DEMOCRATS' UNDERDOG TRAP

My poor Dem friends, I feel for you as you wander around dazed and confused, like you just got sucker punched. You remind me of Bud Fox in the movie Wall Street. Remember the scene when he realizes all is lost after Gordon Gekko (Donald Trump) has just finished using and abusing him? Bud stares out the window of his darkened penthouse (Don’t jump, Bud!) and sappily asks himself, “Who am I? What does it all mean? What have I become?” I’m sure he also wondered why he paid stupid money for the crappy interior decoration that Darien, his girlfriend and Gekko’s ex-lover, foisted on him, kind of like how Dems are wondering why they let Kamala blow $1.5 bil in 15 weeks.

Don’t jump out the window, my dear Dem friends. After Obama won in 2008, the accepted wisdom then was that the Republican party was finished and would never ever prevail over the Democrat coalition of minorities, public sector unions, suburban housewives, college kids, and high-income voters. Nothing is never or forever in politics. So as your shake-down artist/party elder Jessie Jackson used to say, “Keep hope alive!” Bud did in the end take down Gekko, right? But let’s be honest, y’all have a lot of wood to chop to forge a path out of the wilderness, a wilderness that you have wandered into on your own accord.

There’s been a lot of chatter about the Democrat Party “brand” since the election and why so many have rejected it. Your brand for the past 90 or so years has been that you stand up for the little guy, the marginalized and unrepresented, the underdog. It wasn’t always that way. The only underdogs that Andrew Jackson, the founder of your party, felt the need to protect and promote were the westward migrating white settlers and farmers who were tired of being governed by Virginia plantation owners (the Adams family being the exception). Jackson’s conscience wasn’t bothered by the underdog Cherokees or African slaves. Only two Dem presidents got elected from 1864 to 1932, and that was Grover Cleveland, who showed his regard for the underdog buy sic’ing army troops on the striking Pullman Car workers, and Woodrow Wilson, an unabashed white supremacist who threw protesting women Suffragists into jail.

That all changed with FDR. Economic necessity forced the government to provide massive fiscal support for the distressed and rapidly diminishing working class. The out-of-work “forgotten man” became the emblem of the New Deal. After WWII and the economic recovery, Dems, realizing they had found a political winner, would remember the forgotten man by linking arms with labor unions, which in those days counted a third of all wage workers as members. Then in the late 50s and early 60s, Dems found another underdog to champion, i.e. black Americans. The civil rights movement wouldn’t have happened when it did without the Democrat party, albeit with support from Midwest/Northeast Republicans who offset the opposition from the Dixiecrats. Next came women and all that they were entitled to, including the freedom to burn their bras in public. Again, your party gets most of the credit, my Dem friends. Then gay rights took center stage. I had my repertoire of gay jokes back then in high school, but your party made me see the light, and now I count as progress that gay comedians are making the same sort of jokes.

But the Democrat party’s championing of underdogs ran into the problem of success; thanks to our country’s adherence to its founding principles, the underdogs gradually became big dogs. The socio-economic, political, and cultural advancement of African-Americans over the past 75 years has been astounding. And the same with women. Thanks to climbing living standards and better working conditions, less than 6% of workers in the private sector are union members. The party lost some of its purchase on the underdogs as they became successful and more integrated into the establishment.

Thus, the Democrat party can’t afford to relinquish its dark characterization of America’s past and present. If it did, then it would have to admit that broad brushing a whole demographic group as an underdog that needs its (the Federal government’s) beneficence is an anachronism. Dems will say that sure, racism is not as overt and palpable as it once was, but white people are still racist even if they never commit a racist act or express racist thoughts because they are born into a system that is based on white supremacy. I can never get a clear answer from you, my Dem friends, when I ask you how this system is racist when its main legal and legislative thrust since the early ‘60s has been to eradicate laws and regulations that oppress black Americans. You guys can’t give up the ghost of Jim Crow, which Biden and Dems ludicrously invoked during the campaign as an existing threat that Repubs happily present.

Bill Maher, the surprising voice of whatever remains of old-school Dem liberalism, came up with the term “zombie lies,” which he explained as a concept that was once true and no longer is, but people still keep saying it. He lambasted Nike’s new Super Bowl commercial featuring female athletes like Sha’Carri Richardson and Caitlin Clark as deceiving viewers with a zombie lie about patriarchy. “When was the last time a woman was told: ‘You can’t do this, you can’t be confident’?’” Maher asked. “Who are these imaginary mean old men of the patriarchy?” He linked the ad to problems plaguing the Democratic Party and how it views its voters, explaining that Americans are “not that savvy about politics, but they know when you’re lying.”

The cynical take is that Dems hug the lies that the US is systematically racist and forever under the thumb of a patriarchy in order to keep their core voting blocks of minorities and women in the fold. We are protecting you, and don’t be naive and think that you don’t need our protection! I think even a lot of underdogs are beginning to feel they’re being patronized. And of course, a lot of people are making money off these zombie lies, like Nike for instance. It’s sad to think that for for these reasons, these lies will probably still be the walking dead a hundred years from now no matter the reality. Too many people have too big an invested interest in them. The problem for Dems is that many Americans, including minorities and women, find relentless vilification of the nation that we all live in to be tiresome and demoralizing. I think this is true particularly with Latinos, who might be the most optimistic group in America. Dems have been shocked to see Latino counties along the southern border turning bright red Republican. Call that the canary in the coal mine for the Democrat Party.

Dems’ answer to the problem that their pet underdogs are gradually leaving the kennel is to search out other underdogs. One result is the relatively recent emergence of the transgender movement. Trans may represent only 1% of the population, but their cause enables Dems to still claim to always be the underdog’s champion so as to keep the brand fresh. But that play seems to really be backfiring on Dems. More than one of my Dem friends have said to me, “Of course, I don’t think biological males should be allowed to play women sports.” But if you reject that, then are you rejecting the fundamental premise that trans women are really women; you totally undermine the cause by that admission. So which is it?

Another group that Dems have latched onto are illegal migrants. It boggles the mind now, but Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign said, “"What I would do as president is several more things, I would in fact make sure that we immediately surge to the border, all those people who are seeking asylum. I welcome the surge." File that under, Be careful what you wish for. This one is a head-scratcher because there didn’t appear to be an immediate upside in Dems welcoming a surge at the border. These migrants can’t vote after all, or at least they’re not supposed to be able to. Repubs have accused Dems of allowing these migrants entry with the hopes that one day they and/or their children will show their gratitude by becoming Dem voters. Dems went ballistic over this “replacement migration” claim. How dare you accuse me of that, you white supremacist! But I saw a lengthy video montage of Dem politicians and progressive pundits over the years gleefully predicting that migration would change the color of red states to purple and then finally blue. And they were talking illegal migration because legal migration is not large enough to matter. How many times have you heard a prediction that Texas would go Dem sometime in the not-too-distant future thanks to migration? Cue Beto O’Rourke.

But I know, my Dem friends, that another reason you were so tolerant of open borders is because that showed that you are always for the underdog, the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. That virtuousness is what got your party to its heyday in the 60s and 70s. But you seem not to notice that the afterglow from those golden years has been steadily dimming.

Dems become trapped in their underdog politics when those politics pervert into identity politics. The underdog groups ossify into special interests. Virtue is corrupted when the game becomes pandering to those special interests. Being the underdog champion gets complicated because the respective interests of these special groups often don’t jive. Like try to tell a auto worker in Flint, Michigan that men can have babies or why, if he’s white, that he’s a born racist. Is it any wonder that Dems have lost the blue collar vote? Or explain to an inner-city black why his neighborhood has been overtaken by migrant crime and homelessness. Trump got around 30% of the black men under 45 vote, double from 2020. The Jewish vote, always a mainstay of the Democratic party, has been bleeding away as progressives equivocate about the war in Gaza because Muslims are the newest underdog on the block. And oh yeah, they also happen to be an important constituency in the swing state Michigan. Who can deny that Josh Shapiro was not picked for the VP spot because he’s Jewish? Asians are also beginning to split from the party as they see their high-achieving kids overlooked by universities because they’re too high-achieving.

That the country is evenly divided between the two parties masks a long decline that the Democrat party has been on. The best evidence of this is the House of Representatives, which unlike the Presidency and the Senate, gives an unadulterated measurement of the two parties in the country as a whole as well as on a granular basis. There have been sixteen House elections since Clinton took office. Of those sixteen, Repubs have won control of the House twelve times. As incredible as it now seems, from 1931 to 1993, Dems had won the majority in the House every election except two!

The champion-of-the-underdog brand has become tired, jejune, irrelevant to these times. Dems face a conundrum as to whether they can transition from that brand into something more compelling to voters today. And who knows what that new brand might be.