Today the Washington Post profiles New Castle, Pennsylvania, a desperately poor town where a quarter of all families live in poverty. But most of them voted for Donald Trump anyway even though they depend on welfare benefits that Republicans have long wanted to cut back. Some quotes:
Lori Mosura: “He is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of just the rich,” Mosura, 55, said on a recent afternoon. “I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us.”
Steve Tillia: “It’s not cutting government programs, it’s cutting the amount of people needed to run a program,” he said. “They are cutting staff, which could actually increase the amount of the programs that we get.”
Dawn Simmons: Trump’s decisions may even lead to enhanced benefits in the coming years because he plans to “put Americans first.”
Kathy Davis: Asked whether she worries that Trump’s agenda could hurt the poor, Davis said the incoming president is “too smart for that. You can’t wipe out half of the population” of New Castle, Davis said. “We are old and tired and just want to be taken care of, and Trump has too much common sense, so I don’t think he is going to do anything to hurt us.”
The delusion here is painful. It's on Democrats that so many people have apparently given up on them, but I still wonder what they could have done. Joe Biden increased food stamp benefits permanently by nearly $200 after inflation. He cut the poverty rate from Trump's first-term average of 11.1% to 10.1% in 2023. He made Obamacare cheaper for everyone. Even after the recent unwinding, he's expanded the Medicaid rolls by 8.3 million. SSI benefits went up 22%—more than inflation. He wrote generous stimulus checks at the height of the pandemic against united Republican opposition.
But as near as I can tell, the SNAP increase is practically a state secret. The stimulus checks didn't have Biden's signature on them. And the child tax credit and other pandemic lifelines went away after the pandemic was over. So lots of poor people think Democrats did nothing for them.
Part of the reason for this is that Democrats are reluctant to tout their safety net accomplishments because they're afraid it will turn off working class voters. They might be right. But it sure hits them in the gut when even the beneficiaries of their programs don't believe they've gotten anything from them.
It continues to be the greatest failure of journalism in my lifetime that people regularly rate the Republicans better on the economy, when there's no data to back that up. There is, however, the fact that Trump played a rich guy on TV.
Kevin’s post takes an almost entirely technocratic view of the situation, but in politics that’s just not enough. And that’s why he winds up with silly statements like this:
“It's on Democrats that so many people have apparently given up on them, but I still wonder what they could have done.”
No need to wonder. At all. The things that Democrats need to do are simple and obvious: profess their support for an American meritocracy and abandon vitriolic condemnations of the USA as an evil and systemically racist country; promote hard work and a culture of success rather than the politically toxic and arguably racist DEI dogma; acknowledge and utterly repudiate the culture of censorious social justice at overwhelmingly Leftist institutions like universities, media outlets, nonprofits, publishing houses, and the now-infamous ACLU; abandon mystical jargon about fluid gender identities and respect the perfectly reasonable objections to trans rights extremism; and for god’s sake just condemn assassins without any qualifications about the health care industry!
Why is any of this basic stuff even remotely contentious? The Dems have spent years if not decades walling themselves off in a secular religion that decisively separates them from the vast majority of Americans. Both Clinton and Obama pushed back on the Left but, in terms of influencing the culture of the Dem party, I would say that the Left ultimately prevailed after George Floyd. And the entirely predictable fallout from that debacle has finally manifested in the reelection of convicted felon Donald Trump.
So it’s not enough to enact good policy, as Biden did. If a party wants to win national elections, it also has to stop telling the country that it’s composed of little or nothing more than evil whites, Asians, and Jews on one side, and various groups of victims on the other. That’s a narrative of nihilism. And it deserves to lose.
Quite a fairy tale.
Fuck you Leo.
I kind of think if you actually knew as confidently as you write that your five item list leads decisively to democrat success you would be able to or want to articulate reasonings why instead of just stating conclusion, that it is all self-evident.
In other words, what's the underlying reasoning(s)? Put some meat on those bones.
Perhaps you should read this: ""Elon Musk learns about racism."
Nice collection of extremist right wing talking points by the way. Democrats should stop defending people's rights to cater to bigots and idiots. No thanks.
@Josef
This sort of strawman response is of course very common (both in person and online), but it nevertheless remains profoundly counterproductive.
Because, of course, I do not advocate that anyone should stop defending their own, or anyone else's, rights.
Enforcing mandates for proportional racial outcomes in all spheres of society, as DEI attempts to do, is not equivalent to defending anyone's rights. It is simply ideological extremism. And it ultimately accomplishes very little other than to elect people like Trump.
I doubt the Dem party will be truly competitive again unless and until Dem politicians can finally start saying these things. But if the Left then responds by successfully tarring such individuals as "bigots and idiots," then we can look forward to a generation or more of national Republican leadership.
So the Dem party will either jettison the Left (and win elections), or the Left will destroy the party and enshrine national Republican dominance. And you seem to be promoting the latter.
Since you included DEI in your comment I can completely ignore what you have to say.