We’ve been pawing through the post-election analysis (which takes on various forms of “I told you so” and “if only they had listened to me”) and this morning we provide you with excerpts from three of the takes we found most insightful.
Well, okay, so it’s basically the same take expressed by three different writers. The basic idea: the Democrats have become the party of snobbish, condescending “educated” elites and the voters basically just told ’em to go to hell. We’ve been saying that for years here at YSDA, but let’s hear it said better by others.
David Brooks has long argued that the divide in societies all over the West is about education, not race or gender. In his piece headlined “Voters to Elites: Do You See Us Now?” Brooks writes:
Society worked as a vast segregation system, elevating the academically gifted above everybody else. Before long, the diploma divide became the most important chasm in American life. High school graduates die nine years sooner than college-educated people. They die of opioid overdoses at six times the rate. They marry less and divorce more and are more likely to have a child out of wedlock. They are more likely to be obese. A recent American Enterprise Institute study found that 24 percent of people who graduated from high school at most have no close friends. They are less likely than college grads to visit public spaces or join community groups and sports leagues. They don’t speak in the right social justice jargon or hold the sort of luxury beliefs that are markers of public virtue.…
The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. I guess it’s hard to focus on class inequality when you went to a college with a multibillion-dollar endowment and do environmental greenwashing and diversity seminars for a major corporation. Donald Trump is a monstrous narcissist, but there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself.
As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet…. In 2024, he built the very thing the Democratic Party once tried to build — a multiracial, working-class majority.…
Trump is a sower of chaos, not fascism…. But in chaos there’s opportunity for a new society and a new response to the Trumpian political, economic and psychological assault. These are the times that try people’s souls, and we’ll see what we are made of.
Maureen Dowd’s speciality is to lay it on the line with a practical bluntness aimed at her fellow liberals. Like this in a piece titled “Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics”:
Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).
This alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help. “When the woke police come at you,” Rahm Emanuel told me, “you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”
Never Trump Republican Bret Stephens said he had to hold his nose to vote for Kamala Harris, a position I found ludicrous. Pocket lint is a better choice than Donald Trump and Stephens should have appreciated Harris’ move to the center. Nonetheless, I thought he hit the mark with this piece titled, “A Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat”:
The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.
The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.
Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how’s that ever going to be a winning electoral look?
That’s the take from the moderate, left-to-right center. Later this week we’ll take a look at the response from the hard-left.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the 2024 general election was a massive repudiation of the Democratic Party and its policies. His victory was also a failure of the Democrats to make the case for their successes over the past four years, as they have too often failed to do. Trump, a man who attempted to overturn the 2020 election as the country watched, made possibly the most remarkable comeback in political history by winning the 2024 election. When he takes office in January 2025, he will have more power than any other man on earth ever had. He will have the opportunity to tear the U. S. government and the nation down to their foundations and remake America in his own image. Because of who and what he is, he will do terrible damage to the basic fabric of the nation, and some or most of that damage may be permanent.
The Democratic Party was once the party of the working class. Through numerous unforced errors over the last four decades, it has ceded that title to the Republican Party, which ironically has never done much to help anyone besides the wealthy and powerful. The time has come for the Democratic Party to take an honest and thorough look at itself without acrimony and to reclaim that title by earning it back. To do that, Democrats must listen to the people of this great nation and hear what they are saying about the Party:
There is more, of course, but the gist of the criticism is that Democrats aren’t listening to working-class voters and are now being punished for that failure. But we haven’t seen anything yet. Trump will get a lot done in his second term, much like Genghis Kahn and Attila the Hun “got things done.” It is late in the day for Democrats to turn things around, but their only hope of preserving the “world’s oldest democracy” is to do precisely that. Trump will have a head start, but Democrats must do the following:
The Republican Party has only ever been the party of the wealthy and powerful, throwing a few bones in the direction of the working class to get their votes by offering tax cuts (which mainly went to the wealthy, who were already wealthy without the cuts), and welcoming the votes of the Christian Right by appointing conservative judges and Supreme Court justices who would support their plans for the removal of the separation between church and state. Because they needed their votes to win elections, the Republican Party also courted the lunatic fringe who live on a steady daily diet of lies and conspiracy theories. Unfortunately for both the once great and honorable Republican Party and America, the lunatics got tired of being paid only lip service for their votes, so they took over the party. Today, the Republican Party doesn’t exist, consisting instead of only one mentally ill and demented Head Lunatic, who is calling all the shots and will soon be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States.
Democrats completely blew the 2024 election, but this was a long time coming. As early as the Eighties, when Reagan took office, and the nineties, when Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House and became one of the primary architects of the currently dysfunctional Congress, Democrats have been hemorrhaging working-class votes. We should have immediately stopped right then and asked ourselves what caused this to happen, yet here we are with a real possibility of losing our flawed yet priceless democracy, along with the Constitution and the rule of law, which made that democracy possible.
Trump will do terrible damage, but he will overreach and make mistakes. We have one last chance to defeat the monster we helped to create. We start by rebuilding the Democratic Party and refocusing it on the core principles that made it the champion of the working class. Let’s begin by getting our Congressional representatives to set this task in motion.
LikeLike