Like a hangover after a bad bender, Democrats woke up last week realizing their binge of lies on Pres. Biden’s condition had reached toxic levels. The day-after is always a harsh one but this one was especially so. The veil has now been pulled back on a frail and foggy incumbent president (and his enablers)...
Like a hangover after a bad bender, Democrats woke up last week realizing their binge of lies on Pres. Biden’s condition had reached toxic levels. The day-after is always a harsh one but this one was especially so. The veil has now been pulled back on a frail and foggy incumbent president (and his enablers) whose candidacy is opposed by the vast majority of the American public. The question now is not just who should replace Biden as the party’s nominee — as important as that is. The question is also whether the party will engage in much needed self-examination about the unpopularity of its policies that predate the debate. Equally urgent is an examination of the cultural rot that deluded party officials into believing they could pull the wool over the voters’ eyes about Biden if they — and their allies in newsrooms — just repeated it often enough.
Let’s start with the policy problem first. In recent years, the Democratic party has moved to the far left, ceding much of its policymaking to the intersectional cultural warriors who mostly understand complex economic and social issues through the lens of oppressor/oppressed theology. This progressive left represents about 6% of voters according to PEW, but makes up a disproportionate share of campaign workers, donors and staffers. They have mastered the art of ideological purity enforced by the flying monkeys of social media who threaten heretics with ostracization. Even before the debate debacle, the Biden-Harris team was losing its bid for re-election largely because of the unpopularity of increasingly hard leftist positions on nearly every major issue other than abortion. The big spending policies — from COVID to student-loan reform — have created an inflationary record of lost real income for most voters. Today voters believe, by 2-1 margins, that Trump’s tax cut and deregulation economy produced better results. Most of the economy’s new jobs last year were in government and health care; only a tiny fraction were in manufacturing — hardly something to build a campaign on. Voter disapproval of Democrats’ policies is consistent across the board. Voters oppose Biden’s open borders policies by as much as 80%. Biden’s inflationary shut-down of oil and gas leases at the start of his presidency together with his EV mandates are widely opposed by voters; many support renewables. But they also demand in huge bipartisan numbers a meaningful long-term strategy that doesn’t sink the economy — most likely through a fossil, nuclear and renewable all-of-the-above approach that, among other things, shelves inflexible EV mandates seen by autoworkers as a giant pink slip. The intersectional left is also driving Democrats off the cliff on social issues like race and gender. Large majorities oppose the Democratic party’s continuing push on DEI/critical race theology — quotas, preferential hiring and lower standards in college admissions and elsewhere. Even voters of color prefer merit-based systems. De-policing and de-prosecution are also wildly unpopular among nearly everyone other than the coastal elites generally secluded from crime’s worst consequences. School choice is also highly popular in black and brown communities where failing public schools hurt the most, but Democrats won’t take on the unions who recoil at the prospect of competition — even though charter schools regularly improved the most vulnerable communities. My guess is that most Americans believe we should treat gender dysphoric youth with kindness, compassion and support. That said, over 70% oppose biological men competing in women’s sports, but Democrats can’t seem to find that happy place in the center. On the global stage, most voters believe that Israel’s war against the ethnonationalist death cult of Hamas is a just war, but Biden and the Democrats have sacrificed their leadership opportunity for consistent moral clarity on the issue. Democrats delude themselves that they did well in the 2022 midterm election because of their policies and record. In fact, the popular vote swung 7 points in the GOP direction. Even The New York Times reports that the Democrats’ 2020 advantages with the electorate had all but disappeared by 2024.
Which brings us to the closely related issue of culture. In the same way the party leaders denounced heretics who questioned Biden’s condition, they have similarly done so with critics who question the party’s leftward orthodoxy on policy. Dissent is rarely seen on immigration or anything else no matter how unpopular the policy. Instead, administration officials insist during migration surges that the border is closed. This kind of commissar-mendacity by party officials is enabled by activist newsrooms that elevate opinion over investigation and put their thumbs on the scale for a favored political party who they then often resist challenging in a serious way until they are otherwise embarrassed. And they’re certainly embarrassed about Biden, but only after the debate fiasco unmasked their abdications. This media prostration is deeply harmful to the nation. It not only cheapens the political discourse, it encourages a lack of accountability within the party that it favors so that the very self-examination the party needs never truly occurs. So as Democrats look to replace Biden with a new nominee, they should seek two essential qualities: they should insist on a candidate that did not participate in the cover-up of Biden’s condition, and they should look to a candidate who will have newfound courage to break away from unpopular and failing orthodoxies that are hurting the party across the board.
Julian Epstein is the former Democratic Chief Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.
author Julian Epstein