I think I’ll agree that Democrats no longer “get” the new environment. The media and social media landscape is changing, as this article points out. We are living in the era of YouTube and influencers. I agree. But saying that the entire problem of why democrats suck at elections comes down to “learn the social media game” is simplistic and misses other parts of the or. First of all, I’d argue that the democrats are still living in the 1990s as far as policy goes. The concerns that they have as major initiatives just don’t seem to match up to what I hear people talking about. People are worried about declining standards of living, ghost jobs, affordable housing, and student loans. The Biden administration was worried about green energy, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, Ukraine, DEI, and Our Democracy. Even when campaigning, they barely bothered to nod in the direction of concerns people have. They were all over project 2025, or Schedule F, or Trump hates (whatever group were pandering to right now). They were careful to be pro Palestine. But they never got around to anything average Americans would care about. They just sort of assumed “I hate Trump” was sufficient. It wasn’t, and won’t be next time. Our Democracy doesn’t matter to people watching their kids struggle to afford housing. It doesn’t matter to people sitting around the kitchen table trying to squeeze yet more money out of their budget to afford groceries. And even when they did have a message that would have resonated with average people, their ability to actually do anything significant about the issues that matter to the average person is practically nil. There’s no real chance that the majority of students will see student loan relief. There’s even less chance that housing will be more affordable anytime soon. Prices are still high.
It's interesting that Broderick can say "Sure, there are plenty of uncomfortable echoes we can point to, but history doesn’t tend to repeat. The European fascist movement that helped leaders like Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and Hitler take power in the 20th century was specific and deeply contextual" and then the very next sentence say "It was a direct response to the political and economic realities of the moment" as if the political and economic realities aren't an echo of Weimar Germany. There's also this insistence that Democrats lost overwhelmingly, rather than acknowledging the slimmest of margins in an electoral system leads to a representative wipeout. There's no acknowledgement that the policies Trump ran on - deporting illegal immigrants and bringing down prices - have been almost entirely absent from the actions of the administration. Eras of turmoil are eras of populism, same as it ever was, and everyone paying attention knew the dangers. We just underestimated the dissatisfaction. THIS SO HARD Somewhere or other the WSJ has an article pointing out that those with an affinity for the Democratic Party are more likely to have it for social issues than economic ones. Not unions, not minimum wage, not healthcare, but LGBT issues and immigration. Which works where Democrats win, but it gets you annihilated where Democrats lose. The truly unfortunate thing is when you look at Democratic policies they're overwhelmingly popular... but preserving the Democratic base requires threading the needle between Palestine and Bud Light and it's virtually impossible. It also sucks all the air out of "hey how'd we end up with so many billionaires."But they never got around to anything average Americans would care about.
That part is absolutely mind blowing to me, not only because tge policies are popular, but because they chose to snuff out their own popular candidate. The Bernie Bro movement was real. Maybe Bernie himself wasn’t viable — he’s pretty old — but there was genuine grassroots support and excitement for the politics Bernie was selling. But there democrats as a party chose to deliberately kill it off. They conspired to keep the only candidate to really get people excited to vote for them off the federal stage. Then they’re all wondering why nobody wants to vote for a party that doesn’t even bother with common people’s problems, kills off their most popular candidate, and insists on acting like it’s 1994 and the biggest problem is that we pollute too much.
It's been ten or more years now since some wag compared the average age of the cabinet, president, supreme court and heads of Congress and Senate to the age of the Polituro in 1986 to point out that the body that elevated Gorbachev is substantially younger than the body that elevated Hilary Clinton. If you look at both bodies as sclerotic organs of self-preservation, the Republicans attempted to sideline their populist and failed; the Democrats attempted to sideline their populist and succeeded. The Republican party is winning but is an organization virtually unrecognizable from 2015 while the Democratic party is losing but would be perfectly familiar to Tip O'Niell.