For all of the soul searching that came out of their losses at the polls in November, the Democrats haven’t really changed, and they won’t. Even when they can see that they’ve lost the working class.
Democrats’ claim to fame has always been as champions of the downtrodden, saviors to the victims of oppression. When they supported the working class, Democrats saw them as victims of capitalist oppression. Lately, they’ve moved on to a different set of victims who also, supposedly, need protection from capitalist oppression.
Up to now the victim-playbook has worked very well. Voters love the compassion, and Democrats have gotten richer, more powerful, and less likely to be voted out of office. Nancy Pelosi comes to mind. All the while, they never fix anybody’s problems. Sure, some people benefit from Democrat initiatives, but it’s generally a small benefit that gets amplified by our dishonest media into widespread misperception that Democrats are all about making things better for people. Their playbook has worked.
It has worked so well that Democrats overplayed. Working class and minorities were the base, but in the last 30 or so years Democrats added new classes of victims. When gay, lesbian, bisexual, the climate, and then transgender came into the mix, cracks appeared in Democrat solidarity. Not all of their victim groups were sympathetic to each other. But they were small cracks, and party unity didn’t suffer.
It wasn’t until illegal aliens became the darlings of the Democrats that small cracks became serious fractures. Minorities saw crime on the increase in their neighborhoods and their opportunities fading. Meanwhile, illegal aliens were getting free housing and healthcare. Minority Americans said, “What about us?” Legal immigrants said, “How come they get to jump the line? What about us?” Calculating what waves of illegal immigration would eventually mean for blue state voter rolls, Democrats ignored them, counting on the legacy media to provide cover.
But the legacy media have been caught in too many lies, as people have been finding out from other news sources. We’re finding out that so much of the money we thought America was sending around the world to help the downtrodden, really gets soaked up by NGOs (non-government organizations) and ultimately routed back to Democrats, their friends, and their donors. It’s been going on, unreported in the legacy media, for decades.
And now we have the spectacle of Democrats going to court over USAID to argue that the elected government has no right to see what the unelected government does with taxpayers’ money. It’s going to be a fascinating time, this second Trump administration.
Meanwhile, Democrats will do what they always do, work on their message. Someday Democrats might instead choose to work on what benefits all of the people, or what benefits the country, but it won’t be soon. Democrats are all about power. They believe they are the ones.
In fact, Barack Obama once said as much (quoting someone else): “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” He meant, we can’t wait for somebody else to change things. We have to do it.
I prefer another interpretation: Obama and the Democrats think they are morally and intellectually superior, and uniquely qualified and entitled to govern in a fair and equitable way. All they need is power. The power to do what’s right and good. Whatever that might happen to be at the moment. Keeping in mind that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, and most voters aren’t well enough educated to know what is in their own best interests.
So, the Democrats will focus on a what amounts to a new advertising campaign, just the right wording and the right images to create their message, an illusion that what they’re doing is not utterly self-serving. And, as always. the greater emphasis in their message will be that as bad as you think the Democrats are, Republicans are worse.
Tom Bowler is a retired Information Systems professional who lives in Nashua, New Hampshire. He wrote this for NHJournal.com.
