Will the Democrats See Sense?

Fresh from a thrashing by twice-President Trump, the Democrats are conducting a post-mortem of their election defeat. But the party’s coroners are coming to all the wrong conclusions. Both Joe Scarborough on MSNBC and Sunny Hostin on The View blamed racism and misogyny for Kamala Harris’ loss — despite Trump winning more Black voters than any Republican for 48 years. One in three non-Whites voted for Trump. The incumbent President made gains with all voters in 49 states and Washington, D.C. — a kind of coalition not built since Bill Clinton in 1992. But while the pundits blame the public, Machiavellian apparatchiks blame Biden — and each other. Nancy Pelosi lamented the lack of an open primary after Joe Biden bowed out: “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race […] And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time.” Likewise, George Clooney directed invective at Barack Obama “for disappearing after the election disaster and leaving him holding the bag for pushing the plan with his Hollywood pals”.

As Napoleon said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” If the Democrats want to double-down on Wokeness and let egos get in the way, I won’t stop them. Eight years of Vance, after four of Trump, sound like a blessing compared to record border crossings, rampant inflation, and failed foreign policy ventures under Biden. However, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali argued on our new podcast, The Weekly Wrap, healthy democracies feature a give-and-take of good faith debate between two parties. It would be better for America to have both sides of Congress committed to national prosperity. So, in that spirit, let’s gaze into the political crystal ball and ask: do the Democrats have any moderates left?

First, they would have to get past Kamala Harris. Despite failing upwards into the Vice President’s office, before losing a primary in her home state, and losing the popular vote to a man she spent four years calling Adolf Hitler reincarnated, Harris is reportedly thinking of running again in 2028. An Emerson poll last week put her ahead of other potential contenders.

In 2024, Harris ran the most socially progressive campaign in history. If you transported Woodrow Wilson through time, he would not recognise the party promising taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries for illegal immigrants as his own. Harris’ record in congress was to the left of every single member, save former-Native-American Elizabeth Warren. Harris advocated to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), promoted a bail fund which freed rapists and thieves during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, and pledged to pursue a federal ban on fracking. She even flirted with President Biden’s plan to pack the Supreme Court. We need not enumerate her whole record to emphasize her addiction to racial and sexual identity politics, permissive abortion policy, and so on. America already recognized that, and repudiated it at the ballot box.

However, the Democrats’ leftward ideological drift have made them incapable of recognizing this. In 2004, most Democrats saw themselves as socially conservative (20%) or socially moderate (40%). Now those factions are down to 6% and 24%, respectively.

The Republican party became marginally more socially conservative, accommodating some of those Left-left-me Democrats. But that roughly 10% shift to the right is dwarfed by the 30% shift among Democrats. Commensurately, Americans as a whole have gotten more socially liberal.

A preponderance of Americans self-identifies as social liberals nowadays, which should make fertile recruiting ground for progressives. Liberals have a large, motivated, ideological consistent base that can attain almost half the seats in congress, even in a bad year like 2024. Remember that, for all her faults, Harris still secured more than 74 million votes. Perhaps this group will continue to grow, and come to dominate American politics one day (though the ratio of children-per-parent of liberals versus conservatives means this is unlikely).

In the meantime, progressives have become victims of their own success. Ross Douthat explained their conundrum in 2017. His analysis centered around a survey of 2016 voters that polled views on a variety of social and economic issues. Here is the resultant matrix:

Going clockwise: In the top right, we have rock-ribbed Republicans (conservative socially, and fiscally restrained). In the bottom right are libertarians (social progressives, but fiscal conservatives). In the bottom left are dyed-in-the-wool progressives (left-wing on everything). Finally, in the top left are a large, varied group of voters we might call “populist” (fiscally relaxed, but socially conservative). This top left quadrant constitute the most common voters in the UK: left on economics, right on social issues. Populists support a welfare state and socialized healthcare for native citizens, but oppose mass immigration and Woke identity politics. They are traditional Labour voters, who largely voted for Brexit in 2016, Boris Johnson in 2019, and in significant numbers for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in July this year. They also vote in large numbers for Donald Trump; hence his unwillingness to touch entitlements such as social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. This puts Democrats in a difficult position: unable to run as economic populists, while also wedded to radioactively unpopular Woke social policies.

In Douthat’s diagram, one notices that the most densely populated quadrant is the most politically progressive. Many Americans cluster in that corner — more than any other — but, crucially, not a majority. A small majority of Americans exist in a miasma centered in the middle of the socially-conservative top-half of the graph. This consolidation of their activist base, at the expense of gains elsewhere, could explain why Harris failed to outperform Biden by >3% in every single county nationally. Thanks to Democrats’ failure to read the room, Republicans stood to gain. Bush-era Republicans, for better or for worse, had no choice but to move to the center on economics along with Trump. No GOP strategist worth his salt could look at this chart and conclude that the party should prioritize Romney-style concerns about the solvency of social security over immigration. Save Romney himself and Susan Collins of Maine, any politician who couldn’t or didn’t concede ground to the MAGA movement lost to Trump allies in their primaries. Those who made the prudent move are probably feeling pretty happy about their compromises.

So where do Democrats maneuver? The New York Times has already opined about the extinction of the blue-collar Democrat, after Trump tore down the Blue Wall of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The Teamsters withheld from endorsing a candidate in 2024: as, despite endorsing Biden/Harris in 2020, a majority of their members supported Trump when polled. When their traditional party spends four years systematically dismantling America’s manufacturing capacity, and sabotaging energy security, on behalf of costly international climate commitments, all the while calling heterosexual White males irredeemable racists, they tend to run screaming.

Inversely, moderating on economics wouldn’t help much, since libertarians don’t exist in sufficient numbers to justify doing so. And, looking at the Libertarian Party, they already had the socially progressive, fiscally restrained base covered with candidate Chase Oliver — who finished with 0.4 % of the vote, behind RFK after he had already dropped out and joined team Trump. Instead, what killed the Kamala and Oliver campaigns were positions on culture. Democrat strategists such as Ruy Teixeira, James Carville, and Matt Yglesias have begged the party to drop the wokeness for years. As the polity fractures into competing identity groups, the maxim must be inverted to, “It’s the culture, stupid.” But it’s very difficult to drop issues that are dear to the hearts of 85% of your reliable, bottom-left-quadrant voters. Democrats are more urbanized than ever, and less working class than ever. Atheism in America is growing, but not fast enough to offset the Democrat collapse among formerly divided voters, like Catholics. While the majority of Jews support Democrats, 74% of the growing Orthodox population voted for Trump. It appears, for Democrats, demographics is destiny — just not in the way they had hoped.

Blaze host Auron MacIntyre and academic Neema Parvini have a long-running wager, as to whether or not “the Woke will be put away”. Parvini believes intersectionality is used only in the service of seeking power (hence the Great Awokening, as a distraction tactic after Occupy Wall Street). When it becomes inexpedient, the likes of Larry Fink and Chuck Schumer will ditch ESGs and tell the Squad to shut up. But the double-bind that Democrats now find themselves in suggests that MacIntyre is correct: that sincere commitments to liberal progressivism will prevent them from putting on the brakes. For the lower-left quadrant, ideology is not an afterthought; and party higher-ups have done so much placating to their activist base, that the wild horse is well beyond the control of these seasoned charioteers. Saying “give up the trans stuff, and maybe you’ll start winning elections” is like telling a pro-life evangelical Christian “Let people kill their unborn babies — then we’ll get a Republican in the White House!” All the polling in the world will not convince them to squish on matters of conscience.

Don’t take my word for it. Look at what Democrats have done in every part of the country they control. The number of pro-life Democrat senators is zero. The number of pro-life Democrat governors is zero. Representatives? Either zero or one, depending on whether you take Henry Cuellar at his word or Marjorie Dannenfelser at hers. And he might not be around long, given that even the Biden justice department thinks he took bribes from Azeri diplomats. (As a sidenote, Cuellar did vote to extend rights to babies born alive during botched abortions. No fellow Democrats joined him.) This continental drift is why Democrats went from the compromise of “Safe, Legal, and Rare” under Clinton, to “Shout your abortion”, and having a Planned Parenthood services van parked out front at the DNC under Harris. The contradictions in this compromise — with abortions, if safe and moral, having no need to be rare — are why Democrat elites got dragged to extremely liberal positions by their base.

Of course, it’s not just abortion. LGBTQ+ activist group, the Human Rights Campaign scores members of congress (out of 100 points) across a variety of causes célèbres dear to sexual revolutionaries. These include kitchen-table issues, such as letting crossdressing men into women’s bathrooms, inflicting sterilizing drugs and irreversible surgeries on minors, and evangelizing Pride in the third-world. A grand total of six Democrats in the 118th Congress earned middling scores from them. One just lost her seat, bringing that total down to five:

Jared Golden (78/100)
Henry Cuellar (73/100)
Vincente Gonzalez (78/100)
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (76/100)
Don Davis (72/100)

Every other Democrat in the House stuck to the extreme left’s policy roster with the zeal of a convert.

The “blue dog Democrat” seems to have been put down. In 2006, its eponymous caucus of open moderates boasted 56 members in the US House. By 2010, it had diminished to just 28. The incoming class this year will have just nine — four of whom are avowed lefties on social issues.

Moderate Democrats, inasmuch as they exist, are a curio. In 30 years, they might be featured in the footnotes of an anatomical study of the party’s total demise. We’ll read about them, and feel the same surprise we feel as when remembering William F. Buckley was educated at Yale. Significant numbers of moderate democrats remain in Massachusetts’ nursing homes, or as exiles in Texas’ inner-cities. But who will lead them? And why would they stay Democrats when even some of the Kennedy family feel comfortable in a GOP administration?

So yes, perhaps Democrats could win again, were they to moderate on social issues and meet Republicans in the center. But their own voters have purged all the moderates Democrat politicians in primaries. Many of their moderate voters are following Tulsi Gabbard into the welcoming arms of the GOP. In fact, many of Trump’s A-list allies are former Democrats. While smart political operators cannot wait for a congenial centrist to emerge from the South or Midwest to lead Democrats back to victory, the drawbridges are up. There are literally zero socially moderate Democrat governors or senators left. John Bel Edwards, the last of that dying breed of governor, was term-limited out of office in Louisiana in 2023, and West Virginia senator Joe Manchin is retiring.

There are no permanent majorities in the United States. Eventually, something will give. But between 1972 and 2008 the Democrats elected only two presidents — both moderate Southern governors. They’ll get out of the wilderness one day, but the time frame might verge on the Mosaic. While Republicans are blessed with a wealth of successors to the Orange Man, the best Democrats can hope for is to exhume the corpse of Andrew Jackson and hand him a “No Tax On Tips” t-shirt. Otherwise, they’ll be left with the very-real prospect of Kamala Harris taking another inebriated crack at the nomination — or (please God) even AOC.

Wokeness is, as Elon Musk says often, a mind virus — which may very well kill the Democrat party’s chances of moderating at the next election stone dead.