Since last January 20 it has seemed to me (as it still does) that the Democrats’ rush to cancel the previous administration’s legacy and replace it overnight with a violently progressive political agenda for which they have no electoral mandate is a measure of just how deeply the election of Donald Trump and his ensuing presidency shocked, affronted, and frightened them, and how determined they are to make certain that no such thing happens in this country again. I have thought too that, while they are determined to pass as much of their program by any and every means possible before the mid-term elections next year, they are confident of prevailing in the longer term—by similar means but also from the conviction that the majority of the American people want, in the long run, the return to the “normalcy” and bipartisanship that Joe Biden promised during the campaign. A brilliant article by Daniel McCarthy (“
Biden’s party is over”) published this week in The Spectator and now being circulated electronically in the U.S. by Spectator US, has widened my views on the subject.
“The Democratic Party is dying,” McCarthy argues.
“That may be hard to believe since Democrats control both houses of Congress and won the last presidential election with a record 81 million votes. But the exiguous margins of their hold on the House and Senate, with fewer than 51 percent of the seats in either chamber, tell another story, as does the desperation of their struggle to abolish the filibuster and federalize election law.” So, he adds, does their aim to pack the Supreme Court and the Senate as well by
“turning two tiny Democratic bastions into new states,” and their assault on the fundamental principle—the equal representation of the states in the upper chamber—on which the Senate rests.
Briefly put, McCarthy’s thesis holds that politically, socially, and economically the Democratic Party has accomplished nothing positive for the country since the 1960s while damaging it considerably in all these respects. Biden had no coattails last year. He was nominated not because the Democrats believed he had a constituency of interests behind him, but because they knew Bernie Sanders would stampede the American electorate to the Republicans. Further, black Democrats preferred him to both Kamal Harris and Cory Booker.
The Party’s leadership problem isn’t about race: it’s that the Kennedy-esque image and ideology have had their last dance.”
What panics Democrats is that they have always imagined that the demographic shift toward a majority-minority white nation would result in a Democratic America, or even a single-party one. That would rescue them from their failed political record by making race and identity the most critical national issues.
“This is why race-baiting has become [for them]
not only the most important stratagem but practically the only one that Democrats and their allies resort to in their public messaging”—for instance, by trying to convince Asians that whites are targeting them with violence, while the fact is that people of every race and ethnicity are being threatened by the violence of nihilistic mobs that the Democratic Party refuses to put down. For the party’s left-wing, law enforcement is the enemy.
“When their publicists write that they really and literally mean ‘Defund the police,’ Americans of all races must believe them.” The Democrats’ worst nightmare is that they will do so—as a growing number of minority voters did in 2020 by voting for Donald Trump. When the race card doesn’t work, the only other cards the Donkeys can play are blank ones. Should the Republicans gain influence in the burned-over cities, the Democrats will lose ground not only there but in the states as well.
“Hence,” McCarthy concludes,
“the sudden panic about political arrangements they were content with until the day before yesterday. Biden is alive but his party is dead. And the newborn radicals can’t win—not without rewriting the rules to get around competition at the state level, where elections are closer to the people.”
Mr. McCarthy is absolutely correct. This is precisely what the Democratic Revolution is all about.
This post was originally published in my blog:
chiltonwilliamson.com/
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