It’s Leftism, Stupid

National Review Online

Monday, November 11, 2024

 

Democrats and their media allies have offered plenty of explanations for Vice President Kamala Harris’s stunning defeat that will return Donald Trump to the White House.

 

There is the circular firing squad. Harris allies have questioned President Biden’s decision to run for reelection in the first place rather than announce he was not running in time for there to be a regular primary. David Plouffe publicly vented on X that “we dug out of a deep hole but not enough” — and then deleted his account. Biden allies, for their part, resent the way he was sidelined from the campaign and questioned the competence of the Harris operation. Axios quoted a former Biden staffer as asking, “How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the f***?”

 

There are also the explanations that the right-wing media is too powerful and the Democrats simply have no way to match podcasters like Joe Rogan; that Harris should have done more to accommodate the anti-Israel wing of the party; or, the old standby, that America is racist and sexist.

 

All of these debates are efforts to escape the most obvious reason why Harris lost, which is that left-wing policies are unpopular and they don’t work.

 

Harris first ran for president in 2019, when ambitious Democrats believed that all the energy in the party was with the socialist wing. It was during that campaign that she took the positions that would come back to haunt her over the past several months: decriminalizing illegal immigration, eliminating private health insurance, confiscating guns, banning fracking and offshore drilling, and providing access to transition surgeries for transgender prisoners. The latter became the focal point of the Trump campaign’s most effective ads, with the brilliant tagline, “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

 

While Harris defenders might argue that the real problem was that Biden was deeply unpopular, the natural follow-up would be: Why was he deeply unpopular?

 

During the 2020 primary, Biden ran explicitly against the crazy Bernie Sanders wing of the party, rejecting a lot of the woke nonsense that Harris and other candidates adopted. Yet as president, he abandoned the lessons from his successful campaign and decided to cater to the Left.

 

As such, he pushed through trillions of dollars of spending that triggered progressives to hail him as the new FDR, but that spending overheated an economy that had already been recovering from Covid, thus creating excessive inflation. Though eventually prices began to increase at a slower rate, cumulatively, consumers had to pay more than 20 percent extra for goods when they went to the polls last week compared with when he was elected. Biden reversed Trump’s successful immigration policies, embracing open-border extremism that flooded the nation with millions of illegal aliens, and went around Congress to grant some of them dubious legal status.

 

These two issues — inflation and the border crisis — proved devastating to Democrats.

Leftism is unpopular, and when they tried it anyway, it failed. So Democrats lost. Yet they will come up with all sorts of explanations for Harris’s defeat just to avoid the obvious one.