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In 2024 Democrats lost for the second time to a cruel, boorish, lawless conman, a man so obviously unfit to be President, one has to ask, is the Democratic brand that tarnished? No doubt it’s complicated, but here are at least two tightly coupled reasons: first, we have abdicated our messaging to a small group of vocal, far left activists. They say silly things, and out of complacency or fear, no one corrects them. Second, we are still selling a sixty-year-old model for government called the Great Society, a constant clamor for more ways for government to help people in need. We need to help people, but that approach is out of gas.
We normies share with our extreme left brothers and sisters fundamental Democratic ideals: social justice, fairness, equality, values that represent the best of the Democratic mind. But they go too far in their belief that their grievances are on the same moral plane as, say, the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, or the morality of the Vietnam War. They’re wrong, most Americans know they’re wrong, think they're pests, and don’t like being lectured or condescended to.
Most Democrats I know are people of moderation and common sense, but who would know that since we allow a small group of avant-garde artistes to define us. And look where we are: in 2024 more Americans preferred barbarians to foolishness. It was so unnecessary, and as most of us knew and feared beforehand, unbelievably harmful.
We are the big tent party, inclusive, tolerant, decidedly not monolithic. But voters are hearing only one voice, and not the majority voice. Here are four issues that illustrate the point.
1. Defund the Police. No one I know agrees with this ludicrous idea, but it continues to tarnish the Democratic brand. Democratic leaders have blown the opportunity to fully repudiate it, and so it sticks. I recall in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder there was a protest outside the home of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry. A smug, precocious girl asks the Mayor if he will defund the police. He hmms, he haws, he evades. What was he thinking? The answer was easy, that we need police, that they keep us safe, that they are necessary for a civil society, that they would risk their own lives to protect hers if necessary, and that the City of Minneapolis would positively not be defunding them. Thanks, Mayor. That was brave of you.
2. Abolish ICE. Really? Uncontrolled immigration was one of the two most important issues in the 2024 election (the other was inflation). In the ten years we have suffered through the Trump era, I have agreed with him only once: if you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country. He’s motivated by bigotry, of course, but even bigots can sometimes be right. Most Americans support immigration, legal immigration. So why was Joe Biden enabling the largest inflow of undocumented aliens ever? Didn’t he know it was both wrong on policy and would have disastrous political consequences? He eventually came around, in 2024. Too late. You blew that one, Joe.
3. Gender is a spectrum. Let’s stipulate that gender dysphoria is a real thing, to be taken seriously. Trans has always been seen as a socially unacceptable aberration, one we are now being forced to confront. Everyone has the right to be their genuine selves, and you have to have empathy and admiration for people so willing to expose themselves to ridicule, even danger. They’re nothing if not brave, and if they want to change their pronouns, I respect that. But there are some commonsense limits to their idealism. One, children are easily confused and do not fully understand what may be happening to them. So we’re not going to help them to make life changing gender transition decisions they may very well regret in adulthood. Two, there is no such thing as “assigned gender.” There is only gender, and there are two of them. Three, a lot of parents do not want boys in their daughters’ rest rooms, and they are neither stupid nor bigoted. And four, trans girls do not get to compete in girls’ athletics. For Democrats who think all this is unfair, you don’t understand fairness.
4. Education. The Education Department is forty years old, yet children are less well educated than ever. The results suggest that we were better off without a centralized government entity insinuating its values on local schools’ curricula and culture. From an educational, not ideological, point of view, states establish education standards, and school boards implement them with some latitude. Yes, some states and schools will foolishly ban books (the truly stupid will actually burn some). Some will try to impose their religiosity into school curricula despite sixty years of court decisions against them. Some will insist the Civil War was not about slavery but instead about states’ rights. But these fools and battles are best fought locally, at the ballot box, in court, or in the court of public opinion, not within the walls of a remote centralized bureaucracy. When trusted to manage their children’s education, most schools and parents will focus on the essentials: reading, writing, adding, subtracting, and civics. It worked before.
Summary. The people who won the last election are there in part because we enabled the most extreme Democrats to define our brand and project disrespect for a majority of Americans’ values. They want to defund the police, open the border, use tax dollars to pay for hormonal therapies. None of that is going to happen, and if we continue to let the most liberal of Democrats define us, we will continue to lose.
Related. I highly recommend this 2022 essay at Progressive Policy Institute by Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck for an in-depth analysis of this topic: The New Politics of Evasion
