There’s an earthquake crackling through the Democratic party ecosystem in the wake of the humiliating loss to Donald Trump.
After eight years of castigating Trump as the country’s #1 enemy– a congenital liar and cheater who would stop at nothing to get his way, even if that meant destroying our democracy– Democrats were shaken that this horrible man could beat them fair and square.
In just a few hours on the night of Nov. 5, eight years of Trumpian gangsterism were overtaken by a resounding victory that was, stunningly, totally legitimate. This didn’t just trigger cognitive dissonance—it triggered a political cardiac arrest.
How could this happen? How could they get things so wrong?
For starters, what many Democrats seem to have missed is that they turned into a party of snobs. Snobs are full of themselves, and when you’re full of yourself, you tend to lose your edge.
Democrats lost their edge.
They thought, for example, that they could abandon the working-class and that the working-class would not notice. But as Bernie Sanders himself said: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party, which has abandoned working-class people, would find that the working-class has abandoned them.”
They also seem to have forgotten that a key reason Joe Biden won in 2020 was his “Joe Scranton” image that appealed to that very same working class.
Unfortunately, they had to deal with the reality that Scranton Joe turned into Woke Joe after he entered the White House. To the detriment of his party, he allowed his presidency to be hijacked by a radical progressive left with an anti-America streak that represents a small but very vocal minority of Americans.
Biden’s promised “return to normalcy” turned into a chaotic term where his staff and their media enablers had to hide from the country that he gradually became mentally unfit for the world’s toughest job.
Because the Dems did better than expected in the 2022 midterms, they got cocky and figured there was no need to make any pivots, either away from Woke Joe or Cognitively Impaired Joe. But by the time Biden’s disastrous debate performance made it impossible to keep him on the ballot, it was too late for any pivot. With only a few months left to Election Day, the record of the Biden-Harris administration was already set.
It was a record that alienated much of the country, regardless of who the candidate would be.
“Donald Trump won a majority of white women and remarkable numbers of Black and Latino voters and young men,” Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times. “Democratic insiders thought people would vote for Kamala Harris, even if they didn’t like her, to get rid of Trump. But more people ended up voting for Trump, even though many didn’t like him, because they liked the Democratic Party less.”
Evidently, Democratic strategists never figured out that they became a party of snobs, and that ordinary Americans who love their country can’t stand snobs. They can’t stand the condescending attitude of know-it-alls who keep reminding you that they know more than you.
In many ways, this sense of superiority came to define the Democratic brand of recent years.
“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),” Dowd wrote. “This alienated half the country, or more.”
As Bill Maher said on his show a few days ago: “This election was about this country’s had enough with the anti-common sense woke bulls**t.”
Beyond the wokeness and the condescension, people were also alienated by progressive policies that led to record low approval ratings for Biden and 7 out of 10 Americans saying the country was on the wrong track.
“From an Orwellian-sounding Inflation Reduction Act that increased inflation to a feckless foreign policy that emboldened our enemies—the Taliban blew up our soldiers, Russia invaded Ukraine, Iran through proxies attacked Israel—this was no steady hand on the wheel,” Ilya Shapiro writes in City Journal. “Biden fulfilled the only mandate he had (not to be Trump) on Day One, but he governed like FDR’s woke grandson.”
Instead of normalcy, Biden and his party delivered instability that their media comrades struggled to gaslight. But no spin could camouflage the outrage of allowing 12 million illegals to enter through virtually open borders, not to mention a shamefully biased justice system that swarmed Trump with indictments during an election season, something that would never have happened with a Democratic candidate.
The 2024 election, then, became not so much a race between two candidates as between two records—Trump’s first term versus Biden’s only term. Clearly, a majority preferred Trump’s first term.
As much as Democrats tried to convince people they needed to vote for Harris because Trump would be a disaster, most voters recalled Trump’s first term and concluded that a future Harris presidency would be a bigger disaster.
I’m no expert on sociology, but I do understand body language. Democrats are no longer the party of the people because their sanctimonious body language showed it, whether they realized it or not.
People who lose sight of essential truths are often blinded by too much self-love and self-obsession. The Democrats in the Trump era lost sight of their country because they couldn’t see beyond their smug little world. On the night of Nov. 5, the truth came crashing down on them: The people fired them, fair and square, and the aftershocks won’t be going away anytime soon.
