Shrill and defensive as usual, but you are missing the point.
"Distressed at the plight of the poor resulting from the Winter's severity, Queen Marie Antoinette saved three hundred thousand francs from her personal budget and turned this sum over to her ladies-in-waiting, the parish priests of Paris, and charitable organizations for distribution among the needy"
And the peasants famously replied "Cheers, Marie!" and harmony was restored to the land.
How do you think it feels to read that tweet, undoubtedly shared on some facebook group or whatever, after you've spent a quarter of your weekly budget on gas to queue idly with thousands of other cars because you can no longer feed your kids without someone else's charity? And then the algorithm links to Nancy Pelosi showing off her mansion and suggesting you give her favourite $12 ice cream a try.
Do you think they immediately googled Pam Keith to get the backstory, or to compare Pelosi's voting record with Kevin McCarthy's? Are they sitting there thinking, 'You know what's wrong with America these days? The lack of civility in our political discourse"
The Democrats are the party of the professional elite. They are the party for people with college degrees, and the socialisation and manners that accompany them. It wasn't always this way - West Virginia was the most Democrat state going until Clinton finished that off for good - but it is now, and everybody except for people with college degrees knows it. It's a bit like that old joke: 'A frog asks a fish "how's the water today" and the fish says 'what the hell is water?'
The Democrats are so thoroughly immersed in their own self-righteousness that they are genuinely baffled - they sincerely cannot comprehend - how anyone could fail to love them. "They must all be racists", they soothe themselves, over cute electoral college fantasy maps. "We'd win every state if only 60% of the population spontaneously disappeared". It is all but impossible these days for them to empathise with people who don't spend every waking hour retweeting Trump outrages, and Russiagate hysteria which quietly but invariably
turns out not to be true . Virtually impossible for them to see themselves the way those outside their own tribe see them. Even synapse strains, and usually the '
But the Republicans!!!/you morons are voting against your own interests!!!' circuit-breaker kicks in first.
At this point, both parties' primary function is to protect the status quo and manage America's lurching regression to the gilded age. Absurd as it is, the symbiotic culture war matters more than anything else in American politics because, very much by design, it is the primary realm in which the duopoly opts to perform their symbolic competition. They have in effect agreed to divvy up the spoils. The Democrats' positive vision is neo-puritarism; salvation from
original sin - but only to a select few who can master the arcane rituals and incantations required for penance and absolution. For everyone else, they are Bill Cosby for white people, hectoring them for their cultural pathologies and blaming them for their plight. If only you'd pull your trousers up, stop listening to that dreadful
gangsta rap Joe Rogan, and
learn to code!
Voters without college degrees, who do not spend their spare time fretting about Lev Parnas or googling Nancy Pelosi's voting record to win arguments on the internet, would genuinely struggle to list a single way in which their lives will materially change after Joe Biden takes over. What they do know is that while Democrats think they are dullard barbarian heathens
who are responsible for what is wrong in America, the Republicans do not. It is not a difficult choice.
Once the Democrats' transition to College Party is complete - and without a pandemic, a depression and the most reviled President since Harding to campaign against - they
will lose every time. I suspect many Party elders probably feel relieved - after all, the modern Democratic Party functions more as a
fundraising racket than a political organisation, and panic and hysteria reels in the checks like nothing else. With real power comes responsibilities which and expectations which they have no intention of fulfilling. A Republican senate means the Democrats can resume normal operations: approving Mitch McConnell's judges and
reaching across the aisle to people who they accused of fascism not ten minutes ago, performing the comfortable rites of 'moderate, pragmatic bipartisan consensus' on, say, gutting and privatising social security (like Obama would have done with Boehner if the Tea Party hadn't stopped them) - until the next electoral cycle kicks in and we immediately return to edge of the totalitarian precipice.
www.theguardian.com
