Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies – so said British publisher Ernest Benn long ago. But the fundamental purpose of politics remains unchanged. It has been a constant over the centuries. First and foremost, it is about winning elections. Yet many Democrats continue to self-immolate while their party’s approval stays in free-fall, down to 25% in the latest Gallup survey. As they carry on fiddling while Rome burns, one might ask them: Do you prefer to be right or to win?
And what if you come up short on both propositions?
Leftists Normalizing the Abnormal
How many Americans support the idea of a senator who ignored the murder of one of his state’s citizens by an illegal alien traveling to a foreign country in support of another illegal, credibly accused of being a wife-beater with connections to a notorious criminal gang whose sole purpose is violence? How many citizens believe a party should remain silent or even tacitly encourage the firebombing of car dealerships? How many believe Harvard University is entitled to receive billions of taxpayer dollars without restriction? Or that the same university should be allowed to sue the government for the right to continue uniformly promoting an ideology far out of the mainstream while indoctrinating students to hate this country?
How many people do you know who oppose the detection and recission of billions in wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive expenditure of their tax dollars? How many are opposed to trimming the fat from a famously bloated, featherbedded federal government? How many Americans support the progressives’ “Green New Deal,” which has spiked the cost of energy? How many oppose exploring and expanding traditional energy sources that will lower their cost of living?
The answers are quite obvious, but along with rabid, uncontrolled hatred of Donald Trump, these have become the signatures of the 2025 Democratic Party. These are the hills it is evidently willing to die on. And die it will if it continues to support wildly unpopular stances, opposing what most Americans believe will reverse its disastrous performance in the last election.
Are Weak Democrats Good for the Country?
Many Republicans, if not most, are cheering for Democrats to stay the course of self-destruction, hoping they continue to double down on the failed policies that cost them control of the entire federal government. However, it raises the question of whether it is healthy for a democracy to have one of the country’s two major political parties be so out of touch with ordinary Americans. Voters have, in the fullness of time, generally favored divided government so as not to grant excessive power to one party, but Democrats are doing their best to allow Republicans to have and to hold all the keys to the kingdom.
It’s been five and a half months since Trump swept away Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their fellow travelers, more than enough time for the left to take stock and pivot to a sustainable platform designed to attract broad support. The remarkable reality is that – almost half a year after their humiliating repudiation – there is not a single discernible sign that the Democratic Party has learned anything or offered up any attractive alternative policies. It almost beggars belief.
Perhaps progressives who have controlled media and academia and succeeded in co-opting the Biden presidency are accustomed to winning battles to normalize wildly unpopular policies such as open borders, DEI, and radical transgender ideology. After all, their bullying of the supposedly moderate 46th president was a striking success. Extreme ideas rejected by the broad mass of normal Americans found a comfortable home in the Democratic Party.
Some in the dwindling liberal (as opposed to progressive) wing of the party have called for throwing progressives under the bus. The problem is that progressives are the bus. They effectively control the party and are intent on weeding out the remnants of moderation. Former Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema – the two Democrats who saved the country from the packing of the Supreme Court, the granting of statehood to liberal DC and Puerto Rico, and the initiating of a full-court press to abolish the Electoral College – were widely condemned by strident progressives and driven from office.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), once thought to be on the left flank of the party, is now considered so insufficiently progressive that he will likely be primaried by avowed Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And if AOC succeeds, it is almost impossible to envision the party turning to the center, where elections are won. Right now, according to a recent poll by YouGov, the most popular Democrats within the party are Kamala Harris, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Rep. AOC — all dyed-in-the-wool progressives. That is no surprise since there are few, if any, prominent Democratic moderates or even conventional liberals in the public eye.
The Sister Souljah Moment
The Democratic Party found itself in similar straits after the 1988 presidential election, when Michael Dukakis stumbled his way to a near-landslide defeat at the hands of George H.W. Bush. Come 1992, the party was badly in need of tacking to the center and demonstrating that it cared more about average Americans than liberal coastal elites. Along came Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who correctly surmised that if he could exhibit moderation and common sense, he could defeat the liberal party regulars opposing him.
Rap artist Sister Souljah had been quoted in an interview saying that “if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” And one of her music videos contained the lyrics, “If there are any good white people, I haven’t met them.” Clinton seized the moment with a speech to Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, stating, “Her comments before and after Los Angeles were filled with a kind of hatred that you do not honor today and tonight … If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black,’ and you reversed them, you might think [white supremacist] David Duke was giving that speech.” This effectively sent the message that Clinton was distancing himself from the left wing of the party, as embodied at that time by Jackson. Clinton parlayed that famously shrewd political maneuver into an eight-year tenure in the White House.
Are there any prominent Democrats today who are willing to call out the extremism and intransigence of their party? Is there a single Democrat, such as relatively moderate Govs. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or Andy Beshear of Kentucky, brave enough to take on the progressive wing of the party? Who might be willing to seize another Sister Souljah moment and declare that hating on Trump, upholding criminal aliens, supporting DEI, and other such self-destructive posturing will lead the party down the primrose path? With the 2026 midterms and 2028 election already attracting national attention, the clock is ticking.
