By Kurt Schlichter | Townhall.com
AP Photo/Matt Rourke
We Republicans have plenty of internal issues. It’s not all hugging n’ sunshine on the right side of the aisle. We're building an unprecedented coalition that includes new members who don't agree with a lot of things us old-school Republicans agree with, and we still have some residual dinosaurs from the Paleolithic Era who don't know what time it is and don't know who our enemies are. We've got a tough road ahead, but we are stumbling down it. We're working out compromises among our multiple factions, and we've been remarkably successful in overcoming the obstacles in our path – witness the House getting past the continuing resolution and speaker issues. We have a pretty good idea of what we want to do and a general idea of how to do it. We know who we are. Sure, the GOP sucks, but there's a light at the head of the tunnel, and it might turn out not to be an oncoming locomotive.
But the Democrats are completely screwed.
Compare what they believe in with what they say they believe in. The cunning and reptilian James Carville correctly identified that the key issue is the economy. If the Republicans master this economy and make it great again, we will do fine for the next few election cycles. If we blow it – and don't underestimate the ability of Republicans to blow stuff – we're going to get crushed in the next few election cycles. Carville, who's criticized the Democrats because he's not stupid, says the best strategy is to go even more populist than ever. In fact, his idea is to go so populist that the Republicans can't compete. And that's an interesting idea, one that matches up with the Democrats' preferred self-image as the champions of the little guy, but it also runs head-on into the Democrats' reality. It is not the party of working people anymore. In fact, the Democrat Party hates working people. Working people like God, families, guns, and America, which makes them racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and probably fatist. What do Democrats offer the working class? More lectures? More limits? More hardships? You can't have cars, you can't have steaks, and you certainly can't have a rifle. You can have subways full of homicidal hobos, cash giveaways to Ukrainians and Third World peasant invaders, and government employees trying to talk your son into becoming your daughter. Enjoy!
What's the economic gift that the Democrats are going to bestow upon the working class? Socialized healthcare? Well, they already gave us Obamacare, and that was supposed to fix the system, yet the system is terrible, according to Democrats. Apparently, the answer is to do more of what they already failed to do.
And what's the other populist thing they could try? Increase taxes on the rich? Who do you think the rich are? There's still some sort of image in these people's collective head that the Republican Party is the party of the Monopoly Man twirling his cane and peering through his monocle while wearing a top hat. But today's megarich people aren't Republicans, except for Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and a few of their friends. The billionaires almost all donate to the Democrats. Do you think the Democrats are going to raise their taxes? Well, the Democrats are never going to raise the billionaires' taxes because the billionaires will find ways not to pay taxes. The people whose taxes they will have to raise, because they are where the money is, are the mostly college-educated professional swells who make in the low six-figures and will suddenly find themselves paying 40% federal, 15% state, and all sorts of other tax assessments. Those people happen to be a large part of the new Democrat base. Uh oh.
So, understand the Democrats' conundrum. To be the populists they want to be, they have to shaft some of their key voters. They have to turn against the scheming lawyers, the woke HR managers, and the fat bureaucrats who make much more than people who actually produce things in order to fund the massive spending that they want to use to buy back the working class voters who fled to Donald Trump. Their problem is that you can't be an effective socialist party when all the money that you need to spend to be socialist comes from the people who are your voting base. Socialism is about stealing the other team’s voters’ money, and the Democrats' problem is there are no other people with money to steal from.
The Democrats certainly can't tax the welfare cheats who make up much of their base, the working class folks have no money to loot and, as we saw above, the Dems cannot tax the zillionaires effectively. That means all those Chardonnay-swelling wine mommies who helicopter parent over their non-binary children Kayden and Ashleigh are the ones who are going to get hit with the bill for any new populism. And they're not going to like it. We're already seeing some of that. The Democrats are pressing hard to reinstate the unlimited SALT deduction. SALT means the "state and local tax” deduction, which allows people to deduct what they pay to their state and local governments from their federal income taxes. Thanks to the Trump tax reforms, that deduction has been limited. Many people pay a lot more than that limit to their state and local governments, and they used to be able to deduct every penny. Poor people don't benefit from a SALT deduction because they're not paying taxes anyway. The effect of the SALT deduction is to subsidize high-tax states, and high-tax states tend to be blue states, so reinstating the SALT deduction is a tax cut for affluent Democrat voters who don't sweat when they work. That's not very populist.
Who are today’s Democrats if not populist? Woke scolds. What are they really about besides encouraging bizarre social pathologies? And who really cares about those things? Yeah, the frigid wine women care about them, and the faculty lounge types, too, but the normal people don't. Normal Democrats don't have any use for this stuff. It's just that when they complained about wokeness, they got trashed by their own side so they shut up. And then what happened? Well, a lot of them left and came over to join our new coalition. They voted for Trump because they're sick of having some dude dressed as a chick leering at their daughters in the locker room because the dude now says his name is Anastasia, and the Democrats running things demand that we all pretend that he's a girl.
Today’s Democrats are not party of a populist party. They are a party of bespoke and perverted ideas generated by pseudo-intellectuals for the benefit of weirdos to the detriment of normals. It's not just the trans nonsense. It's the embrace of criminals. It's the fetishizing of racial grievances. It's the demand that we genuflect at the altar of the climate hoax and give up the pleasures that make life worth living, like steak, trucks, and central heating. And it's the utter hatred of America itself. There was a time when Democrats liked the United States of America and, ironically, the nephew of the last Democrat president who truly loved America is now in line to join the incoming Republican administration.
There have been some Democrats who have pointed out the obvious and suggested that this might not be an optimal electoral strategy, that maybe they should focus on things that normal voters want rather than the demands of social media-savvy mutants. The challenge for Democrats is that this woke garbage has become their religion, and its believers can't tolerate heretics. The party is powerless to change until it has a brutal internal fight and the forces of creepiness lose.
The Republicans had their civil war starting in 2015, and it finally ended when neocon Nikki Haley lost her primary in 2024. We are now relatively united, though we still need to sand off some of our coalition's sharp edges. The Republican Party has a path forward, because it knows who it is, but the Democrats don't. They're stuck where they are because they haven't confronted the problems and internal contradictions inherent in their ideology, nor have they confronted the fact that they've driven away a substantial number of the voters that used to be able to count on. They attributed that migration to the inherent badness of the people who deserted them, living out the Seymour Skinner "No, it's the children who are wrong" meme. Until the Democrats have it out and resolve the irreconcilable differences inside their party, they're going to continue to deteriorate. And that's great. I’d say, “Let them fight,” but they refuse to. And until they do, they will lose.
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