Progressive Delusions Die Hard

By Noah Rothman

Friday, November 22, 2024

 

Writing in the New York Times, New York’s lieutenant governor Antonio Delgado recently articulated a novel theory to explain the Democratic Party’s losses in November’s elections.

 

“President Biden should never have run for a second term,” he observed. Okay, this one isn’t all that novel, but what followed was. “It,” he said of Biden’s ego-driven quest for a second term, “betrayed our party’s collective will to be bold and fresh.”

 

“Bold and fresh?” What are we talking about here? Salsa? DJ “Jazzy” Jeff Townes?

 

We can safely assume that precisely no one cast a ballot for Joe Biden in 2020 operating on the assumption that they were casting a ballot for boldness or freshness. Indeed, Biden had reached his sell-by date long before he was elevated to the presidency.

 

The Democratic Party’s rallying cry throughout the first Trump presidency was that his administration and all the chaos that surrounded it was that “this is not normal.” The Left reacted to what it perceived as abnormality with its own special brand of peculiarity. At the outset, Biden appeared to stand athwart it all, and voters rewarded him for it. But what followed were four years of disruption designed to fundamentally alter the preexisting American civic compact.

 

In this month’s issue of the magazine, I attempted to itemize the myriad ways in which Biden imposed his own unique style of chaos onto the American political landscape. But there’s only so much you can do with 2,000 words.

 

I was compelled by spatial constraints to overlook the president’s lawlessness — his abrogation of property-owners rights, his transference of the burden assumed by student-debt holders onto taxpayers, and his expansion of overtime pay eligibility by executive fiat.

 

I passed over the extent to which Biden was elected to guide America out of the pandemic but, once in office, deferred to a neurotic cast of comfortable shut-ins who sought to perpetuate Covid-era practices indefinitely. Americans “need to come to the acceptance phase that our lives are not going to be the same,” said Obama-era CDC director Thomas Frieden at the time. He spoke for those who advocated perpetual masking regimens and social distancing, as then-press secretary Jen Psaki mused, “even after you’re vaccinated,” and restrictions on in-person education well into the second year of Biden’s presidency.

 

Possessed of a lunatic delusion that his remarkably narrow presidential victory and his party’s meager majorities in Congress represented a mandate to remake the culture, Biden set about attempting to federalize state-level elections. His multi-trillion-dollar Build Back Better framework would have drafted young people into a “Civilian Climate Corps” — whatever that was — and radically expanded America’s already underfunded entitlement programs. And he clung to his signature legislative initiative long after his own party’s more prudent members dealt it a death blow. Why? Because he outsourced his administration’s thinking to his party’s most radical members.

 

“Biden has been incredibly responsive to the progressive movement,” said outgoing Democratic congressman Jamaal Bowman early in the president’s tenure. It was an unimpeachable observation, and the truth of it likely contributed in its own ways to Bowman’s defenestration by his own primary voters in favor of the workmanlike Westchester County executive, George Latimer. The contrast between Latimer and Bowman, the flashy vanguard of the progressive revolution, couldn’t have been starker. In their foolishness, Team Biden took a hands-off approach to the counterrevolution brewing in Democratic ranks that took the likes of Bowman and fellow Squad-mate Cori Bush off the board. It was one of many warning signs this White House ignored, all of which pointed to an exhaustion among voters — left, right, and center — with the president’s bold freshness.

 

Delgado surveyed the wreckage of his party and seems to have determined that the cure for the Democratic Party’s ills is more of the same. “Our philosophy must make clear that the real threat to democracy is widening economic inequality and the colossal power of big money in politics,” he insisted. These shibboleths are utterly divorced from reality.

 

Republicans were outspent in 2024 by $300 million. According to the exit polling, Democrats won a majority of support among voters who make less than $30,000 and those who make over $100,000. The voters Democrats lost occupy the bulkiest part of the bell curve: middle-income Americans. He can prattle on with Marxian superstitions about the “interests of capital” and the evils of “cultivating greed,” but that doesn’t speak to voters’ concerns.

 

The Democratic Party’s diagnosis should be a simple one. They voted for “normal” in 2020, and they didn’t get it. It’s deluded to presume that voters turned away from the party in power because it wasn’t radical enough. But there is instrumental utility in that narrative. If Democrats adopted his prescription, they’d conclude that it wasn’t them but the voting public that must change. It’s not much, but for progressives in desperate need of something to salve their wounds, it’ll do.