RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/09/the-election-common-sense-democrats-and-the-long-march/

Not long before Tuesday’s election, Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic political scientist and commentator, predicted that, regardless of the outcome of the election, the contemporary progressive movement was dead. Harris, he intimated, could still win the election, but the dominant force in Democratic politics for the last two decades was done. Voters had clearly and unambiguously voiced their distaste for the four pillars of contemporary progressivism: open borders/mass immigration, lax law enforcement/social disorder, identity politics, and the war on fossil fuels. As Teixeira astutely noted, the electorate simply isn’t buying what the progressives are selling.

Teixeira, it should be noted, is not alone in his concerns about and disapproval of the contemporary progressive agenda and its alienating effect on average voters. In the few days since Donald Trump handily defeated Kamala Harris, a handful of prominent Democrats have condemned their party’s polarizing platform and have echoed Teixeira’s denunciation of the progressives’ stubbornness. For example, Matt Yglesias, a longtime left-wing journalist and political commentator, posted a short “common sense” Democratic platform to restore the party’s following, overtly rejecting the entirety of the progressive plan. Like Teixeira, Yglesias slammed the progressives’ obsessions with climate, race, and anti-social behavior in particular.

Based on what we all saw the other night—the most improbable political comeback in American history and a realignment of the electorate—it is clear that both Teixeira and Yglesias are right. The progressive movement has enfeebled the Democratic Party and made it unappealing to a majority of voters. In order to stave off long-term minority-party status, Democrats must move on from contemporary progressivism and must realign themselves with the needs and wants of their traditional voters. The party must change.

There’s only one problem—and it reminds me of the old joke:

Q: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Only one, but the light bulb really has to want to change.

Teixeira, Yglesias, James Carville, and a host of other Democrats are inarguably correct about the state of their party, the malign influences on it, and the necessity of change. The problem is that the party has to want to change first, which is not as easy as it sounds. Indeed, there are several very important reasons why the Democratic Party will not change—why it cannot change.

The most obvious and overpowering of these is the capture of the institutions.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/09/bill-kristol-shows-signs-of-advanced-kamalamentia/

Out of a sense of morbid curiosity, we decided to venture over to the Bulwark, the opinion site founded by alleged conservative Bill Kristol with the single mission of providing readers a daily dose of anti-Trump vitriol.

We wondered if perhaps the folks at Bulwark were celebrating because Donald Trump’s victory means that their reason for existing just got extended another four years. Had Trump lost, their pretense of being a conservative “bulwark” would have shattered.

They aren’t celebrating.

Instead, Trump’s overwhelming victory against overwhelming odds has them struggling to think straight.

Jonathan Last, after lamenting that Biden didn’t pack the Supreme Court and add four Democratic senators by declaring Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., states, then effectively accuses 51% of American voters of not being “committed to … the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Mona Charen reveals how hopelessly out of touch she is with everyday Americans by admitting that she “wrongly attributed (Biden’s unpopularity) mostly to his age,” instead of the economic disaster his policies unleashed on the working class. And then she shows that she has learned absolutely nothing by calling Kamala Harris’ loss “an elite failure of the first order.”

But the worst of the bunch is Kristol.

His response to this unprecedented turn of events is simply to say that Trump’s agenda must be stopped. “There should be no honeymoon for the Trumpists, no honeymoons for authoritarians,” he writes.

“This requires organized opposition,” he continues, “to thwart or delay or impede Trump’s plans.”

And what plans does Kristol want to stop?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-elections-big-loser-is-the-democrats-narrative/

On Tuesday Donald Trump’s “shellacking,” to borrow a word from Barack Obama––winning not just the electoral college, but also the popular vote and the Senate majority–– is a definitive repudiation not just of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, but of a political narrative over a century in the making. As always, bad policies are the fruit of bad ideas, but arrogance about the superiority of those ideas carries within them nemesis, the punisher of hubris that may be delayed, but never escaped.

Today’s Democrats have embraced a narrative––call it “left,” “progressive,” “socialist,” “woke,” or what you will–– which rejects holding people accountable for their actions. Instead, a crude determinism shapes and governs their behavior. Hence, we’re told that poverty, capitalism, injustice, racism, sexism, and all the other -isms and -phobias explain people’s crimes and failures. So we get Democrat policies that ignore or legitimize illegal border crossings, shoplifters, bums and addicts befouling our cities, repeat felons, no bail release for arrestees, and numerous other dangerous absurdities.

Since the ordinary law-abiding “moral majority” have to suffer the physical and economic consequences of these policies, which increased significantly under the Democrats, it’s no wonder they voted for a president who promises to restore law and order.

Another bad idea that harms our economy and pocketbooks is green “climate change” policies that ignore the laws of physics and wage war on fossil fuels, which have created the West’s unprecedented wealth and quality of life for billions of people worldwide. This bad policy reflects the scientism of self-styled “bright” Democrats, who “follow the science” and yet resort to pseudo-science for gratifying their fundamentalist cult of environmentalism, and their need to signal their superior virtue.

Again, the citizens are hit with expensive energy prices and intrusive regulations. Meanwhile, the forced switch to intermittent “renewable energy” like windmills and solar panels makes producers dependent on fossil fuels for their construction, and for providing electricity for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

Then there is the “transgender” cult that believes the biological sexes are cultural constructs, and that chemical and unnecessary permanent surgical interventions can restore children to their actual “gender.” Moreover, aggressive promotion of this unscientific idea is encouraged in schools, polices our free speech, and subjects girls and women to “trans” males occupying women’s restrooms and sports. Democrats have endorsed these farcical programs, as Kamala Harris did during her campaign.