Where Have All The Democrats Gone?
By John J. Duncan Jr.
duncanj@knoxfocus.com
My political prediction: As I write this week’s column, the Iowa Caucuses are five days away. Even with far less money than the other candidates, the surprise of the night will be Vivek Ramaswamy, who will probably not win but who will far exceed expectations and what the polls have predicted.
The Free Press, an online publication founded by former New York Times Editor Bari Weiss, recently published a review of a new book entitled “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?”
What makes this book especially fascinating is that it is written by two long-time Democrat consultants, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. The two had written a book in 2002 called “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” saying that the fastest growing areas were “cultivating a new wave of Democratic voters.”
Democrat leaders would have enjoyed reading the earlier book, but probably won’t like this latest book nearly as well.
The new book says: “In the past few decades, the Democratic Party has undergone a seismic shift. Kitchen-table issues like the economy and public safety have been overshadowed by more elitist topics like identity politics, gender ideology, defunding the police, climate change, and the vaguely defined yet rigidly enforced ideology of anti-racism, which sees white supremacy as the force behind every institution in America.”
The book also says: “But while activists, lobbyists, and pundits were busy reshaping the Democratic Party, ordinary voters – including the working class, middle-class families, and ethnic minorities – were simply leaving.” Democrats “had lost out on its central issue: the economy and had all this extra baggage” called political correctness.
Teixeira said many Democrats thought, “Why even bother with these people? They’re ‘deplorables’ as Hillary Clinton famously put it.”
Judis actually went to several Trump rallies and said Trump talked about things people cared about while the Democrats just talked about how bad Trump was “and it didn’t work.”
The latest thing showing how tone-deaf the Democrats are was the actions by two of their governors, Phil Murphy of New Jersey and Gavin Newsom of California.
Murphy said he was open to the idea of providing illegal immigrants with $600 a week despite New Jersey “quite clearly running out of money.”
Despite California’s projected deficit of $54.3 billion, Newsom’s Disaster Relief Assistance For Immigrants project will use $75 million to pay each adult $500 and caps out at $1,000 per household. Recipients must be at least 18 and be an undocumented immigrant.
The elitist Newsom, in his debate with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, refused to answer the question of why so many people are leaving California and simply kept bragging about how many Nobel prize winners lived in California.
He also never denied DeSantis’ charge that drug addicts were defecating on the streets of California cities or telling what, if anything, he was going to do about it.
Of course, Newsom wants to be president so he can mess up the country like he has California.
Politicians like Murphy and Newsom, and especially President Biden, are in office primarily because of the extreme bias of the national media, led by the New York Times, formerly edited by Weiss, as mentioned above.
Weiss was brought on as editor of the New York Times to try to bring “in voices that would not otherwise appear” in its pages, such as centrists and conservatives. Three years later, in July of 2020, she gave up and resigned in frustration.
Weiss wrote in her resignation letter that everything at the Times was “molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative” and that almost all published pieces had to “explicitly promote progressive causes.” Of course, progressive wrongly means left-wing today.
Weiss is not a conservative, and she wrote that “showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.” She apparently felt that at the Times it did require courage because of all the attacks from others at the paper against anyone not obeying the liberal-left line.
In her lengthy letter, she added “that intellectual curiosity…is now a liability at the Times” and that “we can assure ourselves of job security by publishing our 4,000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world.”
