenly become fond of lawlessness, expensive and unreliable energy and millions of unvetted migrants, running amuck, or worse.
The elephant in the room is that the Democratic Party is increasingly dominated by white college-educated women. It is now THEIR party (regardless of the gender of any titular leader). Modern feminism is the ideological North Star, and men are welcome in the party as long as they downplay their masculinity and accept their place in a position of cultural dhimmitude.
Very few self-respecting men will find that appealing. I suspect the Democratic party has hit the point of diminishing returns leaning into Schrodinger Feminism and will continue to erode support.
Just one point on the abundance agenda. There is zero chance the Democrats can do that. The core competency of the modern Left is litigation, which is wholly incompatible with an abundance agenda.
It's social-democratic malpractice for Teixeira to exclude childcare, long-term care, healthcare, community college, and affordable housing from any list of the affective (felt) needs and interests of working and middle class families. This is the stuff cut from Build Back Better in favor of infrastructure, chips, and green energy which, as important as they are, are not what moves the dial.
The article purports to tell us what working-class voters "really want". I responded to that claim. As to how to get there? It took a universal payroll tax to get Medicare and Social Security for older adults. I suppose you could call that "raising taxes", but the programs have near universal approval. And cutting Medicaid to reduce government spending and size, as Republicans propose, will leave millions without health insurance and long-term care. That's why Medicaid, which relies on federal and state taxes, is almost as popular, as is Head Start pre-school, which allows young low-income working class couples to have two parents in the workforce. These programs touch people's lives, so yeah, Democrats should run on them.
We are $36T in debt. If you ask people - hey would you like free stuff - most would enthusiastically say yes. Medicare and Social Security are running out of money because the government won't make the hard choices. (And Medicare costs me $235+$250+$45+$25 monthly -- and vision and hearing are out of pocket.). Is Medicaid solvent? Is Head Start just a super expensive government daycare program?
Ask families to sit down and write checks for these programs and see how enthusiastic they are.
The far left's cultural dogmas has certainly contributed to the Democratic party's loss of support from working class voters. But jettisoning unpopular positions on DEI, structural racism, and climate change alone won't bring these voters back. Nor will it convince young voters to embrace the party. Democrats have to come to grips with their relationship with government. Over the past several decades, Democrats have come to believe that the best, if not only, way to promote broad-based prosperity and improve the lives of Americans (or at least certain groups of Americans) is through government programs and regulations. In reality, these programs and regulations have often done just the opposite - they have both inhibited free market expansion (e.g. job growth, housing construction, business start-ups, etc.) and diminished the quality of community life (e.g. regulations regarding crime, homelessness, educational choice, etc). The government-solution orientation of Democrats reached its zenith during the Biden administration, which turned over domestic policymaking to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Sanders acolytes, who expanded the federal government's regulatory power across nearly every aspect of American commercial, educational, and cultural life. At the same time the Biden administration's bureaucrats exerted governmental power to silence its critics through both legal actions and censorship undertakings with private industry. In 2024, American votes finally had enough. The rejection of Democrat's active government ideology was not newfound; it has been growing since the Obama administration's use of executive power to implement its agenda on a legion of issues, including immigration amnesty, fossil fuel mandates, university disciplinary hearings, and banking and employment regulations. The majority of American's don't favor excessive government regulation. Until Democrats understand this, and revise their ideological obsession with government solutions to allow for greater free market growth and better community life, then Americans will rightly view efforts by Democrats to temporize the worst of their cultural nostrums as calculated cosmetics rather than a serious to transform the party.
I think this article makes some excellent points; however, I'm a bit disturbed by some of the generalizations made here. The Democrats have been told for years that they have to move to the right to accommodate a larger demographic, yet I don't see the Republicans responding in kind. They keep moving to the right as well, and as a result, issues which would benefit ALL Americans, such as raising the minimum wage and protecting the environment, are eroding. Climate change, for example, is apparently considered a priority mainly among "progressive" white college graduates. This is unfortunate. Climate change affects everyone! When the California wildfires destroyed the towns of Paradise in 2018 and Greenville in 2022, it wasn't just liberals who lost their homes. These issues are all interrelated. People need to understand this. If subsistence farmers in Central America are unable to make a living because the climate has become too inhospitable, they have little choice but to either work for drug cartels or go somewhere else, which often turns out to be the USA, and then we have an immigration problem. If "cheap, abundant" fossil fuels become depleted today, everyone's children will suffer tomorrow. Same with environmental protection. Today's ingestion of foul air and water leads to tomorrow's cancers. There needs to be an honest dialogue between people from different demographics and everyone needs to understand that the various disparate issues can't be compartmentalized; they're all part of a long-term whole, which the Republicans have shown zero interest in fixing.
If every single person in the West, permanently and immediately reverted to only candles and actual equine power, the world's Climate would barely notice.
In a world of 8 billion, the 1 billion in the West, are a rounding error. China now produces more carbon than the entire West, Japan and South Korea combined. If Climate Warriors want to save the world, they must move beyond a West, that has already reduced carbon output back to 1990 levels, mostly thru clean natural gas, and go where the carbon is, Asia and South America.
FYI , the new Energy Sec notes when he was a college student studying nuclear power in the 1970s, 85% of the world's power was fossil fuel derived. A 1/2 century later, after trillions spent, 80-82% of the world's energy is fossil fuel produced. Renewables are a laudable goal, but we must be realistic.
Finally, a friend who lost a house in PP is convinced the fires were not Climate related, but started by the massive homeless population, that lives in the hills behind the area, and utilizes fire for warmth and cooking.
Thank you for your response. The official cause of the fire was a downed power line, which sparked the fire which then spread rapidly due to dry conditions most likely exacerbated by climate change.
Furthermore, from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions:
"Climate change has been a key factor in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the Western United States. Wildfire risk depends on a number of factors, including temperature, soil moisture, and the presence of trees, shrubs, and other potential fuel. All these factors have strong direct or indirect ties to climate variability and climate change. Climate change enhances the drying of organic matter in forests (the material that burns and spreads wildfire), and has doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015 in the western United States.
Research shows that changes in climate create warmer, drier conditions. Increased drought, and a longer fire season are boosting these increases in wildfire risk...."
So what are the chances the Party will follow your wise counsel? It seems not very good, given your analysis of who the base is. I suppose they could suddenly change direction like a flock of birds but I don't think argument will make that happen. Fundamentally, they, like their counterparts on the right, care more about their ideology than the Party as an institution. The Republicans have had their still incomplete internal revolution by the portion of the base that felt betrayed by the leadership. Absent some new developments, Democrats seem likely to go the same way.
As someone wiser than me said, people's primary attachment is to their opinions.
What saddens me is that the idea of liberalism in thought and perspectives is no longer a characteristic of the Democratic Party. The reason is that it has become infested by progressives who are as tribal as are MAGAs.
This the best article written about our political divisions I have read. The text is simple, factual, and logical. If you don't ascribe to the progressive, white liberal belief system, where do you think it came from? My answer is that it came from the indoctrination of immature minds perpetrated by our betters - our college professors.
Most recent public opinion polling indicates continued broad support for solar and wind energy in the U.S., although support is declining among the most partisan Republicans. Solar consistently ranks as a highly favored energy source, and a majority of Americans support government policies to promote renewable energy development.
If solar was accurately portrayed, and the finances behind it actually reported on, support would go down. Unfortunately we don't have journalists any more.
100% agree. And the Dem party and leadership had better start today on realignment of our messaging if we have any hope of capturing the Presidency in ‘28.
Same old tired analysis since right after trump kicked ass! The truth is the Democrat party will never get back to be a part of the work in class however you define it! It is the party of the academic and professionally Elite and they are certainly on their way out. Donald Trump will win a few. He will lose a few, but in the end, he will change America for the best over the next four years or actually a little less than four years. We will become the real America again !America for Real Americans with real American values
When he has become the author of the first completely unnecessary man-made recession, (something possibly already underway) as well as the guy responsible for losing the dollar as the world reserve currency, as well as the guy who lost a trade war to China and essentially ceded the world stage to the Chinese...and he has less-than-nothing to show the public for it...I just don't think the average person will be thinking "Gee he really changed America for the best!"
What is going well is change. Any change from the last four years. Which is also change from Obama years to now. Unlike the losers, those who want change are willing to give it time and accept some pain. That is how badly the Dems fuc*ked up this world. Your impact on today is much greater than you can even imagine. The irony, with each Trump win against the left, it forces the left to go into the direction it needs to become winners. Thank Trump for that. He is doing more for liberals than any leader they have had for a long time.
You are half-right; Trump is in the process of showing people just how painful, authoritarian and destructive the full implementation of the MAGA policy regime is. That will indeed help the Democrats down the line.
The problem is that it's going to hurt the United States, and especially its working class. The country will likely emerge from this having destroyed all its protective alliances and alienated all its allies, thus subordinating it to an ascendant Eurasian Chinese/Russian axis. It will have almost certainly lost its trade war with China, with nothing to show for it (certainly no one is going to be building factories in the U.S. with a tariff policy that changes by the day) except perhaps some higher unemployment and higher interest rates. The dollar is *already* starting to be jettisoned as the world reserve currency--see: the bond market and the value of the dollar--along with all the exorbitant privileges we get from it. Meanwhile Trump will have established that the next person in office can freely disobey the courts, disappear civilians off the street for expressing opinions the executive doesn't like, have the government directly attack media outlets and other institutions through DOJ lawsuits for differences of opinion, refuse to accept the outcome of elections...he will have handed to his successors, in other words, all the tools and precedents of a proper authoritarian state.
The ones who will get hurt the most in all this will be blue-collar workers, who will have to endure the worst of the consequences in return for less-than-nothing. That will indeed push them away from the madness of MAGA, and surely benefit the Dems--but like I said, it will be at a cost they and the whole country will wish they didn't have to pay.
Your scenario was already here. What voters for Trump voted for was change. I feel sorry for folks like you and the shitty world you now survive in. Assuming from your post you voted for Biden, your worldview here is no different than your world view prior to the election. You were proven wrong then and since you haven’t refined your worldview, there is no reason to believe that your world view has now become that of a loser. Nothing you posted is of any value to me. Quit frankly, I’m tired and bored to tears by the whiny losers on here. Maybe you should a try to actually come up with a winner and a winners policies and become competitive again. Your go after Trump childish strategy was also proven to be a loser. I see no hope for you. Hoping the other side fails is not a strategy for winners.
Uh, no. As of October 2024, NATO was still a thing that existed, restraining the expansion of the now-unhindered Sino-Russian axis. The economy was stable, recovering and interest rates were dropping. The dollar was historically strong. Now the economy is in a tailspin--not because of any disaster or financial crisis but simply because Trump decided to dismember it--while long-term interest rates are on the rise and the dollar is in decline. We have gotten nothing in return for this unneeded pain except the wholesale loss of American soft power. A civilian being disappeared off the street by masked federal agents for co-signing an editorial the government didn't agree with was not a thing that happened six months ago. The president defying a 9-0 Supreme Court order so he could keep ignoring due process, bypass the courts and unilaterally throw people in an El Salvadoran gulag wasn't a thing that happened six months ago. Unelected oligarchs weren't carving up the government in contravention of Congress's apportionment powers. The president didn't openly brag about making billionaire friends of his money off of insider trading on market chaos he created.
The horror scenario arriving at our doorsteps wasn't even on the radar six months ago. It began its approach in January of 2025, when the Chief Executive of the U.S. began making a series of choices so colossally bad that the rate and scale of the implosion that has followed since then will, when all is said and done, have few comparisons we can point to in American history.
"Hoping the other side fails is not a strategy for winners."
But it is a good component of a larger strategy. For, as people smarter than you or me or Ruy have noted:
"Never interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake."
That’s your world under your worldview. It was rejected on 11/5/2024. As a losing view, it has no validity to today. Isn’t it about time you folks stopped your useless whining and maybe find a way to become competitive again? Waiting for the other side to screw up also proved to be bad strategy. We’re back to “orange man bad.” How’d that work out for you? What I can’t figure out, is why you folks are wasting your time and insulting the voters you need to bring to your side to win. I guess a losers mentality is hard to get over. The left has been and continues to be, the party of not being responsible for anything, but being victims of Trump who you concede bests you at everything. From the outside, your world sucks and why would anyone want to part of that?
No Presidency happens in a vacuum. In a country where 1/2 of all families live on $77K a year or less, and 25% live on less than $45K a year, or less, Biden increased the cost of American life by $13K a year. He accomplished that with needless spending and giveaways to the rich, after he unnecessarily locked down the US economy for nearly 2 years. dems cheered as schools remained needlessly close for 18 months or longer, in Blue states.
Dems spent the bulk of the last 4 years devoted to forgiving the student loans of MDs, JDs , MBAs and engineers earning $125K, annually, at age 26, on their way to paychecks in middle age, 4X larger than the median US family income.
10 million migrants crossed the US border without one single extra apartment to house them, to say nothing of a lack of extra healthcare workers or bilingual teachers. No border in all of world history, has previously endured such a breach, with the permission of the host country.
The list goes on and on and on. Perhaps Trump's tariffs are a plague or perhaps, in the end, they will benefit the 80% of Americans economically leveled by Dems, the last 4 years. 100 days in, no one knows. We do know for certain the result of the Biden Presidency. At the expense of the bottom 4 quintiles of US earners, the top 20% of the wealthiest Americans, never had it so good.
However, many Dems side with other country's against our own, because....Trump. They are siding with criminals and illegal, wife-beating immigrants, males pretending to be females, and massive fraud, waste, and abuse -- because....Trump.
Or just, in my case, siding with the constitution and the classically liberal values of checks and balances, due process and individual freedom. We’ve got to get past what the dems think and did (case in point it’s ALL TLP talks about) and focus on building something meaningful with integrity and purpose. Why do most Republicans who love Trump want to continue to live in reactionary politics when that reactivity is similarly destroying our country?
I compare that to Jesus turning the tables over in the temple.
I guess you could form a committee while our country collapses under massive debt while Dem cronies get rich....
I wonder how much you loved the Constitution during the Biden years and the first few months of the Trump Admin when bureaucrats and judges run the country.
I disliked much of Biden presidency. It still doesn’t negate the overreach of the executive branch has picked up wild momentum, with no clear oversight. Again why are you bringing it back to the dems??
Are you a Christian? So wild, me too. It’s even wilder how differing our visions of what Jesus would have done are. I’m not sure how to bridge this gap between American perceptions of reality. Mine may be suspect, and I am constantly asking myself if what I am reading is true. I can’t be sure. But I can do the best I can to be flexible in my thinking. And kind. I cannot say the same for current MAGA.
Not a Republican, If you don't understand that partisans are irrelevant, you can begin a journey of a working worldview. You describe your worldview which is the same the Dems had/have and that worldview was rejected soundly in the last election.
Shall we assume you also agreed with the liberals worldview of what our Constitution means?
I didn't assume you were. But you assumed I was liberal/a Democrat. I am a mixed bag, as I hope most people are. I don't know what my interpretation of the Constitution would be labelled--I just read it and apply it, particularly as a compare/contrast benchmark to many of the years I have lived in non-democratic countries.
The reason that the activist base of the Democratic Party will not change is because their nonintuitive radical beliefs have taken on the characteristics of a religion and are immune to logic and reason. Anyone who has tried to discuss the issues described (policing, immigration, racism, etc.) with a young Democrat was most likely met with anger, dismissiveness, contempt, and personal attacks (racism, Zionism, sexism) rather than facts and coherent positions. Four years of leftist indoctrination is hard to undo. How ironic that the most educated group of people in the country is the one most likely to embrace the most poorly thought out and destructive ideas.
This article ignores the most important thing that the working class wants. They want steady secure jobs with benefits and pensions where they can work for one company for a life time. With such jobs they can purchase a house in a safe and stable community with good schools. They want to know that their children can also get such a job in the community and live nearby when they are of age. These jobs were provided by the local factory. Wall street has encouraged these factories to close or move to other countries, especially through allowing stock manipulation through buy backs (see Leopold, Wall Street's War on Workers).
Pretty much. Globalism killed that. Can it be brought back? Maybe with populist fusion between the Right and Left populists. Right and left populists need to separate from the Establishment factions in their own parties and join. I can't say I am optimistic.
Honestly, I think the Democrat’s only expeditious path back to legitimacy goes through a major Trump failure.
It has to be a failure of Trump’s making…not caused by Trump-resistance that can easily be dismissed as derangement (i.e. activist judges intervening in immigration/deportation procedings, which continues to be a popular issue for Trump). Dems would be wise to drop their ‘due process’ crusade as they have zero integrity on that issue outside of their shrinking bubble given their actions during the Trump era. The same holds for first amendment arguments. Dems are on the wrong side of the immigration issue and their line of argument only reinforces their hypocrisy. They should find a way to help or stand down on this one.
The tariffs are Dem's best bet. But even with tariffs, Dems can’t be seen as cheering for them to fail. Americans suffered greatly under Biden’s inflation, which was caused by the Democrat's reckless spending with seemingly no real benefit. At least with the tariffs, there is a hope that the pain will be short term and yield something great for the working class. You can make all sorts of wonky financial arguments as to why that’s not the case, but the working class sees Trump working for them on this issue.
I honestly don’t think the current Democratic party is capable of moderating. Absent an unassailable failure of Trump’s making, I think Dems are in for a long haul. And if Trump is successful, well, Dems may be lost of a generation.
A good start would be to stop calling us all fascists and Nazis. Dems really have to get a grip with that stuff. It’s a terrible look.
Thank you for an EXCELLENT article. It really nails it.
One other dimension that we see is that progressives find conservative, rural, Republican, etc. voters as "icky" people. The things said about them in left-leaning publications are awful. They are often told what to believe (too stupid to figure it out themselves), and that they are too stupid to know that it's Democrats who are doing good things for them...i.e., "they vote against their best interest."
Progressives consistently slam white folks, baby boomers, males, and police officers.
.....and then wonder why they have lost two elections to Trump.
This is not the Democratic Party of old that we used to have such admiration for.
The working class is still a bigger percent of the Democratic voters than the college vote in 2020 according to Catalist, 2024 numbers aren't out yet. Also,,,in 2020 Democrats only lost the working class by 4%.
Still, the impetus in in the Republican direction year over year.
Not mentioned here is money. "The Economy" for many doesn't mean inverted yield curves of the bond market, or other esoteric measures, it means how much money I'm taking in, and does it pay the bills. For an increasingly huge portion of the working class there is no hope of a better job. No hope to buy a house, go on a vacation, pay college for the kids, no hope of bettering oneself or one's family.
Wages have to go up, a lot. Listening to tales of woe from laid off college DEI admins making mid six figures just doesn't do much for me. That plagiarist at Harvard is still on a near million dollar salary. What of the truck driver or forklift operator?
Immigration is a huge issue that even the most moderate Democrats won't touch, and to be relevant to the working class they have to. Immigration was the first or second most important issue prior to the 24 election, I'd argue it's the same issue as the economy. I've seen no mention of an alternative to Trump on immigration.
I live in a deep blue, highly educated suburb of a major city, and people here are absolutely oblivious to the working class. They are just the things that make the mail come or deliver heating oil.
They send around these AI-generated memes of MAGA working in sweatshops, completely missing the point that someone who is working at Dollar General making $17 an hour would kill for a steady 40 hour / week manufacturing job paying $25 an hour. That is who voted for Trump.
Have you seen the data that illegal immigration is basically down to zero now?
Yes, it's something the new administration has done exceptionally well.
Deportation is harder. I wish there was more effort in a gradual E verify and fewer headlines of ICE raids on apartment complexes. I believe Trump got the majority of the Hispanic male voters. Many don't understand that the jobs that are threatened are disproportionately Hispanic. The construction trades here especially.
The alternative to Trump on immigration is the bipartisan Senate Bill that was put together under the leadership of Oklahoma Senator James Lankford that Trump torpedoed when he was a candidate in early 2024. High profile deportations seem to be focused on college students who have student visas or green cards which the Secretary of State is trying to revoke without judicial review.
Trump didn't kill it. Sunlight did.
You don't really believe that Trump has enacted a comprehensive immigration policy through executive orders, tweets, photo ops and press releases. Trump will not deport anywhere near 1 M people this year, just as Mexico did not pay for repairs to the border fence during his first term.
I think Trump may fall short on his promises, but that is superior to open borders which was the only other item on the menu.
With the birth rate in the U.S. near the mortality rate, the U.S. will depend on immigration for the foreseeable future. We need a long-range immigration policy. It is not clear that anyone in the White House wants one. They seem to prefer the drama of identifying international students who have said something they disagree with for high visibility deportation. This will result in a lot of litigation around the first amendment and due process under law.
You are conflating legal and illegal immigration.
It is my guess, free speech will be irrelevant in most students visa retractions. They will not need it.
Few Americans realize, the legal reasons to pull a student visa, are a mile long, and twice as wide. Was paperwork inaccurately presented, by error or untruthfulness? Was the arrest of a relative, inadvertently or purposefully not disclosed? Did the visa holder move, and neglect to inform the government, in a timely fashion? Did the student access welfare benefits? Traffic citation that might endanger other drivers, or pedestrians? Did the student borrow money, and not repay the loan?
Then there is the all encompassing "moral turpitude" that is basically anything you would not do, in front of your Grandmother. Hire a hooker? Have an affair? Allegations of abuse? Before this is all over, porn in a browser history, may well be relevant.
The above is a small sample of behaviors that can bounce a student visa holder, along with the fact Rubio is having a bad hair day, and feels like taking it out on a student visa holder. The fact Biden refused to enforce the student visa regulations, does not mean, they do not exist.
As for asylum seekers, when federal welfare and NGO payments dry up, which they will soon, sadly many migrants will have to choose between permanent homelessness and departing.
Arrests of illegals are done by uniformed ICE and border patrol agents.
Normally, holders of student and work visas or green cards are informed that their permission is in jeopardy and they need to respond, or that it has been revoked, and they have so many days to leave. Even the Oak Ridge Nazi, Carl Berger, accused of lying about his participation in the Holocaust, had several years of appeals before he was flown back to Germany.
No, these high profile street.abductions by plainclothes agents into unmarked cars and thence into an increasingly opaque detention system are aimed at eroding habeas corpus rights for anybody citizens included, that Trump is annoyed with.
Much is made of Trump's inspiration by Javier Milei, Argentina's President , who has taken a chainsaw to government budgets and red tape there. It looks as though, in this case, trump.is taking a leaf from another period of Argentinean history, the "Dirty War", in which many opposition candidates were disappeared.
All this makes me think of the poem by Martin Niemoller:
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
There was no bipartisan immigration bill. By the time it hit the Floor, not a single Rep voted for the law. That is because, when Gotaways and exemptions were included, the bill codified into law 2-3 million migrants a year, or more. Trump didn't kill the bill, Math did.
Combined with just the migrants that have arrived since 2020, by 2028 or so, Biden migrants, alone, would have comprised a landless 51rst state, larger in population than 48 other US states.
The mess we have is about to get much worse, and no one seems to care. Trump has ended all federal welfare for migrants, just as the billions of tax dollars sent to migrants thru NGOs, have permanently evaporated.
The US is a very high cost of living country. Most migrants are sparsely educated and skilled, working for low wages. It will take a while, but when the migrant subsidies disappear completely, if even 10% cannot feed and shelter themselves, the US homeless population will double, very quickly. Dems and Biden enticed millions of people to relocate where their skills and education, do not match the cost of living. The result is going to be tragic, on a mass scale.
Here's the problem:
For the past 50 years, ever since the first oil crisis in 1973 exposed the flaws in us manufacturing and woke us up to the fact that imported cars, tools, furniture, computers, etc were cheaper and often better than what we could make here, the status of us workers has been reverting to what it was before WW2. The thirty years from 1945 to 1975 were an anomaly resulting from America being the only nation to emerge unscathed from WW2. Everything since then has been an increasingly futile attempt to recreate the magic years when a man could graduate high school (or even not) and get a union job at a plant and make a middle class wage doing the kind of work that is now increasingly done by robots.
it is tempting to use protectionist tactics to protect the incomes of American workers but that won't work. Prices will rise to eat up any increase in wages and output will drop, unless there is massive automation, which will be accelerated by more expand labor. A good example of what might happen is to look at sweatshirts from American Giant, which has an all American supply chain. Hoodies from AG cost around $150, about four times what a comparable Bangladeshi product would cost in Wal-Mart.
The problem for the democrats is that labor is increasingly hard to represent effectively, whereas, intellectual workers, who are harder to replace and have money to donate, can drive campaigns.
There's a deep contempt and distrust most Americans feel toward what responsibly must not be called "liberal" but recognized for what it is: An emergent radical and out-of-touch Democratic Left. The uncompromising rigidity of their radical positions cannot be sugar-coated by calling themselves "progressives." Control and manipulation of the language is a hallmark of authoritarianism.
Fascinating. Every week, as Ruy keeps digging, the situation seems more dire. If the stats are correct, this will be the obituary of the Dem Party, if it remains, as is.
College educated white Dem voters favor redirecting police funds by 50 points, because most cops are racists? Fine, they should call each other, when someone is breaking into their home, in the middle of the night, rather than 911.
By 40 points they support trans girls and trans women in formerly, exclusively, female spaces. This pairs with the Dem proclivity to insist, preschoolers be instructed they may have been misgendered at birth, even as they are educated in the mechanics of various sexual relationships.
By 30 points, our educated betters, favor the end of fossil fuels? Even Sweden and Germany are beginning to realize, dependency on renewables, as they now exist, is the road to economic ruin, not salvation. How are the college educated White Dems unable to grasp, fossil fuels are the backbone of US food production and national defense, and will be, for decades to come?
White college educated liberals believe border safety is less important than welcoming migrants? Reuters polling shows between 750 million and 1 billion world residents would emigrate to the US, if allowed to do so. Are we expected to welcome them all?
Moreover, stories of violent migrant crime are no longer rare. A 3 year old crime, of a migrant driving 100 mph, drunk and stoned, hitting SoCal teens on a CA freeway with such force, the auto caring the teens immediately burst into flames, and immolated them, recently made the news yet again.
For burning two 19 year old Americans alive, the migrant felon, will be released this summer after serving 3.5 years for the deaths. For those without a calculator handy, that means CA values each teen life, as worth less than 2 years of migrant incarceration. Th felon is enjoying a 6.5 years early release. Until this morning, CA was still refusing to aid ICE with the immolator's deportation.
As Dems clutch their pearls, 90 days into the Trump term, sure tariffs are the end of the Republic and gang banging, wife beaters must, be adjudicated deportable thrice, not twice, to truly enjoy due process, they might consider NYC in the mid 1990s. Eventually, the city's Progressive policies rendered the metropolis so uninhabitable, one of the most liberal electorates in the US, elected the most conservative Prosecutor in the nation, Mayor, to clean up the mess.
Trump's election was America pulling the emergency break, on Progressive policies, just as New Yorkers did in 1993. To have a chance at winning future elections, Dems must purge the policies of White, college educated Progressives or they must pray, US voters suddenly become fond of lawlessness, expensive and unreliable energy and millions of unvetted migrants, running amuck, or worse.
The elephant in the room is that the Democratic Party is increasingly dominated by white college-educated women. It is now THEIR party (regardless of the gender of any titular leader). Modern feminism is the ideological North Star, and men are welcome in the party as long as they downplay their masculinity and accept their place in a position of cultural dhimmitude.
Very few self-respecting men will find that appealing. I suspect the Democratic party has hit the point of diminishing returns leaning into Schrodinger Feminism and will continue to erode support.
Just one point on the abundance agenda. There is zero chance the Democrats can do that. The core competency of the modern Left is litigation, which is wholly incompatible with an abundance agenda.
It's social-democratic malpractice for Teixeira to exclude childcare, long-term care, healthcare, community college, and affordable housing from any list of the affective (felt) needs and interests of working and middle class families. This is the stuff cut from Build Back Better in favor of infrastructure, chips, and green energy which, as important as they are, are not what moves the dial.
So it's your contention that Democrats should run on increasing the size of government and raising taxes?
The article purports to tell us what working-class voters "really want". I responded to that claim. As to how to get there? It took a universal payroll tax to get Medicare and Social Security for older adults. I suppose you could call that "raising taxes", but the programs have near universal approval. And cutting Medicaid to reduce government spending and size, as Republicans propose, will leave millions without health insurance and long-term care. That's why Medicaid, which relies on federal and state taxes, is almost as popular, as is Head Start pre-school, which allows young low-income working class couples to have two parents in the workforce. These programs touch people's lives, so yeah, Democrats should run on them.
We are $36T in debt. If you ask people - hey would you like free stuff - most would enthusiastically say yes. Medicare and Social Security are running out of money because the government won't make the hard choices. (And Medicare costs me $235+$250+$45+$25 monthly -- and vision and hearing are out of pocket.). Is Medicaid solvent? Is Head Start just a super expensive government daycare program?
Ask families to sit down and write checks for these programs and see how enthusiastic they are.
The far left's cultural dogmas has certainly contributed to the Democratic party's loss of support from working class voters. But jettisoning unpopular positions on DEI, structural racism, and climate change alone won't bring these voters back. Nor will it convince young voters to embrace the party. Democrats have to come to grips with their relationship with government. Over the past several decades, Democrats have come to believe that the best, if not only, way to promote broad-based prosperity and improve the lives of Americans (or at least certain groups of Americans) is through government programs and regulations. In reality, these programs and regulations have often done just the opposite - they have both inhibited free market expansion (e.g. job growth, housing construction, business start-ups, etc.) and diminished the quality of community life (e.g. regulations regarding crime, homelessness, educational choice, etc). The government-solution orientation of Democrats reached its zenith during the Biden administration, which turned over domestic policymaking to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Sanders acolytes, who expanded the federal government's regulatory power across nearly every aspect of American commercial, educational, and cultural life. At the same time the Biden administration's bureaucrats exerted governmental power to silence its critics through both legal actions and censorship undertakings with private industry. In 2024, American votes finally had enough. The rejection of Democrat's active government ideology was not newfound; it has been growing since the Obama administration's use of executive power to implement its agenda on a legion of issues, including immigration amnesty, fossil fuel mandates, university disciplinary hearings, and banking and employment regulations. The majority of American's don't favor excessive government regulation. Until Democrats understand this, and revise their ideological obsession with government solutions to allow for greater free market growth and better community life, then Americans will rightly view efforts by Democrats to temporize the worst of their cultural nostrums as calculated cosmetics rather than a serious to transform the party.
I think this article makes some excellent points; however, I'm a bit disturbed by some of the generalizations made here. The Democrats have been told for years that they have to move to the right to accommodate a larger demographic, yet I don't see the Republicans responding in kind. They keep moving to the right as well, and as a result, issues which would benefit ALL Americans, such as raising the minimum wage and protecting the environment, are eroding. Climate change, for example, is apparently considered a priority mainly among "progressive" white college graduates. This is unfortunate. Climate change affects everyone! When the California wildfires destroyed the towns of Paradise in 2018 and Greenville in 2022, it wasn't just liberals who lost their homes. These issues are all interrelated. People need to understand this. If subsistence farmers in Central America are unable to make a living because the climate has become too inhospitable, they have little choice but to either work for drug cartels or go somewhere else, which often turns out to be the USA, and then we have an immigration problem. If "cheap, abundant" fossil fuels become depleted today, everyone's children will suffer tomorrow. Same with environmental protection. Today's ingestion of foul air and water leads to tomorrow's cancers. There needs to be an honest dialogue between people from different demographics and everyone needs to understand that the various disparate issues can't be compartmentalized; they're all part of a long-term whole, which the Republicans have shown zero interest in fixing.
If every single person in the West, permanently and immediately reverted to only candles and actual equine power, the world's Climate would barely notice.
In a world of 8 billion, the 1 billion in the West, are a rounding error. China now produces more carbon than the entire West, Japan and South Korea combined. If Climate Warriors want to save the world, they must move beyond a West, that has already reduced carbon output back to 1990 levels, mostly thru clean natural gas, and go where the carbon is, Asia and South America.
FYI , the new Energy Sec notes when he was a college student studying nuclear power in the 1970s, 85% of the world's power was fossil fuel derived. A 1/2 century later, after trillions spent, 80-82% of the world's energy is fossil fuel produced. Renewables are a laudable goal, but we must be realistic.
Finally, a friend who lost a house in PP is convinced the fires were not Climate related, but started by the massive homeless population, that lives in the hills behind the area, and utilizes fire for warmth and cooking.
Thank you for your response. The official cause of the fire was a downed power line, which sparked the fire which then spread rapidly due to dry conditions most likely exacerbated by climate change.
Furthermore, from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions:
"Climate change has been a key factor in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the Western United States. Wildfire risk depends on a number of factors, including temperature, soil moisture, and the presence of trees, shrubs, and other potential fuel. All these factors have strong direct or indirect ties to climate variability and climate change. Climate change enhances the drying of organic matter in forests (the material that burns and spreads wildfire), and has doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015 in the western United States.
Research shows that changes in climate create warmer, drier conditions. Increased drought, and a longer fire season are boosting these increases in wildfire risk...."
So what are the chances the Party will follow your wise counsel? It seems not very good, given your analysis of who the base is. I suppose they could suddenly change direction like a flock of birds but I don't think argument will make that happen. Fundamentally, they, like their counterparts on the right, care more about their ideology than the Party as an institution. The Republicans have had their still incomplete internal revolution by the portion of the base that felt betrayed by the leadership. Absent some new developments, Democrats seem likely to go the same way.
Agree.
As someone wiser than me said, people's primary attachment is to their opinions.
What saddens me is that the idea of liberalism in thought and perspectives is no longer a characteristic of the Democratic Party. The reason is that it has become infested by progressives who are as tribal as are MAGAs.
This the best article written about our political divisions I have read. The text is simple, factual, and logical. If you don't ascribe to the progressive, white liberal belief system, where do you think it came from? My answer is that it came from the indoctrination of immature minds perpetrated by our betters - our college professors.
Most recent public opinion polling indicates continued broad support for solar and wind energy in the U.S., although support is declining among the most partisan Republicans. Solar consistently ranks as a highly favored energy source, and a majority of Americans support government policies to promote renewable energy development.
If solar was accurately portrayed, and the finances behind it actually reported on, support would go down. Unfortunately we don't have journalists any more.
Check out Bloomberg New Energy Finance to get some facts. There are many journalists reporting on the energy transition.
The left likes to pretend that renewables can replace fossil fuels and nuclear.
It cannot.
Or that it's cheaper (it's not) and that it's better for the environment (it's not)
Brent, it appears you know a lot about "the left". Have you ever had a real conversation with a leftist about nuclear or fossil fuels?
Of course. Most think the reason we don't have 100% renewables is because we permit Exxon to lobby.
100% agree. And the Dem party and leadership had better start today on realignment of our messaging if we have any hope of capturing the Presidency in ‘28.
Same old tired analysis since right after trump kicked ass! The truth is the Democrat party will never get back to be a part of the work in class however you define it! It is the party of the academic and professionally Elite and they are certainly on their way out. Donald Trump will win a few. He will lose a few, but in the end, he will change America for the best over the next four years or actually a little less than four years. We will become the real America again !America for Real Americans with real American values
When he has become the author of the first completely unnecessary man-made recession, (something possibly already underway) as well as the guy responsible for losing the dollar as the world reserve currency, as well as the guy who lost a trade war to China and essentially ceded the world stage to the Chinese...and he has less-than-nothing to show the public for it...I just don't think the average person will be thinking "Gee he really changed America for the best!"
I’m so fascinated to hear what you think is going well under Trumps administration right now
What is going well is change. Any change from the last four years. Which is also change from Obama years to now. Unlike the losers, those who want change are willing to give it time and accept some pain. That is how badly the Dems fuc*ked up this world. Your impact on today is much greater than you can even imagine. The irony, with each Trump win against the left, it forces the left to go into the direction it needs to become winners. Thank Trump for that. He is doing more for liberals than any leader they have had for a long time.
You are half-right; Trump is in the process of showing people just how painful, authoritarian and destructive the full implementation of the MAGA policy regime is. That will indeed help the Democrats down the line.
The problem is that it's going to hurt the United States, and especially its working class. The country will likely emerge from this having destroyed all its protective alliances and alienated all its allies, thus subordinating it to an ascendant Eurasian Chinese/Russian axis. It will have almost certainly lost its trade war with China, with nothing to show for it (certainly no one is going to be building factories in the U.S. with a tariff policy that changes by the day) except perhaps some higher unemployment and higher interest rates. The dollar is *already* starting to be jettisoned as the world reserve currency--see: the bond market and the value of the dollar--along with all the exorbitant privileges we get from it. Meanwhile Trump will have established that the next person in office can freely disobey the courts, disappear civilians off the street for expressing opinions the executive doesn't like, have the government directly attack media outlets and other institutions through DOJ lawsuits for differences of opinion, refuse to accept the outcome of elections...he will have handed to his successors, in other words, all the tools and precedents of a proper authoritarian state.
The ones who will get hurt the most in all this will be blue-collar workers, who will have to endure the worst of the consequences in return for less-than-nothing. That will indeed push them away from the madness of MAGA, and surely benefit the Dems--but like I said, it will be at a cost they and the whole country will wish they didn't have to pay.
Your scenario was already here. What voters for Trump voted for was change. I feel sorry for folks like you and the shitty world you now survive in. Assuming from your post you voted for Biden, your worldview here is no different than your world view prior to the election. You were proven wrong then and since you haven’t refined your worldview, there is no reason to believe that your world view has now become that of a loser. Nothing you posted is of any value to me. Quit frankly, I’m tired and bored to tears by the whiny losers on here. Maybe you should a try to actually come up with a winner and a winners policies and become competitive again. Your go after Trump childish strategy was also proven to be a loser. I see no hope for you. Hoping the other side fails is not a strategy for winners.
"Your scenario was already here."
Uh, no. As of October 2024, NATO was still a thing that existed, restraining the expansion of the now-unhindered Sino-Russian axis. The economy was stable, recovering and interest rates were dropping. The dollar was historically strong. Now the economy is in a tailspin--not because of any disaster or financial crisis but simply because Trump decided to dismember it--while long-term interest rates are on the rise and the dollar is in decline. We have gotten nothing in return for this unneeded pain except the wholesale loss of American soft power. A civilian being disappeared off the street by masked federal agents for co-signing an editorial the government didn't agree with was not a thing that happened six months ago. The president defying a 9-0 Supreme Court order so he could keep ignoring due process, bypass the courts and unilaterally throw people in an El Salvadoran gulag wasn't a thing that happened six months ago. Unelected oligarchs weren't carving up the government in contravention of Congress's apportionment powers. The president didn't openly brag about making billionaire friends of his money off of insider trading on market chaos he created.
The horror scenario arriving at our doorsteps wasn't even on the radar six months ago. It began its approach in January of 2025, when the Chief Executive of the U.S. began making a series of choices so colossally bad that the rate and scale of the implosion that has followed since then will, when all is said and done, have few comparisons we can point to in American history.
"Hoping the other side fails is not a strategy for winners."
But it is a good component of a larger strategy. For, as people smarter than you or me or Ruy have noted:
"Never interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake."
-Napoleon Bonaparte
That’s your world under your worldview. It was rejected on 11/5/2024. As a losing view, it has no validity to today. Isn’t it about time you folks stopped your useless whining and maybe find a way to become competitive again? Waiting for the other side to screw up also proved to be bad strategy. We’re back to “orange man bad.” How’d that work out for you? What I can’t figure out, is why you folks are wasting your time and insulting the voters you need to bring to your side to win. I guess a losers mentality is hard to get over. The left has been and continues to be, the party of not being responsible for anything, but being victims of Trump who you concede bests you at everything. From the outside, your world sucks and why would anyone want to part of that?
No Presidency happens in a vacuum. In a country where 1/2 of all families live on $77K a year or less, and 25% live on less than $45K a year, or less, Biden increased the cost of American life by $13K a year. He accomplished that with needless spending and giveaways to the rich, after he unnecessarily locked down the US economy for nearly 2 years. dems cheered as schools remained needlessly close for 18 months or longer, in Blue states.
Dems spent the bulk of the last 4 years devoted to forgiving the student loans of MDs, JDs , MBAs and engineers earning $125K, annually, at age 26, on their way to paychecks in middle age, 4X larger than the median US family income.
10 million migrants crossed the US border without one single extra apartment to house them, to say nothing of a lack of extra healthcare workers or bilingual teachers. No border in all of world history, has previously endured such a breach, with the permission of the host country.
The list goes on and on and on. Perhaps Trump's tariffs are a plague or perhaps, in the end, they will benefit the 80% of Americans economically leveled by Dems, the last 4 years. 100 days in, no one knows. We do know for certain the result of the Biden Presidency. At the expense of the bottom 4 quintiles of US earners, the top 20% of the wealthiest Americans, never had it so good.
I am not a democrat 😂
If it walks like a liberal and thinks like a liberal... Your self described political affiliation is irrelevant.
Maybe so.
Also, am I real American if I don’t agree with Trump?
Of course you are a real American.
However, many Dems side with other country's against our own, because....Trump. They are siding with criminals and illegal, wife-beating immigrants, males pretending to be females, and massive fraud, waste, and abuse -- because....Trump.
Or just, in my case, siding with the constitution and the classically liberal values of checks and balances, due process and individual freedom. We’ve got to get past what the dems think and did (case in point it’s ALL TLP talks about) and focus on building something meaningful with integrity and purpose. Why do most Republicans who love Trump want to continue to live in reactionary politics when that reactivity is similarly destroying our country?
I compare that to Jesus turning the tables over in the temple.
I guess you could form a committee while our country collapses under massive debt while Dem cronies get rich....
I wonder how much you loved the Constitution during the Biden years and the first few months of the Trump Admin when bureaucrats and judges run the country.
I disliked much of Biden presidency. It still doesn’t negate the overreach of the executive branch has picked up wild momentum, with no clear oversight. Again why are you bringing it back to the dems??
Are you a Christian? So wild, me too. It’s even wilder how differing our visions of what Jesus would have done are. I’m not sure how to bridge this gap between American perceptions of reality. Mine may be suspect, and I am constantly asking myself if what I am reading is true. I can’t be sure. But I can do the best I can to be flexible in my thinking. And kind. I cannot say the same for current MAGA.
Not a Republican, If you don't understand that partisans are irrelevant, you can begin a journey of a working worldview. You describe your worldview which is the same the Dems had/have and that worldview was rejected soundly in the last election.
Shall we assume you also agreed with the liberals worldview of what our Constitution means?
I didn't assume you were. But you assumed I was liberal/a Democrat. I am a mixed bag, as I hope most people are. I don't know what my interpretation of the Constitution would be labelled--I just read it and apply it, particularly as a compare/contrast benchmark to many of the years I have lived in non-democratic countries.
The reason that the activist base of the Democratic Party will not change is because their nonintuitive radical beliefs have taken on the characteristics of a religion and are immune to logic and reason. Anyone who has tried to discuss the issues described (policing, immigration, racism, etc.) with a young Democrat was most likely met with anger, dismissiveness, contempt, and personal attacks (racism, Zionism, sexism) rather than facts and coherent positions. Four years of leftist indoctrination is hard to undo. How ironic that the most educated group of people in the country is the one most likely to embrace the most poorly thought out and destructive ideas.
This article ignores the most important thing that the working class wants. They want steady secure jobs with benefits and pensions where they can work for one company for a life time. With such jobs they can purchase a house in a safe and stable community with good schools. They want to know that their children can also get such a job in the community and live nearby when they are of age. These jobs were provided by the local factory. Wall street has encouraged these factories to close or move to other countries, especially through allowing stock manipulation through buy backs (see Leopold, Wall Street's War on Workers).
Pretty much. Globalism killed that. Can it be brought back? Maybe with populist fusion between the Right and Left populists. Right and left populists need to separate from the Establishment factions in their own parties and join. I can't say I am optimistic.
Good piece.
Honestly, I think the Democrat’s only expeditious path back to legitimacy goes through a major Trump failure.
It has to be a failure of Trump’s making…not caused by Trump-resistance that can easily be dismissed as derangement (i.e. activist judges intervening in immigration/deportation procedings, which continues to be a popular issue for Trump). Dems would be wise to drop their ‘due process’ crusade as they have zero integrity on that issue outside of their shrinking bubble given their actions during the Trump era. The same holds for first amendment arguments. Dems are on the wrong side of the immigration issue and their line of argument only reinforces their hypocrisy. They should find a way to help or stand down on this one.
The tariffs are Dem's best bet. But even with tariffs, Dems can’t be seen as cheering for them to fail. Americans suffered greatly under Biden’s inflation, which was caused by the Democrat's reckless spending with seemingly no real benefit. At least with the tariffs, there is a hope that the pain will be short term and yield something great for the working class. You can make all sorts of wonky financial arguments as to why that’s not the case, but the working class sees Trump working for them on this issue.
I honestly don’t think the current Democratic party is capable of moderating. Absent an unassailable failure of Trump’s making, I think Dems are in for a long haul. And if Trump is successful, well, Dems may be lost of a generation.
A good start would be to stop calling us all fascists and Nazis. Dems really have to get a grip with that stuff. It’s a terrible look.