“Joe we blew it”

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The question is how the Ivy League technocrats with oodles of cash and all their allies in legacy media, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley managed to bungle this so royally.

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For the past eight years, the Republican Party has been having an honest conversation about the real things that ail us: inflation; the hollowing out of rural America; the rise of China; the housing crisis; the opioid crisis; the chaos at our southern border; free speech; and the decline of American power.

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The Democrats haven’t been talking about any of these things. The reason that the culture wars are so deeply offensive to so many voters is not that they’re racist or transphobic. It’s that voters want to know why reparations or gender fluidity is more important than rescuing the hundreds of millions of Americans who have seen their way of life dissolve in the face of globalization, automation, and shifting labor markets.

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The Democrats preferred to tell a self-congratulatory tale about how we arrived at this juncture: In 2016, the fascists took over the White House; in 2020, the party of democracy and justice took it back; over the past four years, that party has steered us back to normalcy; and, if they didn’t win in 2024, the fascists would come back, and this time it would be worse than ever. This time, the fascists really would lock up their political foes and abolish the Constitution, and it really would be the last election.

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They didn’t lose because they didn’t spend enough money. They didn’t lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because they were consumed by their own self-flattery, their own sense of self-importance. They should have spent the past eight years learning from the Republicans’ very honest, if flawed, conversation about the plight of America. But they insisted on talking to themselves about the things that made them feel morally superior.

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