What Undid the Democrats? Let Me Count the Ways

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Most Democrat (and those Republicans looking to be helpful) are offering up their considered opinions about why the Democrats lost so badly, so totally, in such a gloriously complete manner.

Obviously, I’m not one of those Republicans wanting to be “helpful.” I guess being called a “fascist” and a “racist” makes the Democrats’ drubbing immensely satisfying to me.

Democrats are in the same position as someone who knows they’re very sick but can’t for the life of them figure out what the problem is. Could it be that golf ball-sized lump on their head? Perhaps it’s the bleeding from their ear that’s related to the cause.

The truth is, Democrats know damn well what the problem with their party is but they have so much invested in identity politics, gender craziness, and woke culture that if they gave it all up, they’d have to do something they’d rather die than do.

They’d have to admit they were wrong about all of it. 

And for the arrogant elitists who have spent their careers looking down their nose at us plebes, it would just be too bitter a pill to swallow. So they search frantically — not for the most plausible or the actual reasons for their drubbing but for an explanation that sounds reasonable enough to pass muster with the rest of the far left.

“The Democratic Party needs to be rebuilt,” said Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “We have become a party of elites, whether we abandoned working-class people, whether they abandoned us, whether it’s some combination of all of the above.”

When a party promotes open borders, gender transformation for kids, and punishment for using the wrong pronoun, I would say that working-class voters ran from the Democrats while screaming in terror at the thought of these wackos governing. 

The Free Press’s Bari Weiss speaking on Fox News::

i[I] turns out that running on these extraordinarily niche issues like gender fluidity or defunding the police or any number of things that people in places where I live get extremely excited about don’t actually matter or frankly, feel profoundly out of touch to ordinary Americans. So if “progressive” is about, you know, these niche issues that you find in on college campuses and in gender studies department, and you want to keep doubling down on that, you’re going to continue to lose.

Bret Stephens expanded on that point and laid the wood to the Democratic Party.

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.

The most basic explanation for the left’s defeat is that the Democrats’ “America” is a radically different place than the vast majority of voters’ “America.” In ordinary people’s “America,” life is simple, straightforward, and with a minimum of rigmarole. You can’t live in the kind of society being promoted by the radical left without carrying a swollen list of instructions on how to talk to people, whom you can’t offend, who gets to stand in line ahead of you, and whom you should apologize to if you happen to be white.

Ordinary voters rejected that “America” decisively. Will the Democrats learn and alter their strategy to reflect the reality of the nation they wish to govern?