Democrats Are In Deep Trouble

It actually isn’t a hard question
to answer. The Biden/Harris administration had an
indefensible record, and Kamala Harris didn’t seriously
try to defend it, absurdly presenting herself as the
candidate of change, while at the same time unable to
identify a single respect in which her administration
would be different from Biden’s.

Voters were unhappy about
inflation, about the economy in general, and about the
border. The Democrats, having created these problems,
had no solutions to offer. Instead, they tried to tell
voters that their concerns were imaginary.

Also, Kamala herself was a lousy
candidate.

But the reality is worse than
that. As the dust settles, I think Democrats will
realize they are in a deeper hole than they thought. It
was no coincidence that Harris refused to say what her
position was on a variety of issues, earning the title
of the “no comment” candidate–something that must be
unprecedented in presidential history. The problem
wasn’t that Kamala was tongue-tied, the problem was that
the Democrats no longer have a coherent policy agenda.

The one issue that Harris never
refrained from talking about was abortion. That is,
today, the Democrats’ signature–and arguably only–issue.
Apart from a fervent devotion to abortion, up to the
moment of birth and beyond, what do they stand for?

A few years ago, the energy in the
Democratic Party was in its socialist wing. Several of
its seemingly up-and-coming representatives were members
of the Democratic Socialists of America, and Bernie
Sanders is the grand old man of socialism. On one
memorable occasion, Nancy Pelosi was unable to explain
how a Democrat is different from a socialist.

But the bloom is off that rose.
Socialism was never a serious alternative for America;
it is a discredited ideology that has been rejected
around the world. And socialism is not a plausible
ideology for a party whose core demographic is people
who earn over $200,000 a year.

The Democrats are the party of DEI
and Kamala Harris was a DEI candidate, but DEI is widely
unpopular. The United States has labored under
affirmative action, of which DEI is the current
iteration, for 50 years. But Americans don’t like race
discrimination or sex discrimination, and they believe
in merit. An unbroken history of polling, stretching
back for decades, has found that race and sex
discrimination in employment and education are
unpopular. Despite the massive corporate, government and
cultural pressure that has tried to force DEI on
Americans, that remains true. DEI, now on its way out,
can hardly be the basis for future Democratic campaigns.

Opening the borders and admitting
millions of illegal immigrants has been the core policy
priority of the Biden administration, as reflected in
Biden’s day-one executive orders. But it was a policy
prescription that Democrats were never able to openly
articulate and defend. Thus, as the 2024 election
approached they were reduced to making the absurd claim
that “the Southern border is secure.” Open borders are
deeply and correctly unpopular, and do not provide a
platform on which any future Democrat can run, although
no doubt we will see plenty of tearjerking stories about
illegals who are being deported.

The energy issue is analogous.
Occasionally a Democrat will say publicly what the party
really believes, that Americans live too well, and we
must reduce our standard of living in order to emit less
carbon dioxide. This view is manifested in efforts to
suppress oil and gas production and subsidize and
mandate expensive renewables. But the Democrats can’t
admit that their goal is to make gasoline unaffordable,
so when elections roll around they release the strategic
petroleum reserve to drive the price down. The bottom
line is that Democrats can yammer endlessly about the
climate, but they can’t run on a platform of
unaffordable energy.

The Democrats have always been the
party of high taxes and unrestrained spending,
ostensibly in pursuit of high-minded goals. But hardly
anyone buys that anymore. Blue states are failing,
without exception, and Americans are flocking to
low-tax, low-spending red states–where they find that
quality of life is better, not worse, than the states
that spend vastly more on government programs.

Ever since the 1960s, the
Democrats have been the party of peace (or, at least,
anti-war). They have never repudiated the pacifism and
borderline anti-Americanism of those days, and as
recently as 2008, Barack Obama ascended from obscurity
to a presidential nomination largely because he was
almost the only prominent Democrat to oppose the Iraq
war from the beginning. But now Republicans are running
as a peace party, and it is Democrats who cling to
international commitments and want to keep the Ukraine
war, in particular, going.

Issues relating to war and peace
are complicated, and the parties’ inclinations do not
fall into a simple hawk/dove paradigm. But for the
foreseeable future, Democratic Party platforms will not
be based on opposition to foreign wars, nor will an
“America last” ideology ever be a vote-getter.

So the Democrats’ problems go a
lot deeper than a senile president and an inept
candidate. At this point, the party’s historic policy
agenda is in tatters and needs a complete
reboot–something of which party leaders seem incapable.