Destructive Democrats
Did anyone expect the Democrats to learn anything from defeat?
The lessons are for others to learn. Democrats, in line with the new cultural Left, think they are right and, when meeting with resistance, scorn the resisters for their stupidity. This has been the pattern for the best part of a quarter of a century. If my analysis in The New Class War is broadly correct – and I’ve yet to see anything that contradicts it, and much to confirm it – then the Democrats are being true to their material interests, their success depending on persuading enough people to believe that these interests are the interests of all. The political problems arise in the clash of these material interests and their political presentation. People once inclined to see the Democrats as the ‘People’s Party’ now see the party as serving other interests. It has served them well. These left of centre parties are now vehicles of material aggrandizement on the part of some against the interests of the people.
The Democrats don’t know what to do. They have been defeated and feel the need to make changes, but don’t know what to change. Changing is hard to do when you think you are right, and the Democrats still think they are right on all things. Hence they revert to type and damn people for being so stupid and brainwashed as to fall for the lies of others. It never occurs to them that they might be lying, that they are the ones so brainwashed as not to see the truths they espouse as the lies they are. Democrats are trying to work out why they lost and what lessons are to be learned and, in typical fashion, common to left-of-centre parties across the Western world, blame not the policies they advance and the ideas behind them but their mode of communication. They thus draw the conclusion that they were not ‘woke’ enough, doubling down on the very thing that, among other things, rendered them unpopular.
“We have no coherent message: Democrats struggle to oppose Trump”, says the New York Times.
The Democrats lost and don’t see why; they still think they are right in all essentials. The problem is that there is no coherent philosophy behind those essentials, nothing to fall back on. They don’t know how to go forward from here because their entire position was based on negativity, labelling and shaming the opposition. Now that the electorate have rejected this, they don’t know what to do. The name-calling is losing its effectiveness and they have no first principles and foundations to fall back upon. They can only revert to name-calling on steroids, hence the fanaticism and hysteria with respect to the fascism they see all around them. To hear them talk, you could gain the impression that there were ten-times the fascists around the Western world there were during the Second World War.
Their entire political strategy was based on name-calling, shaming, cowing, and silencing contrary views, damning contrarians by definition, rendering people compliant for fear of being called a nasty name. Support secured thus, the name-callers would get a free hand to do as they please in office, diverting public funds to preferred causes and identities. The people have had enough, and not before time. Their good nature has been exploited for too long. The revolt of the normies has been a long time coming. And the People’s Party find that they no longer have the people with them.
The biggest mistake all along has been to play the game with them, exchanging words and offering reasons. The problem is that there are no objective or common standards in this game. It is word play, texts without referents. Critics offer objections based on notions of truth and reason, whilst the name-callers are nominalists engaged in magic thinking, declaring something real because they say it is so. They hold the world spell-bound. Then along come the likes of Trump and Musk and Vance who, faced with this lunatic nominalism, say they just don’t care. They leave critics spinning in the world of words, and leave the endless and unwinnable wars behind as they set sail for reality.
The names no longer work and the words lose their power in being revealed as empty. And those who power depended upon spinning words have no idea how to respond. With an entire strategy based on negating their enemies, they find themselves unable to act when constructive action is called for. They have nothing, other than calling out the opposition, to draw on. They are still shouting ‘Nazi’ and ‘white supremacy’ around, as if this is in any way persuasive. More than enough people have worked out that those labels are being applied to them and their friends, families, and neighbours, and are no longer buying it. Had there really been so many Nazis around, you would have expected them to have shown their face and taken over by now (do you really think a mass of bed-wetting neurotics would have stopped them?) People have worked out that the name-callers mean people like them. The political word has divided into People Like Us and People Like Them, and the Us are branding the Them as ‘far right.’ There are more of the Them than of the Us. The power of the US has depended on the power of words to label and libel. And that power is now dissipating as the members of the Them resist and reject the nominalism. Reality is coming back. There is a right and natural way, and truth will out. And most normal folk cleave to reality. That doesn’t necessarily mean that truth will prevail, and countless totalitarian regimes in history have survived for far too long in face of the truth asserted by their victims. Truth has to be fought for. Such is politics. But in fighting, it helps to have reality and the people at your back.
The naming and the shaming is utterly decreative and debilitating, designed to inhibit people’s power and potentials rather than unleash it. The people who engage in such a politics are unable to advance an affirmative politics based on positive principles. They lack constructive content and purpose and proceed only by way of negation. They operate by way of deconstruction, negating all that exists and all who oppose them, and the strategy now lies in ruins. Trump is now in complete control, with Elon Musk being given access to the entire federal government to shred it and cut it down to size. And all Democrats can do in response is claim this is proof of Nazism and berate the great public for being so easily fooled. Because, of course, this mess can have absolutely nothing to do with them and their lousy politics; because, of course, political ineptness is not a thing that applies to them, only to others; because, of course, it isn’t at all possible that the things they have been advancing as truths are a pack of lies based on nothing more than value preferences and the power of words to make them true.
The Democrats approach has been wholly destructive and has proven destructive. The people have rejected it. And all that the Democrats can think to offer in response is more naming and shaming of the people for not allowing them free reign to carry on ruining everything whilst serving and securing their material interests. And the people no longer care about the names, they see them as empty. That’s the problem with name-calling in politics – it has a short shelf life, as the power of particular names wears off in time. You need new names, only to find you have already used the best ones. I mean, ‘Nazi’ trumps the lot, but has now lost the capacity to strike terror (allowing real Nazis to go undetected, well-done Democrats, genius). People no longer care about labels, they have lost their power and meaning by way of overuse.
The Democrats are demoralized. They are in need of an inspirational message, but are so devoid of constructive, bedrock principle that they can’t find one. They know what they stand against – everything and everyone that stands against it – but not what they stand for, beyond preferences void of substance. They can no longer tell the difference between the true and the not-true.
It would appear that the only thing that the Democrat Party stands for knows is the complete and total destruction of the United States. I would say that in that they are in tune with all other left-of-centre parties across the Western world, except that supposedly right-of-centre parties have been party to the destruction too. In the UK, people are now using the term ‘uniparty’ to describe the commitment of all parties to the same politics. That leaves us having to work out what common source they are drawing on behind the scenes. It isn’t popular power, for sure, so, of course, the naming and shaming takes aim against ‘populism’ too. The people are working out that they are the ‘Nazis’ and ‘far right’ the warnings say are all around us, poised to take over. The people who warn constantly of the ‘existential threat to democracy’ are that very threat – they fear the people and seek to remove their sovereign power.
The idea of the 1619 project is designed specifically to recast the USA as a tyrannical project that needs to be torn down in every aspect. The approach is entirely negative and destructive, and the Democrats support it. You can see the same thing happening across the Western world, with people being pressured into expressing shame over their history, their past, everything that made them what they are. They are being taught self-loathing. And it has been succeeding. Those who oppose have been made to feel helpless and have succumbed to demoralisation. The strategy succeeds by cultivating a sense of a false inevitability, people giving in in the face of seemingly unstoppable forces. It’s bunkum. All you have to do is stop playing the game, call it out, and tell the neurotics you don’t care.
You can cleave to truth, reality, and objective standards, and oppose these to the nominalist madnesses of the age in expectation of winning the debate. That’s not how it works when the other side is explicitly repudiating standards of truth and justice. It has taken someone like Trump and Musk, who don’t seem to be the most reflective of people, to turn up, cut to the chase, act, and say they don’t care when the name-calling starts. There is a reality beyond the naming of things and people, and they go direct. Between you and reality is a whole lot of words, and none of them can ever capture the truth, many of them being designed to do the opposite.
The nominalists have had an easy ride against those cleaving to objective standards of truth, reality, and morality, for the reason they go direct to their own preferences, as new, and entirely arbitrary standards, repudiating entirely substantive notions of objectivity binding on all. As a result, we have been drawn into the world of irreducible subjective opinion, preference, and power play, the clash of arbitrary yeses and noes – transcendent standards being labelled as arbitrary as all others. Power, not morality, prevails. And that war is endless and unwinnable. It has taken someone hard-headed, unread, and unreflective like Trump to play the negators at their own game and just say ‘no.’ ‘Just say no’ is the advice given to all those seeking to avoid abuse with respect to sex and drugs and everything. But this is a ‘no’ with positive and healthy connotations. The person who says ‘no’ in this context is also saying ‘yes’ by affirming standards, values, and possibilities that stand outside of present – arbitrary - boundaries.
There is a difference between the contemplatives who seek a proper understanding of the world, fostering a practical approach based on the appreciation of the world, valuing what is to be valued, and seeing how things could be changed for the betterment, and the activist world-changer who works for the destruction of all that stands in the way of their preferences.
The destruction has been given the intellectual cover of deconstruction. The only constructive labour they have engaged in is to have constructed an intellectual weapon that can be used politically to destroy all that stand in their way. Truly constructive work involves established precisely how the Shire is a nice place to be and working out how me may preserve it in all its essential features, continue to renew it, or restore it when it has been lost. Creation, preservation, and renewal is a far more difficult task than negation and destruction. It is therefore vulnerable to the assaults of those who care only for their own concerns and interests. Along comes the unread and unreflective Donald Trump, who, taking a somewhat similar approach, succeeds by negating the negators. The house of cards raised by the nominalists falls easily. It has no essential core, no substance, and is easily blown down.
In my own work on Being and Place I have sought to develop a philosophy of foundations, standards, and substances, orienting action towards the world beyond words. The aim is to ally character formation with social formation, so that people need neither to be persuaded nor pressured to do the right thing, they just know it and do it. It is a philosophy grounded in the common moral reason, and is therefore accessible to all, something innate, requiring little of external authority beyond protection and preservation. In a certain sense, in a very undeveloped and inchoate way, Trump’s revanchism is a direct and blunt expression of this perennial philosophy, expressing standards by way of gut feeling and instinct, expressing a love of place and a hatred of those who seek to destroy it. Rather than argue with them on their own slippery terrain of terms with changeable meanings, he just says defund and down with the lot of them. It’s a message popular with the common folk still on nodding terms with reality.
It turns out that hating your country and damning the people in it might make you unpopular. Trump gained and the Democrats lost in every demographic category.
Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat from Texas, admits that the Democrats have no coherent, constructive, message before going on to denounce Trump as psychotic. All they have is negation and destruction. No one who voted Trump thinks he is psychotic. They see a man getting on with the job he promised to do in seeking election. It is worth reminding the Democrats, still in their bubbles, that Trump won the popular vote.
As Trump gets the federal budget down, the haters carry on shouting ‘fascist’ and ‘white supremacy.’ It’s almost as if they have nothing else in the tank. That’s all they’ve got, and only the band of die-hard believers believe it. Everyone else has lost patience, are no longer cowed, and are reclaiming reality.
Earlier I touched on the intellectual origins of this lunacy in the form of postmodernism and deconstruction. The politics origins are more directly tangible – the negative campaigning that took over politics in the 1990s. The Democrats, as had the Labour Party in the UK, had campaigned around constructive ideals, only to lose out to the direct appeals to selfish self-interest and greed by conservative parties under the sway of neoliberalism. When elections were close, it was discovered that negative attacks on your opponents could tip the balance in your favour. Expressing what you were against proved to be more effective than stating what you were for. And so, at some point, more and more emphasis came to be placed on the negative, and proportionately less on the positive, until politics came to be consumed by negation. The Left lost its ideals and its positive vision and instead became mired in negation and neurosis, endlessly attacking those who stand in their way, thinking the worst at all times, catastrophizing the crises they see all around them. It’s a hopeless condition. It’s no wonder they keep asserting the ‘end of the world,’ such a thing bringing them relief at last.
Negative campaigning has turned into constant negation. When checked and rejected, they are called upon to make a positive case beyond empty sloganeering, and find they have nothing. The Democrats went all in on negation, and lost their positive ideals.
The problem is that when you only have negation, you are unable to construct anything.
A deeper analysis from me here:
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