Many on this Board often complain that Dems are highly aligned while rs are fractured…

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He is lying about what he thinks.

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This was a lot of work to say that Democrats have gone off the deep end.

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Many on this Board often complain that Dems are highly aligned

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The 2024 election was not just a contest between populists and elitists, not even primarily a contest between left and right. The crucial dynamic was strength versus weakness. Trump gave the appearance of strength. Biden—and yes, Harris, too—gave the appearance of weakness. This had to do with Biden’s age; it was mostly about the sclerosis of his party.

There is a body of thought that we’re entering a post-progressive era. A few months ago, I reviewed a brilliant book on the subject, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism by the British philosopher John Gray. A few days ago, in the Wall Street Journal, Eric Kaufmann of Buckingham University offered a partial Cliff Note version of the argument when he wrote:

The decline of woke isn’t merely a “vibe shift.” It marks the end of the 60-year rise of left-liberalism in American culture. We are entering a post-progressive era.

Woke refers to an ideology of equal outcomes and emotional-harm protection for minorities…It energized a suite of policies known as diversity, equity and inclusion, whose roots lie in older racial-sensitivity training and affirmative-action programs. It is now in retreat. [Emphasis mine.]

It is obviously more complicated than that. There were other Democratic tendencies in addition to identity politics that propelled the secular slouch toward weakness. There were also the rise of feminism (and concomitant dissing of men), and arrant litigiousness. These were subtle tendencies, until they weren’t…until they became the battle cry of the 2024 campaign: “Kamala is for They/them. President Trump is for you.”

Decades ago, Chris Matthews identified the Republicans and Democrats as the “Daddy” party and “Mommy” parties. It was eerily accurate then and now, and it’s probably not going to change. Democrats can’t, and shouldn’t, remake the basic DNA of their party. There is too much right about the basic humanity of it. There does need to be a rebalancing, though. The aggrandizement of women, minorities and lawyers has to be modified and rethought. The excesses are going to have to be excised.

Kaufmann notes, accurately, that the 60-year effort to create equal rights—for blacks, for women, for homosexuals, for immigrants of every hue—produced some brilliant social improvements. In fact, it was a smashing moral success…and then, the Democrats took it too far, fr from equality of opportunity to equity of results. Read through any Biden Administration document and you will see the word “equity” used—consciously, foolishly—where previous Democratic Presidents would have used “equality.” Words matter; the Biden staffers were tilting away from freedom toward a slushy socialism by fiat.

Ruy Teixeira, who has been an invaluable part of this discussion, was absolutely right when he wrote this week that the Dems haven’t yet dealt with the unpopularity of their positions on some of the most basic issues: illegal immigration, crime—that is, support for the police—identity politics and environmental extremism.

But there is another way to think about this. It has to do with the public’s perception of strength—and the Democrats’ cultural allergy to it. Weakness—in the form of overweening sensitivity—has become doctrine in the party. Granted, the foolishness of American machismo over the past 60-years—the thoughtless disasters of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan—gave the use of force a bad name. It painted the Democrats, foolishly, against the military, against the police, against the flag. But true strength is different than force. At its best—as it was practiced by George H.W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker—strength is not braggadocio and bluster. It is quiet, but deadly serious. It is demonstrated by a clear sense of intent and values and disciplined purpose. You don’t overthrow Saddam Hussein after you’ve crushed his army. You don’t “rub the Russians’ noses” in the end of their empire. American strength was once Gary Cooper on Main Street, protecting the townsfolk from villains in “High Noon.” Now it’s an asinine Hulk Hogan WWE clown show. Now it is Trump’s cruel version of the Hunger Games.

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Yglesias is simply ridiculous. There is no more powerful “moderate” voice or stance in the Democratic Party. You only have varying shades of radical Leftism.

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If history has taught me anything is you shouldn’t trust a monarchist or conservative’s judgement on the difference between liberal, socialist, and communist.

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Latino men aren't turning out to be the leftist voting bloc that they were counting on.

The end.

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The 2024 election was not just a contest between populists and elitists, not even primarily a contest between left and right. The crucial dynamic was strength versus weakness. Trump gave the appearance of strength. Biden—and yes, Harris, too—gave the appearance of weakness. This had to do with Biden’s age; it was mostly about the sclerosis of his party.

There is a body of thought that we’re entering a post-progressive era. A few months ago, I reviewed a brilliant book on the subject, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism by the British philosopher John Gray. A few days ago, in the Wall Street Journal, Eric Kaufmann of Buckingham University offered a partial Cliff Note version of the argument when he wrote: The decline of woke isn’t merely a “vibe shift.” It marks the end of the 60-year rise of left-liberalism in American culture. We are entering a post-progressive era.

Woke refers to an ideology of equal outcomes and emotional-harm protection for minorities…It energized a suite of policies known as diversity, equity and inclusion, whose roots lie in older racial-sensitivity training and affirmative-action programs. It is now in retreat. [Emphasis mine.]

It is obviously more complicated than that. There were other Democratic tendencies in addition to identity politics that propelled the secular slouch toward weakness. There were also the rise of feminism (and concomitant dissing of men), and arrant litigiousness. These were subtle tendencies, until they weren’t…until they became the battle cry of the 2024 campaign: “Kamala is for They/them. President Trump is for you.”

Decades ago, Chris Matthews identified the Republicans and Democrats as the “Daddy” party and “Mommy” parties. It was eerily accurate then and now, and it’s probably not going to change. Democrats can’t, and shouldn’t, remake the basic DNA of their party. There is too much right about the basic humanity of it. There does need to be a rebalancing, though. The aggrandizement of women, minorities and lawyers has to be modified and rethought. The excesses are going to have to be excised.

Kaufmann notes, accurately, that the 60-year effort to create equal rights—for blacks, for women, for homosexuals, for immigrants of every hue—produced some brilliant social improvements. In fact, it was a smashing moral success…and then, the Democrats took it too far, fr from equality of opportunity to equity of results. Read through any Biden Administration document and you will see the word “equity” used—consciously, foolishly—where previous Democratic Presidents would have used “equality.” Words matter; the Biden staffers were tilting away from freedom toward a slushy socialism by fiat.

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