And so the finger pointing, blaming, and name calling has begun.
The 2024 Presidential Election was supposed to be close.
It wasn't. And that means something. How did the nation elect a convicted felon who hung out with a procurer and who is a creepy serial polygamist, who also is likely sliding into dementia, as President of the United States?
Well, there are a lot of views out there. We offer ours, including some things we noted early on.
1. It turns out that we were correct that Biden shouldn't have run in the first place, and that Harris shouldn't have stepped into the breach.
Biden was supposed to be a caretaker President. "Go with the Joe you know" only made sense as long as it was just one cup of coffee. People didn't want a refill. Biden was supposed to carry on for four years while the nation got back on its feet from a traumatic Trump presidency and figured out where to go next.
Biden's diehard insistence on running again doomed that, and in some ways, the Democrats chances in 2024.
Biden, in his defense, was dealt a bad hand right from the onset. Left with an economy impacted by COVID, he had to deal with it, and he did a good job. The inflation that caused was not of his making, and he actually pulled off a soft landing. In the future, he's likely to be regarded as having pulled an economic rabbit out the hat.
And his rallying to the cause of Ukraine is singularly responsible for the country not being overrun by the Russians.
But people are stupid about economics, and stupidly believe that once inflation slows, prices return to the pre inflation norm, which actually required deflation, which generally causes a depression. That tar baby is now Trump's, as Trump won't be able to pull that off either.
More than that, however, Biden's advanced age was showing, whereas its seemingly not as noticeable with Trump. It was real hubris of Biden to run for a second term, and he shouldn't have done it. That set the Democrats behind.
When he finally stepped out, I noted that the time that Harris shouldn't step in. She did. She actually also ran a much better campaign than I initially thought she would. Frankly, I don't know that I can blame her for running, or blame the Democrats for running her. She proved to be too easy to tag with the issues that had hurt Biden, however, which did not make up the reasons that I thought she should not have run.
2. It's actually the social issues, stupid.
El Paso Sheriff : What's it mean? What's it leadin' to? You know, if you'd have told me 20 years ago, that I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses, I just flat-out wouldn't have believed you.
Ed Tom Bell : Signs and wonders. But I think once you quit hearing "sir" and "ma'am," the rest is soon to foller.
El Paso Sheriff : Oh, it's the tide. It's the dismal tide.
No Country For Old Men.
People keep analyzing the race in terms of the economy, which I myself partially did above. But the big issue, to put it bluntly, is that Obergefell shocked many people into confronting the moral decline of the nation, something that had been going on for a very long time.
Sexual immorality in the US really commenced its roll in the late 1940s, as we've discussed before, and started to accelerate in 1953 with the launch of Playboy, and then really took off in the 1960s with the pill and the Sexual Revolution. The irony of all of this, however, is the public tolerated it, although not always very comfortably, as it fit into conventional immorality. That is, the White Anglo Saxon Protestant community basically tolerated a boys will be boys attitude at first, and then accommodated itself to other trends later, as long as things roughly worked out the way they were supposed to in the end, although they have not been working out for quite some time. Once Obergefell came along, however, the public was asked to accommodate something else, and it hasn't, and for a host of reasons. Transgenderism, which really doesn't exist, came hard on the heels of homosexual marriage, and it was just too much for large sections of the country.
At one time, it might be noted, it was a common assertion that the Babylon Berlin atmosphere of 1920's Germany had brought about the Nazis, in part, as they seemed to stand against unconventional immorality. In truth, homosexuality was present in the early Nazis, but the movement did a good job of plastering over it so it was ignored, if known, just like Trump's flagrant immoral conduct with women is at least somewhat known, if ignored. It allowed people to believe that that the Nazis would foster a return to pre 1914 moral standards, while ignoring that they would inflict new horrors.* A lot of that has gone on in the populist movement as well, which sort of imagines that the country will sort of return to an imagined 1950s, or an imagined 1970s.
The Democrats didn't even try to do anything about this, but rather embraced the matters that the Trump populists and their fellow travellers opposed. That's a big part of what occured. Americans proved to be willing to go pretty far with changes in Christian morality before they started regretting it, which they did, but to be kicked into a new room with a bunch of very unconventional behaviors was more than they could bear. It not only spawned a massive counterreaction, but it spawned radical new theories about the nature of what was going on, much of them false, and sort of a modified variant of a Great Awakening, that we haven't seen the end of yet.** This reaction, moreover, wasn't limited to the US, but has been scene all over the Western World, caused by similar events.
You have to know the times you live in.
3. What we repeatedly said about abortion being a hill to die on was correct.
Hell Courtesan by Kawanabe Kyōsai.
Part of the solid evidence of the Democrats being marooned in a post Vietnam War liberal past is the absolute adherence to swimming in a sea of blood.I warned earlier that grasping tight to abortion was a critical mistake for Democrats, but they saw it as a great issue, one that would turn women out to vote in favor of infanticide.
Instead, what it did was to force truly adherent Christians to vote against them, even if not to vote for Harris. I was one of them. I voted for the American Solidarity Party. I would have anyhow, but in a state that was close, this cost the Democrats votes. It may very well have cost them the election.
Ironically, and the Democrats failed to grasp it, Donald Trump's wishy washiness on this helped him. Lots of Evangelicals and even Catholics could rationalize voting for him as he seemed to be against abortion, sort of. Hadn't his court brought Dobbs around? And Republican women who otherwise adhered to the American Civil Religion could rationalize voting for pro abortion ballot measures while voting for trump, essentially voting for the things they were comfortable with from the 1970s, like abortion and birth control, while voting against homosexuality and transgenderism.
Indeed, the entire religiosity of the Trumpites is much like this, although not of the National Conservatives. They're okay with cheating men, up to a limit, premarital sex, and divorce, as long as the plumbing matches. They aren't okay with homosexuality. Truly religious voters were never supportive of abortion, which Harris leaned deeply into.
Democrats should have known that and figures out a way to deal with it. Even simply taking the same position as Trump, let the states deal with it, would have leveled the choice for many. Or they could have just remained completely silent in the election on abortion and transgenderism, which would have caused some votes to swing their way.
If the Democrats don't modify their position on abortion, they're not going to do better in 2028.
4. What we noted as long ago as 2016 about ignoring rust belt issues is still true.
The problem here is that this festering sore has become infected, and crossed from discontent into malevolence. Basically, its much like small town Germans thinking that a local Jewish butcher was odd, to thinking he's in league with evil. This has been downright scary.
Democrats woke up to the problem of decades long mass illegal immigration, but too late. Now, it appears, we're about to engage in a mass immorality.
This one was a hard one for the Democrats. Biden screwed up early in his administration on this issue. Harris was tarred with it. It would have taken a different candidate to distance from it, perhaps, quite frankly, a Hispanic one. There are solutions, but some of them are quite out of the box, very pre 1940, and a bit drastic.
Likewise, Trump introduced his absurd tariffs concept. The idea is underdeveloped and economically flaccid. But Rust Belt people don't care as in their minds if electric vehicles don't come in from China, 1965 Chevrolet Impalas will come back. This won't happen, and this will rapidly prove to be incorrect.
5. Demographics change.
Roman Catholic Cathedral Santuario de Guadalupe (Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe), Dallas Texas
Democrats in the 1960s abandoned white Southern racists in favor of the minorities of the time, much to their credit. Up until that time, African Americans had been Republicans. Democrats remembered that Italian American and Irish Americans had been, and were, theirs.
But they failed to notice that Roe v. Wade shattered the Catholic immigrant retained vote of earlier eras. For some reason, they didn't grasp that retaining abortion and embracing transgenderism and abortion would come to offend large groups of American, and even immigrant, Hispanics, who had a similar Catholic morality. And they didn't grasp that at the pew level, this was also true for the Black Church and many African Americans, who came to resent having their cause compared to ones based on sexual orientation or practice.
They also forgot that minority adherence to patronage only lasts as long as poverty does. Once a demographic moves into the Middle Class, it begins to disappear within a generation or two. Irish Americans and Italian Americans were once solidly Democratic. This hasn't been the case for a long time. Hispanics have been moving out of poverty, and so have African Americans.
And Hispanic Americans, which are a diverse group to start with.
This left the Democratic party a party of old Boomers, and the white upper middle class, and lower upper class, white, effete, elites. They're aren't enough of them to win an election.
Footnotes
*The Nazis ended up sending homosexuals to the death camps. They were highly resistant to women working, and only relented on it as the war began to go very badly. They'd also encourage pregnancy, including out of wedlock, by German women, which was definitely contrary to traditional Christian morality.
This is of note, not because there will be death camps, but because Germans voting on morality issues didn't get what they bargained for at all. Americans doing the same in the 2024 election are likely to find they may be surprised.
**As an example, while at the county courthouse to vote early, I encountered an elderly man wearing a MAGA hat who was informing people that transgenderism "wasn't invented here", whatever that would mean, and that this was a reason to vote for Trump.
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