The Washington Examiner quotes Della Volpe, polling director at Harvard’s Kennedy School Institute of Politics and a loyal Democrat, on what the Democrats need to do to try to regain power. Much of what Volpe says is sensible, but I want to focus on just one point: his identification of the Democratic Party with democracy.
You see it all the time. Loss of faith in the Democratic Party equals loss of faith in democracy, attacks on the Democratic Party equal attacks on democracy, and so on. Volpe writes:
Millions of Americans aren’t shifting right — they’re walking away. They’re abandoning a Democratic Party and democratic system they believe abandoned them first. This isn’t realignment — it’s abandonment.
This gets it exactly wrong. First of all, it is bizarre to say that in 2024 Americans abandoned the democratic system, when turnout this year was easily the second highest in history. (The turnout in 2020 will forever be marked with an asterisk.)
More important, 2024 marked a resurgence in democracy. The Democratic Party policies that voters rebelled against were profoundly undemocratic. Opening the southern border to admit 10 million or more illegal immigrants–when did Americans ever vote to do that? We didn’t. The Biden Administration exploded the national debt, driving up the cost of groceries by 20% or more. When did Americans vote for that? We didn’t. The Democrats’ top priority is DEI, which is to say, race and sex discrimination. When did Americans vote for that? We didn’t. To DEI the Democrats added trans-insanity, with genital mutilation of minors and men on women’s sports teams. When did Americans vote for that? We didn’t.
Far from representing an abandonment of democracy, the 2024 election was seen by most Americans as an opportunity to–finally!–assert democratic control over a government that was running rampant over their rights via executive and bureaucratic fiat. (Of course the icing on the cake, in terms of democracy, was that the Democrats nominated a candidate who had not gotten a single vote for the office of president.) Until the Democrats acknowledge that reality, they won’t be able to mount a comeback.
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