[L]iberals thought that the best way to stop Trump was to treat him not as a normal, if obnoxious, political figure with bad policy ideas but as a mortal threat to democracy itself.... [T]his style of opposition led Democrats... into their own form of antidemocratic politics — using the courts to try to get Trump’s name struck from the ballot in Colorado or trying to put him in prison on hard-to-follow charges. It distracted them from the task of developing and articulating superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing. And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact....
Yeah, I wanted Democrats to campaign on the substantive merits. Maybe they'll change their ways now that this over-the-top attack on the man, Trump, failed so badly. But for that, they'll need to come up with some good substantive merits. They'd better get to work.
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Yeah, GFY Bret Stephens. You endorsed Kamala and the whole rotten mess. This was just fine with you until it wasn't a winning hand.
if they didnt cheat in 2020, who would have won?
Not Trump
The Walz pick was pure genius.
So suddenly, Bret is on our side. He's our spokesman, ready to bring the insights !
Remember Tradguy rule#1: once your community reputation has been established as very good for 20 to 30 years, out of town experts that try to use personal destruction slanders on you in court only make themselves appear to be evil idiots.
"Party of Prigs and Pontificators"
"Trump Is Weird!", no one will ever forget that projection from the party of vengeful wine aunts, fat acceptionists, and transpersyns showing their tits on the White House lawn.
That Zero Hedge graphic comparing vote tallies from 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024 is quite damning. Where did that 15+ million voter-surge in 2020 go in 2024?
What exactly is a substantive merit? Seriously. I know what merit is, and like most modifiers I have general idea of what substantive means. What would a non-substantive merit look like?
"[T]his style of opposition led Democrats... into their own form of antidemocratic politics ....".
What do you mean "their", Bret?
Who's running for the 2028 Democratic Party nomination? Newsome? Buttigieg? Harris again? Any chance any of them will develop let alone articulate "superior policy responses"?
It'll be abortion, abortion, tax the rich, abortion all over again.
They're doing what they think, the problem being that they can't read Trump. Trump is governed by a sense of humor. Look at the garbage truck.
2/3 of the population spots that and likes that, 1/3 of the population has no sense of humor. The latter are susceptible to cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias in their opinion of Trump. End of story.
If Democrats campaigned on "substantive merit" (which I take to be a serious and truthful discussion of their beliefs), they would lose two thirds of the vote. As Stephens and other commentators have implied or said, American voters are not buying what Democrats are selling.
The Bulwark tries to account for it all, fails in the usual way. But they're really smart people, and develop real smart diagnoses of the failure of voters in this case.
Althouse writes, "They'd better get to work."
Like, surely you jest, Doctor A.
Bret Stephens can go piss up a rope. That aside, it's hard to blame Democrats for their strategy. Firstly, they had a really crappy record to run on. Secondly, demonizing Trump worked in 2020, so not much choice but to recycle it and hope for the best.
They would have been better served to let Biden lose. They could claim Biden won once, but lost the second time because of his age. They could have blamed him and moved on.
LOL. The Democrats will never be a party of workable ideas. The Democrat Party has been the party of division for its entire nearly two hundred year history. For that entire period Democrats have sown discord between the races. They figured out early, if you can get people to vote based on hate and the need for proection from “others,” the voter doesn’t care about the success of policies. Now, not only do the use race-based demagoguery, but have supplemented it with divisions by race, gender, creed, wealth, etc.
Can't wait to hear from Scranton Joe Biden. Until his dying day, he will be enjoy claiming he would have one, while regretting that the Biden name now represents cowardice under fire. Didn't have the guts to stand up to the Pelosi led pessimists who slapped him on the ass on his way out.
What "substantive merits"? Nobody actually wanted what they were selling. Nobody wanted any more of what Biden gave us. Even people who voted for Harris were voting for her because of Trump and abortion and tribal identity, not because of what Biden did or because of what Harris would do (possibly environmentalist fanatics, government employees, activists, and transpeople might be exceptions, but ordinary people just weren't interested in anything Harris could offer.).
Stephens is right, and if more people on his side thought as he does it might conceivably help bring the country together, but he's still contemptable.
You can fuck right off, Stephens. Get lost!
31:49 "permission structure" is mentioned
Correct. Remember the Dems ruling with Jim Crow, reminding their voters they are "better'n any N-word".
Yeah, I wanted Democrats to campaign on the substantive merits. Maybe they'll change their ways now that this over-the-top attack on the man, Trump, failed so badly. But for that, they'll need to come up with some good substantive merits. They'd better get to work.
They can't get to work. Not until they've lost a few more elections. The "Progressives" won't let them get to work
Marco Rubio is exactly correct on this topic:
https://youtu.be/rcUBCd6Jd9Y?si=efYZTr1s3PfvAoLu
Kamala to give concession speech this afternoon at 4 (already late). Did she promise Lady Gaga or Beyonce to ensure anybody showed up?
Obviously, Brett Stephens voiced this fear early and often during the campaign, and was sadly ignored and rebuffed by the Dems.
Wait, he didn't?...
"Kamala to give concession speech this afternoon at 4 (already late)."
Will there be joy? I do hope so.
The politics of personal destruction.... Who was it again that started that political methodology?
A participation trophy comes to mind, as an expression of non-substantive merit.
Althouse, Happy Post-election Day! Did you announce how you voted this year? If you did, sorry I missed it and perhaps you can answer again. If not, then okay with me - your vote is private. 😊
It might help if some of those substantive merit" issues were popular. Or just keep going with child mutilation, bad economic policy and wasteful, dead end energy boondoggles.
I think Newsome is the only viable candidate at this juncture. The abortion issue is simply going to be taken up by the states and resolved to their collective individual satisfaction - it's a dead issue, nationally. Harris is done, and so is Buttigieg, and all the other Biden administration lightweights and lowlifes.
Quick to assume he's not one of the priggish pontificators, isn't he?
Prigs and Pontificators? Bret you are something of a turncoat. You're also short on vocabulary. I'd suggest Prevaricating Poltroons or Pathetic Pemanently Pustulent Putzes. Don't get me started on the rest of the Ps.
They'll pound Newsom and his San Francisco Democrat background like a carpet being beaten at a Persian laundry. Newsom has gone a long way toward destroying Califonria.
Open Borders and Double-Digit Inflation were their policies.
Trump beat them on the biggest issues.
They ran on the Get Hitler strategy because their policies were a total disaster.
I think the typical white, older Democrat has no interest in substantive policy, having no skin in the game in their safe suburb free from those nasty people who ought to stay in Texas. I've already been hectored by a blogger I follow in the photography world how we the voters have failed him; the shame, the stink of our votes will forever taint us, and so on and so forth. I'd give a link but don't want to drive him traffic.
>>Maybe they'll change their ways now that this over-the-top attack on the man, Trump, failed so badly.
Maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt.
But for that, they'll need to come up with some good substantive merits. They'd better get to work.
Lots of luck with that. Behind every policy that aggravates working class and middle class voters there is key component of the Democrat’s coalition that will resist any efforts to accommodate a broader spectrum of the voting public. Accept commonsense restrictions on abortion but work to get rid of the least sensible ones? The feminists will rip your face off. Accept that women need and deserve safe spaces to perform bodily functions and change clothes, free from the leering eyes of biological males? There go the LGBTs. Recognize that the lithium batteries in electric school constitute a fire hazard and a transition from diesel school buses to EVs is certainly going to result in children burning to death? OMG you want to murder Gaia!
Live by bolting together special interest groups? Expect to be hamstrung by those same special interest groups.
All the losers who told us Trump was literally hitler need to either engage in armed insurrection or admit their hypocrisy. They will do neither because they are really just common turds caught in a swirling cyclone of toilet water awaiting their turn to exit the toilet bowl which is their echo chamber. They are incapable of any action except whimpering as they exit stage south. Good riddance.
Three distinct accents in QueMala’s speech have been detected. Along with poor, thespian abilities.
This Bret guy needs to go with them. They weren't 'hard to follow' charges they were invented, fake, phoney baloney charges by a corrupt partisan judiciary. We're in no mood for your shit...
So now Burt Stevens, after pretending to a "True conservative" and "Stalwart Republican" for 15 years in the press, and then changing to Hillary/Biden/Harris supporter in the wink of an eye, is now giving the Democrats lectures.
Notice that the use of Lawfare and historical norm breaking use of impeachment and DOJ indictments against a former POTUS, is just minimized by Burt STevens as the D's using the wrong tactic. To Burt Stevens, it wasnt immoral or unjust, it was just unsuccessful. The D's should have cared about equal justice because a two tier justice system got rejected yesterday.
Well, the D's are busy electing a "new people" through mass immigration, so don't imagine they'll change tactics.
Maybe they'll change their ways now that this over-the-top attack on the man...
You need to change the Democrats, not their ways. These ones are forever irreparable. That's what you should focus on...
They are cowards
Is Bretbug trying to worm his way back into Conservatism?
I have a friend from back in high school days--we're sixty years plus out of high school but we reconnected. I can talk sports with him--still love the same old teams. But politics? Sheesh. He refers to "Trumpty Dumpty". The Republican party is the Repukelicans. When I registered mild resistance--"hey let's talk sports but keep it on the downlow on politics", his response was "I'm surprised. I thought you knew better."
There is a reason why sex, politics, and religion are not discussed in private company. You never know what the other person might hold dear.
Well at least the female libtard editor of Scientific American magazine is feeling introspective... Just kidding, she went off deranged bigoted rant against America, Indiana, and generation X. We're gonna need some emergency mental hospitals stat! Maybe we can convert the Javits Center to a psyche ward, maybe bring in some Naval vessels and dock them along the coasts so Democrat Party members can get the help they need.
Please stop calling the leftist Democratic Party "liberals." They stopped thinking about freedom circa 1991 when they called themselves "politically correct" and criminalized "hate speech."
Those narcissistic boomer totalitarians imagined that their in group and only their in group could be right, proper, and correct. After all, they protested Vietnam. After all, Nixon was a Republican and Watergate happened (never mind the worse offenses of LBJ). After all, they buried a car for the first Earth Day. After all they started anti-business hippie communes and were righteous. So, they taught their children and grandchildren to not listen to others and be arrogant prigs and pontificators (aka Woke).
Those fart-sniffers concluded they'd reached ideological perfection and began to pound it on everyone else. Pelosi, Schumer, Biden (and now the Jew-hating Squad) are retrograde bullies who say "liberal" to buy the dysfunctional excess compassion vote (mostly women seeking companionship and validation).
Excellent.
The Republicans have a big tent, but whether it's big enough to welcome Bret Stephens back? That's not so clear.
Kamala and the Democrats could learn something from Bret Stephens. Not so much from his words but from his example. He claimed to be a Republican but spoke out against Trump. Where is the Democrat that has spoke out again Alvin Bragg. Not just for his prosecution of Trump but for his truly odious prosecution of Daniel Penny. Daniel Penny is a perfect, gentle knight who took down a madman on the subway. That madman died during the course of their struggles and Bragg is trying to imprison Penny for his brave gesture. If Kamala had spoken out against this travesty, she would have won a lot of votes. There are many crazies among the ranks of the Democrats, but their transgressions pass unnoticed. It's been a long time since a Democrat had a Sister Souljah moment.
"I told you so" doesn't work if you didn't tell us so.
Charles DeGaulle wore a uniform and went to church on Sunday. The left really hated him throughout his career. They nixed his proposals to establish a couple of tank brigades prior to the war. Their reason? They thought he would take those brigades and not use them to fight Hitler, but rather to stage a coup d'etat. It was more important to stymie DeGaulle than fight Hitler. DeGaulle stepped away from power three times during his career, but the left in France considers him a Fascist......So far as the OG Hitler goes, he didn't want the election in Germany. He won a plurality of the votes. The far left there thought that there was no discernible difference between Social and Christian Democrats and Nazis. They refused to join a popular front. (After Hitler took power, many German Communists fled to the USSR. After the Molotov pact was signed, Stalin sent them back to Germany and Hitler.) The far left were never the principled opponents of Hitler. They were his enablers.
"Maybe they'll change their ways now that this over-the-top attack on the man, Trump, failed so badly."
I predict that they won't.
A lot of my conservative friends on facebook posted up memes today saying how it's OK to disagree on politics but that we can still be friends who simply disagree on politics. A lot of liberals responded to this by saying that they can't respect "people who vote to take away my rights."
Most Democrats are not good at logically analyzing both sides of the issues. They're all about superficial arguments like "Orange man bad" and the other party are Nazis who want to put people in camps and throw out the Constitution. It's all, over the top, hyperbole.
If Vance runs for President in 2028, he will instantly be 1000 times worse than Trump and an even bigger Nazi. In fact, he'll be the biggest Nazi collaborator in history because he supported Trump/Hitler.
For example: They're STILL pushing that trope today that Trump tanked the economy in 2020. (Completely denying that Covid ever existed.) That's not logical thinking.
Quiet, but potentially very important story of the day: Harris only appears to have gotten 51.5% of the vote in New Jersey.
NJ was a legit swing state when I was a kid. It would be nice if it might become one again.
A liberal friend of mine just posted this up on facebook:
"A lot of people posting sentiments like "a sign of maturity is that we can still be friends while having differences of opinion". That is true. However, depending on how the next four years play out, I hope we can still be friends if one of my opinions is that you're a "good German"."
See what I mean?
Would have been smarter to let Illinois governor JB Pritzker run, if not for president, then at least as VP, so to let him sink his family's billions into campaign run, and hopefully liberate Illinois from his pretense at governor.
Very interesting article, and interesting comments over at the Times. There are some centrist Democrats who agree with Stephens, but most are not willing to listen. Thanks much for the link.
Ultimately, it came down to 74% Wrong Track, 26% Right Track. The Democrats who are mystified why they lost are part of the 26% Right Track bubble. In their newsrooms and faculty lounges, everyone agreed that the Biden administration was doing a great job. Kamala Harris represented more of the same, which was fine with them. In the rest of the nation where the other 74% of us reside, however, change was desired. Donald Trump was that agent of change.
Would things have gone differently had Biden not decided, in his hubris, to seek a second term, and allowed the Democrats to have a competitive primary election? This would almost certainly have produced a candidate with political skills superior to Kamal Harris, who didn't even make it to the Iowa caucuses in 2020. Anointing Harris as the candidate when Biden's obvious incapacity was revealed in his debate against Trump turned out to be a fatal error.
"Prigs and Pontificators?" What a way to address our former (and for aught we know current acting) President Obama and his First Lady! Or former First Lady Clinton and Vice President Harris. Or even my neighbors with their "In This House We Believe" and "Harris Walz--Obviously!" signs.
PP? Sounds about right. Also, PC.
They are ex voters.
Guy wins in a landslide because, unlike last time, he encouraged his supporters to do mail ins, and you still can't let go of the stolen election thing.
Bzzt, wrong
If there was no cheating in 2020, Trump would have easily won
Maybe performance? Think about judging a high school debate competition: is the winner the team that did the best job advocating their side of the debate, or the team who, on the merits, was ON the right side of the debate?
Funny thing a former Obama staffer, Marie Harf, said on Fox today it could be Shapiro, Wes Moore, Whitmer, or drum roll please …..Tammy Baldwin! I laughed out loud in my car at the stop & go light. The lady next to me thought I was crazy!
My facebook is full of "so-and-so" changed their profile picture - and it's just a black-filled circle. Not sure what it represents (democracy has died?). Some of these folks wore pussy hats in 2016. Some justified riots over George Floyd. their reaction today is psychotic - wanting to move to a blue state because their child is trans. Worried about granddaughters (age 3) because of abortion. Worried about a grandson (age 8) who might be gay. And all of them (and their adult children) are in the >$100K annual income level - the one segment that Harris won. They aren't worried about food, housing or energy inflation.
As Joan Rivers used to say, and as too many on the Left don't do: Oh, grow up@
I believe the most significant Democrat policy position going forward will continue to be "Shut Up!"
I subscribed to Scientific American for a couple of decades and had read my father's subscription for many years before that. I cancelled it in the early 2000s. It's nice to get an occasional reminder that I made the right decision.
(1) A united media made Trump’s defeat a holy cause. (2) The Democrats nominated a woman and made Abortion a centerpiece of the campaign. Predictably, a nontrivial percentage of women became single-issue voters for Kamala. (3) A nontrivial percentage of normally republican voters remain never-Trumpers and voted for Kamala.
He still won. Voters have noticed — democrats aren’t good at governing.
G-Pub
I believe Joe did that after he was shoved out. As dense as Joe has always been, he does know retail politics and had to know she was inept, so endorsing her on his way out was his revenge on upstart like Obama and Clinton.
The problem with Pritzker is the problem of getting his campaign of the ground.
Not without a crane with a 5 ton load.
I just got two comments on social media that wondered how anyone could vote for (string of Trump insults follow). They both included the statement Trump told people to inject bleach. I directed them to Politifact and Snopes. Both rate it mostly false but give a reasonable explanation. The retort? Well NBC and the BBC say so, so I must be lying... sigh. They will never learn unless the losses like they just suffered continue in multiple election cycles.
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