2024 in a Nutshell: Each Party's Dysfunction Is the Other's Salvation
Trump can't win on his own strengths, but he can let Biden lose.
As previously discussed, I part ways with my fellow conservatives who take it for granted that Donald Trump is doomed in November. He cannot win on his own merits, messaging talents, fundraising force, or campaign operations, but he can stand there and receive the votes of people Joe Biden is actively repelling by making their daily lives worse and ignoring their grievances and priorities.
On March 15, Newsweek published an opinion piece by Julian Epstein, former Democrat Chief Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee and Staff Director to the House Oversight Committee, which lays out the case why better than I did and better than anyone else I’ve seen so far. Here are some highlights:
The New York Times/Sienna poll shows 61 percent of voters don't believe Biden has the needed mental capacity for a second term. That surely reflects more than just the incoherent, unscripted public meanderings (which we saw again in Pennsylvania last week), or Biden's allusions to his recent conversations with dead French and German leaders.
Voter concern is not just about an occasional verbal hiccup. Rather, the deeply and widely held unease is more about whether there is a steady hand at the helm, particularly in an increasingly unstable world.
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In recent years, the Democratic party has ceded policymaking to the intersectional Left, which tirelessly insists on identity politics, statism, and the abandonment of strong deterrence on the global stage—philosophies fundamentally out of step with most voters. Prominent liberal writers Bari Weiss, Ruy Teixeira, and others point to the culture of illiberalism and intolerance of dissent that enforces the resulting self-defeating groupthink.
Public opinion surveys have consistently pointed to the unpopularity of Biden's open borders' policy on immigration; 70-80 percent of voters disapprove. It's no wonder: Eight million unassimilated, largely economic migrants continue the downward pressure on working class wages—something white, Black and Hispanic working voters know too well. Biden could fix this today with the stroke of a pen, but he doesn't for fear of offending the parties far-Left activists who represent about six percent of voters.
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For the most part, it's only the self-congratulatory beltway elites that discuss things like "legislative accomplishments" during their Chardonnay hours; most voters know they didn't lose income under Trump as they did under Biden.
The patronage politics of student loan giveaways reinforce the negative images of elitism and welfare statism, instead of a more meaningful plan to grow the economy in a way that helps working class voters—the largest single voting block, which Republicans own today despite Democrats telling us they represent working people.
If people like this were calling the shots in the Democrat Party, the Right would have lost America a long time ago.
That’s quite possibly the most stunning thing about current politics: each party is such a mess that the other party’s comparable dysfunction is very likely the only thing preventing one from utterly destroying the other as a nationally-viable entity. All it would take is for one to get its act together first. The GOP had a chance to do that this year; instead cowardice, corruption, and laziness united to sink us deeper into the chaos.
But, as Epstein explains, his party is doing much the same thing. Conservatives may be understandably envious that Democrats are much more aligned with the liberal base’s goals than Republicans are with ours, but there’s a key difference: conservatism works and liberalism doesn’t. So greater ideological purity is a handicap for them. They’re at their strongest, and by extension their most dangerous, when they project normalcy and moderation in front of the public while the bureaucracies and educational institutions they control more subtly, gradually work to transform America behind the scenes.
That’s not what Team Biden is doing. Sundown Joe—who ironically got nominated in 2020 in no small part because the old white guy who’s been in office forever seemed the most mainstream of the field on the surface—and the leftists he’s given the keys to his administration and campaign are going whole hog on the woke wishlist, utterly indifferent to how many voters they hurt in the process.
And unlike Trump, who offers his own laundry list of reasons for America to dislike and distrust him, Biden is doing it all right now, not four years ago. Trump can still lose, but as has so often been the case through his political life, his enemies might well be his salvation.