Where, Oh Where, Have My Democrats Gone?
It wasn't me! I didn't go crazy. They did. Now there's data.
The conservative Manhattan Institute is out with a new survey of Democratic voters that offers strong support for a vibe I’ve sensed for some years now: Democrats are fucking insane.
They represent a tiny, deranged cadre of hard leftists whose commitment to race communism has fully overridden its commitment to working Americans, who they mostly only know as the people who make their lattes.
My transformation from full-throated Democrat to [meagerly] paid essayist who trashes Democrats is one that would have surprised me to see in a crystal ball a few years ago. I spend a lot of time wondering how it happened - something I tried to reckon with in this piece.
Part of it is certainly explained by my having moved away from some of the positions I once held, mostly related to crime and disorder. Relocating my family to Southeast Asia exposed me, for the first time, to societies that have no patience or forgiveness for public deviance. I’d always assumed such places to be stifling hellscapes, with bloating prison populations and North Korean levels of demanded conformity.
And North Korea is like that, so far as I know, but they’re the regional outlier. Most anywhere else in this neighborhood, you can let your hair down. You can party, and get weird. You just can’t do so in a socially destabilizing way.
If you drink a bit too much, fine. If you drink a bit too much and start a street brawl, not fine.
If you find yourself in an argument with a shopkeep, probably okay. If your argument results in you flipping out and trashing his store, definitely not okay.
Peeing behind a bush: not advised, but not going to get you locked up. Peeing into a woman’s lap while she’s innocently riding the metro and stuck in the same car with you: straight to prison. Do not pass go.
You can leave your car unlocked here. You can leave your house unlocked. You can leave your keys in your motorbike and your wallet on the seat, and if either aren’t there when you get back, it’s because someone grabbed them and went looking for you to return them (this happened to me once).
It’s true what they say: once you go high trust, you never go back.
You simply stop understanding why open crime and disordered nonsense are tolerated anywhere. They don’t need to be. Having been victimized by “the system” should not leave a person free to terrorize that system, and everyone who depends on it for their freedom and safety.
So yeah. All that happened to me.
And it massively soured me on Democrats, particularly at the local level. I actually do not care why the fent-zombie is pantless in the street and swinging a sleeping bag full of human feces over his head like a lasso. I don’t care that his mother didn’t hug him enough. That’s sad, but it’s not my problem. I just want you to make him stop.
Another catalyst for my slow turn-off though was my sense that basically everything I cared about was being moved by the party onto back burners, or off the stove entirely.
I’ve likened this feeling to being part of a Harry Potter fan group, and getting dismayed when gradually, every meeting became about Grey’s Anatomy instead. I don’t like Grey’s Anatomy. If I did, I’d join a fan group for it. But I joined a Harry Potter one. I want to talk about Harry potter, not fucking Grey’s Anatomy. If you want different, fine, but I’m probably not going to come to that many more meetings.
It’s not so much that this Manhattan Institute survey validated my feelings - I was pretty confident in them already. It’s more that their data suggest I might not be alone. That there might be others out there who quietly alighted the train, but only after it signal switched and began speeding toward Crazy Town.
The full survey data are here, but I want to respond directly to some points in the summary:
“The Democratic base is not a caricature coalition of socialist revolutionaries and woke militants. The activists are there, but they are a minority—and not a particularly large one.”
The primary system makes it structurally possible for a party to be captured by a dedicated, extremist fringe. We saw this in the 2010s with the Tea Party. What I’ve always found strange about this fear in Democrats though, is that, while the GOP is quite trigger happy about deploying primary campaigns to push out recalcitrant members, the Democrats just aren’t. It is neither easy nor common for fringe-dwellers to topple the pillars of the Dem establishment.
A few days before this piece was drafted, Evanston mayor Daniel Bliss - a liberal, but fairly normie Democrat - bested online bomb-thrower Kat Abugazaleh in a primary for an open congressional seat in Illinois. This despite key endorsements for Abugazaleh from progressives within the caucus, many of the harder-left interest groups, and even St. Mark of Ruffalo.
My point being, it’s odd that the party is so easily cowed by primary threats from hardliners. Hardliners rarely succeed electorally. Why do they cast such a shadow? It’s like spending your life in paralyzing fear of being attacked by a shark while living in Albuquerque.
“In the survey, a plurality of respondents (38 percent) said that their party should move toward the ideological center. Just 22 percent supported shifting to the left. Democratic voters also said, by a greater than 2-1 margin, that future party leaders should prioritize effective governing over fighting Donald Trump and Republicans.”
Huh. Hmmmm. Ahhh. Wow.
If only someone had told them that their resistance pageant was getting played out.
That if the party was going to enact an anti-Trump intifada, they might at least want to learn how to aim a rock.
The Democrats have transformed themselves into an opposition force against something they have no skill at opposing. It would be one thing if they were actually good at resisting Trump, but they aren’t. They’ve let him become a functional king, and have no real plan for what happens when (if?) he goes.
They’ve abandoned principle in favor of a tidal lock with Trumpism. And since Trumpism is nebulous and malleable, they are nebulous and malleable. There is no fixed point at which The Democrats can reliably be found. They can’t be held to anything. They aren’t anything, except a reflection in a dented, funhouse mirror.
“Last comes the Woke Fringe—voters who identify as democratic socialists or Communist. These add up to just 11 percent of the coalition. The Woke Fringe is the youngest of the three groups, the most conspiratorial, the most likely to report poor mental health, and—not incidentally—the most likely to spend excessive sums of time on the internet.”
11%? Fucking 11%!?!?!? That’s what we’ve been afraid of??
We have been taking our marching orders from a gaggle of SSRI-maxed, turbo-online culture goblins, and they’re only 1 in fucking 10 of us??? What kind of frail-ass, jaundiced pussies let something like that happen?
