Well, who but everyone? Yes, Joe Biden and his Merry Band have been hit with lots of bad news beyond their control, like the D variant, which put the kibosh on the back to new normal celebrations of last spring, and the continuing flood of desperate immigrants, and the rise in gas prices, and inflation generally, and the painful withdrawal from Afghanistan, for which Biden was blamed, even though the fault was entirely due to the stunning incompetence of the U.S. military and intelligence services.
So, yes, there was that, and that’s a lot. But there was also the strange attempt to enact a second New Deal, in a single bill, with a one-vote margin in the Senate. And there was the compulsive efforts of many Democratic state governors to micro-manage every aspect of people’s lives in order to tame the Delta variant, including a virtual surrender of the public school system to the teachers’ unions. And there was also the effort in many school systems to daily lecture white students on their wickedness. And there was also the tendency to blame any criticism of such educational policies on racism.
So are the Democrats learning their lesson? Well, there are a few “old hand” political operators like James Carville who really don’t have to learn their lesson, because they were already criticizing these self-destructive policies in “real time” and are just repeating what they've said before. But, otherwise, not so much. Jennifer Rubin, who has metamorphosed from a “Mitt 4 Evah!” Republican to a true-blue Democrat, is reduced to repeating the fraudulent Democratic line that “no K-12 schools teach critical race theory”—even though thousands use lesson plans soaked in critical race theory, something that Rubin knows but pretends she doesn’t. And Rubin is one of the smart ones!
Democrats still express bewilderment that their redistributionist economic policies keep proving a turn-off to middle- and lower-income whites, and even some not so whites. But these programs help everyone! Well, they don’t. I am a big fan of redistribution myself, though I much prefer to see it run through Earned Income Tax Credit, in greatly expanded form, but still emphasizing employment. Redistributionist programs redistribute: they take money away from people who have it, like me, and give it to those who don’t. They don’t help everyone. They hurt people like me. People are not stupid. They know this.
Democrats need to back away from “let the experts handle everything” power grab that marred so much of the COVID-19 response. They need to realize that you can’t beat something with nothing. Donald Trump is a seething mass of utter corruption, but he is something. The Democrats right now seem little more than a grab-bag of unrelated pet nostrums and policies from every extremist faction of the party, with no notion of how this would go over when presented to the general public.
