The Democratic party has hit the abyss. As Shane Goldmacher wrote this week in The New York Times, “[the party’s] standing has plunged to startling new lows — 27 percent approval in a recent NBC News poll, the weakest in surveys dating to 1990.”
This is not a nasty MAGA opinion; it’s a sober, factual assessment from a paper who’d love nothing more than to see a Democratic president in the White House.
But given how the Democratic-thinking complex is reacting to this freefall, I don’t see things getting any better. All the analyses and proposals I’ve read to turn things around reinforce why they’re in such trouble in the first place.
They act as if there’s an intellectual or “policy” way out of their mess. They’re awash in arguments between an “abundance” agenda or recapturing the working class or attracting young men or getting Blacks and Hispanics back or quieting progressives or getting tougher on immigration or focusing on inflation or bashing Trump harder.
But when people don’t like you, they don’t care about your ideas, even good ones. When I was in advertising, we’d say “I don’t care how much you know until I know how much you care.”
We used the term a “likeable brand personality” as something brands should aspire to. Of course, it’s a lot easier to shape the brand of a soap or potato chip than a political party when the stakes are exponentially larger.
But the point remains: if people don’t like you, they won’t buy what you’re selling. And most people now see Democrats as a party for the college class, not the working class. A party of the elite. And who likes the elite besides the elite?
Dems have also been hurt by a cratering of their credibility, from covering up the Biden scandals to the Trump Russian hoax to the hypocrisy of doing things they accuse Republicans of doing to the shameful partisanship of a legacy media that became their enablers.
What I believe has most damaged Democrats, though, is that they allowed love of America to become a Republican thing.
They held MAGA in such contempt that they could never bring themselves to do anything that might make them look like MAGA. Unfortunately for them, loving America was on that list.
Maybe they convinced themselves that all those progressive agitations they became associated with—Black Lives Matter, Defund the police, the 1619 Project, reframing America as “systemically racist,” sanctuary cities, open borders, etc.—were really a sign of their deep love for America. You know, like tough love.
The problem is that no one bought it. Indeed, Democrats didn’t even try to make a case for tough love. They probably figured that MAGA made such a mockery of loving America that the very idea is outdated and irrelevant.
It’s not.
I speak not as a Republican or a conservative or a MAGA. I speak as an immigrant from the Third World who loves this country.
When I attended my daughter’s graduation from NYU last week, I felt that love as much as I’ve ever felt it. The great majority of graduates were not white. I was surrounded by a festive sea of happy graduates and their families who looked like they came from, yes, the Third World.
I couldn’t help reflect on the woke movement of recent years that has gone out of its way to show us what a terrible country this is. That right there is the Democrats’ biggest problem.
If I ran the party, I would make a huge order for American flags and ask millions of party members to proudly display it during July fourth. Until they can utter the words “God Bless America” and mean it, they’ll stay in the abyss.
But we shouldn’t hold our breath. Some things are too much to ask for, and asking a Democrat to do something he or she associates with Republicans is probably one of them.
God bless America.
