Democrats Descend to the Depths of Denial

They are still clinging to a disgraced ideology thoroughly rejected by the electorate.

by Tim Donner | Feb 5, 2025 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

Three months out from losing every bit of power they once wielded, there are zero visible signs that the Democrats are even capable of introspection or that they learned a single thing from their faceplant on Nov. 5, 2024.

If there is one place to gauge a party’s state of mind and forward strategy, it is at the level of party leadership. And the spectacle on display in the race for Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair demonstrated that it intends to carry on with the same radical agenda and identity politics that were overwhelmingly rejected by the voters. It did not take long to figure that out. The forum for DNC chair candidates conducted in DC last week was hosted by three far-left personalities from MSNBC – Rachel Maddow, Jen Psaki, and Jonathan Capehart – which was enough evidence by itself that the party will continue to bow to its most extreme voices.

Before the proceedings even commenced, multiple protesters interrupted with shouts about “climate emergency” and “fossil fuel money.” That was followed by an attempt to unfurl a banner on the stage about some sort of radical cause. Once that display was over and the protesters were escorted from the premises, the forum began with Capehart asking for a show of hands among the candidates on who believes racism and misogyny contributed to Kamala Harris’ defeat. Each candidate raised a hand, to which Capehart replied, “That’s good, you all pass.”

Falling in line like sycophants, all candidates later heaped praise on outgoing party chair Jamie Harrison, who oversaw the Democrats’ electoral disaster. The delegates rejected the candidates who hinted at even modest reform and quickly voted in another insider, Ken Martin, a white progressive who headed the party’s operations in Minnesota. In the midst of it all, there was an embarrassing debacle surrounding the need to meet gender quotas among members of the DNC, during which Harrison could not even explain the rules requiring a prescribed balance of men, women, and transgenders.

‘Self-Reinforcing Echo Chamber’ of Democrats

In an excellent piece in The Wall Street Journal, author Molly Ball called the event “a near-parody of the party’s self-reinforcing echo chamber … captive to leftist activists, obsessed with divisive litmus tests, out of touch with regular people’s concerns and in thrall to a patronizing identity politics that alienates many of the very minorities it is meant to attract.” She quoted one of the few on hand for the forum willing to face the truth, former congressional candidate Adam Frisch, as saying, “Twenty big cities, Aspen and Martha’s Vineyard — that’s what’s left of the Democratic Party.”

Most of the time, the party suffering a stinging presidential defeat sets about regrouping and recalibrating. The GOP has certainly been there. After Mitt Romney suffered a one-sided defeat at the hands of Barack Obama in 2012, the Republican National Committee held a retreat for party bigwigs amid public admissions that it needed a new strategic blueprint. And while the plan it adopted was blown up with the emergence of Donald Trump three years later, they at least admitted the need to reassess and develop new strategies. No such introspection appears to be taking place among Democratic leaders. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY) channeled the infamous Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) last week in proclaiming about Trump’s far-reaching agenda, “We’re going to fight it in the streets.” A senior White House official responded, “Hakeem Jeffries must apologize for this disgraceful call to violence.”

Backtracking Monday Morning Quarterbacks

The closest prominent Democrats have come to rethinking their strategy is Monday morning quarterbacking. Many a prominent Democrat engaged in distorted and/or wishful thinking as Election Day approached, only to backtrack into revisionist history once it became clear that Trump had swept to an easy victory. Take James Carville, who last held a significant position in the 20th century but is still somehow considered an unimpeachable source of political wisdom. Days before the election, Carville wrote a column for The New York Times, “Three Reasons I’m Certain Kamala Harris Will Win,” in which he stated with cocksureness that Trump would surely be a “repeat electoral loser,” while claiming, “On the other side, in just three months Ms. Harris has assembled a unified and electrified coalition. From Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Liz and Dick Cheney, it is the broadest we have seen in modern political history … and if the bigger coalition turns out with equal enthusiasm, it will be lights out for Mr. Trump.”

But this week, Carville insulted Harris by calling her the Democrats’ “7th-string quarterback,” adding that his party needed a candidate who could “actually complete a sentence.” Hindsight is indeed 20/20, even when one’s foresight represents little more than blind optimism.

Legacy Media on the Rampage

As Democrats fiddle while Rome burns, some reliably leftist platforms are unleashing blistering attacks on their ideological soulmates. The Atlantic published a piece, “The Democrats Show Why They Lost,” subtitled “[T]he party seemed to be at pains to demonstrate that it learned nothing from its 2024 defeat.” A writer for The New Republic, in a piece headlined “Primary Every Democrat,” complained that “donor-beholden congressional Democrats continue to be too old, too cloistered, and too bumbling to do anything as the government burns.” He even threatened to challenge second-ranking Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin (IL) himself and called on others to do the same to every Democratic incumbent.

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The New York Times, the granddaddy of left-wing journalism, spoke with more than 50 Democrats who collectively admitted, per the story title, “We Have No Coherent Message” to counter Trump’s anti-establishment agenda. And Washington’s most famous liberal newspaper weighed in with a piece headlined “Can the Democratic Party Come Back to Life?” and another, “Why the Dem Party Has Become Ballot Box Poison.”

The metrics don’t lie. A recent Wall Street Journal poll indicated that 60% of Americans have a dim view of the Democratic Party, while only 36% say the opposite. It is reflected in the fact that the Dems ceded major ground to Republicans in the 2024 election among every one of the demographic groups on which they have always relied: young, female, low-income, less-educated, and minority voters. If that is not a wake-up call, it is hard to know what it would take for the party to face reality and adopt a new game plan.

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Read More From Tim Donner Senior Political Analyst

The Left Was Always Lost

By Rich Kozlovich

 

On Jul 22, 2022 Sasha Stone published this piece,  How the Left was Lost, saying:  

 

It all started in 2012........Yes, the Democrats have used January 6th as a Reichstag Fire to grow their power, punish citizens and present a litmus test to anyone who dares to question the results of the 2020 election. After the American people watched the Democrats and the media completely memory hole what happened in the Summer of 2020, most are looking at these hearings and the reactions to January 6th overall, as an existential crisis the political aristocracy has time and money to care about...........The Left was never the “resistance.” They were always the empire. You can’t be that rich, that power, and control almost every area of American culture from Hollywood to book publishing to media to science and big tech and not be the empire. Trump’s side was the “resistance” and still is.

This is a great piece about why any sane person stops being a Democrat.  She outlines just how destructive to the nation, and the world, the Democrats and the left have become.  Yet, while she explains why she's "not a Democrat", she fails to explain why she's still a " left wing progressive".  

She's smart, insightful, knowledgeable, observant, and articulate.   However, people like her have a screw loose.  No matter how much they may get right, they're still blind squirrels who just happened to stumble on to an acorn.  They unending fail to understand they're a much of the problem as the outright radicals because she and her ilk are the ones who usher them into power since they're the sea of support in which the radicals swim.   

Another example of how ideology makes smart people stupid.

 

When David Horowitz attacked Diana West and her book America Betrayal, after initially promoting it, (which is why I bought and read it, and I recommended reading it) he did so because his buddy historian Ronald Rodash (usually described as a conservative but that's horsepucky, and I find him to be contemptible) was against her, I posted a comment about both of them saying, you were both communists at one time, growing up with communist parents, and while you're opposed to the left now you still can't come to admit FDR was a traitor, which was clear from West's book.  The FDR administration considered the most enemy infiltrated government in history, and we're supposed to believe he was oblivious to that?

 

This is the same mindset I see here.  They just refuse to see it's their irrational philosophy that brought the Democrat party and the nation to where we are now, and that will never change with leftism.  It's insane, it's irrational, it's misanthropic, it's racist, it's anti-Semitic, it's filled with hate, lies, envy, greed and it's foundational philosophy is predicated on violence. 

 

Why Ideology Is the Ancient Enemy of Civilization

In such ideological dystopias, eventually even the shelves empty, the currency becomes worthless, and the nation regresses into poverty and chaos. Is that the future we await?

 

By Victor Davis Hanson February 10, 2022

What ultimately destroyed the evil empires of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were bankrupt dogmas. Crackpot ideology destroyed free expression. It ruined meritocracy and ensured unequal application of the laws—and so paved the way for far worse. The Nazi idea of a superior Aryan race adjudicated everything from physics to tank design. Soviet commissars did the same, subordinating rational thought to communist agendas. Zealots in both systems infiltrated the universities and schools to institutionalize indoctrination. 

Wokeism, while not yet as lethal, is similar. Racial wokeism posits that the race and gender of the vice president and the next Supreme Court justice subordinate all other considerations.........To Read More....

Ideological Alignment Pushing America Toward Totalitarianism, Experts Warn

Concerns over the nexus of big tech, big media, and big government

By Petr Svab January 20, 2021 

 

The formation of a totalitarian state is just about complete in America as the most powerful public and private sector actors unify behind the idea that actions to stamp out dissent can be justified, according to several experts on modern totalitarian ideologies.

While many have warned about the rise of fascism or socialism in “the land of the free,” the ideas have largely been vague or fragmented, focusing on individual events or actors. Recent events, however, indicate that seemingly unconnected pieces of the oppression puzzle are fitting together to form a comprehensive system, according to Michael Rectenwald, a retired liberal arts professor at New York University.

But many Americans, it appears, have been caught off guard or aren’t even aware of the newly forming regime, as the idea of elected officials, government bureaucrats, large corporations, the establishment academia, think tanks and nonprofits, the legacy media, and even seemingly grassroot movements all working in concert toward some evil purpose seems preposterous. Is a large portion of the country in on a conspiracy?......... .To Read More.....

More on what lies behind the Left/Right divide

By Jon Jay Ray

Among psychologists, the most interesting answer to the above question is that given by John Hibbing.  He might be called the "rockstar" of the debate. He attracts attention because he goes down to the physiological and brain-science level for his evidence and conclusions.  He says that what you believe is a product of what you are.  He does not stress it but "what you are" is genetically determined.  So he is looking for inherited physiological differences between Leftists and conservatives.

And he has made some progress.  He has put people through a number of experimental tasks and found that the reactions he observes to the tasks  do indeed differ as between the two ideological groups.  He describes his findings as showing that "disgust sensitivity" is the key variable.  Conservatives are more easily disgusted.  Most generally, they have a "negativity bias", according to Hibbing.  And last year he put up a big paper summarizing the evidence for his view.  It is "Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in  political ideology"

I have long argued that Left/Right differences are largely inborn so my critique of Hibbing is not to contest his findings but to question the "spin" he puts on them.  You can find a pretty good summary of his experiments here and I think it is easy to see that what Hibbing calls "negativity bias" could just as well be described as caution -- and caution has long been said to be the essence of conservatism.  So Hibbing has confirmed some old wisdom rather than telling us anything new.

Hibbing's big article was published in an open review journal so critiques of it keep multiplying.  One such  critique that I have noted recently was "Not so simple: The multidimensional nature and diverse origins of political ideology" by Stanley Feldman and Leonie Huddy.  They make two points that I think are pretty right:

They say that "negativity bias" is characteristic of neurotics and that all the studies show that conservatives are not particularly neurotic.  I observed that in my research too.  So that is a bit of a stake in the heart for Hibbing.  His "spin" on his results has undone him.  If he had simply described conservatives as cautious, that criticism could not so easily be levelled at him.

Their second point is that there is no single Left-Right dimension.  Economic conservatism and social conservatism are quite different. So Feldman & Huddy conclude that Hibbing's work is pretty useless because he has mixed up two different things.  And it is indeed true that those two types of attitudes are very distinct factorially.  I noted that in one of my papers long ago.

So they are right but I am prepared to defend Hibbing on that one.  Although there are  two  distinctly different types of conservative attitude,  they are not totally different.  As I found, they do correlate, albeit weakly.  And that is why the "big tent" of the GOP succeeds.  The two types of conservative do find some things in common, a respect for the individual, mainly.

And as we see in "Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits", Hibbing uses the Wilson scale in his research, which is primarily a measure of social conservatism. And I have shown elsewhere that social conservatism is the big one for separating people.  Economic conservatism is arguably more important to our future but it doesn't get the blood boiling like social issues do: Abortion, homosexuality, religion, tradition etc.

So Hibbing may not be measuring overall conservatism but he is measuring social conservatism and that is the most central sort of conservatism.  So I would summarize his findings as showing that social conservatives are instinctively more cautious than others.  And I see no problem with that.

Hibbing uses "Negativity" rather than "caution" to describe conservatives because he wants to rubbish conservatives (though he says he does not).  "Negative" sounds a lot sadder than "cautious".  But in so doing he lands himself in trouble.  I have noted the Feldman & Huddy comment on that but there is in fact a bigger vat of boiling oil he falls into:

As is noted here, who are the "negative" people when it comes to global warming?  Warmists are almost entirely Leftists but it is they who are vastly negative about the climate and our future.  They predict imminent catastrophe -- while conservatives are mostly just amused by the scare. Conservatives say in  summary that: "global warming is not a crisis, the likely benefits of man-made global warming exceed the likely costs, and mankind is not the scourge on Earth that liberals make us out to be"

And again, referring to conservatives simply as cautious would not enable that criticism.  Warmists do say that they are the cautious ones but to swallow the arrant nonsense that is global warming would have to be a height of incautiousness.  Conservatives just look at the evidence and see that there is no need for caution in the matter.  Here's a graph of the amount of global warming we have had in the last 18 years  -- none:

So two cheers for Hibbing.  He has drawn attention to the biological basis of ideology but he should stop stretching the implications of his findings in a Leftist direction.  He just makes a fool of himself with that stretch.  He was pretty reasonable -- even humble -- in a 2012 paper.  He should try more of that.