Despite the recent narrow passage by House Democrats of a heavily modified version of President Joe Biden’s so-called “Build Back Better” plan, following the signing into law of the long delayed bipartisan infrastructure package, even Biden’s most enthusiastic supporters now admit that his presidency is in deep trouble and facing a crisis of voter confidence.
Biden ran for president on a promise to act as a reuniting force in politics who would restore “normalcy” to Washington. Voters viewed Biden as a known quantity who could be trusted to govern the country by seeking to form a bipartisan consensus with Republicans and getting the job done while putting an end to the circus-like atmosphere which dominated the Trump era.
But the negotiation and belated final passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill is the only accomplishment of the Biden administration after more than 10 months in office which has lived up to those voter expectations.
The wasteful liberal welfare spending programs in Biden’s bloated $1.9 trillion Covid stimulus package, passed over strenuous Republican objections, have arguably done as much harm as good. They stoked the forces of inflation by injecting too much cash into the consumer economy, while providing financial disincentives for Americans idled by the pandemic to go back to their former jobs. Biden’s encouragement of public schools around the country to remain closed longer than necessary delayed the return to post-pandemic normalcy for parents and students alike, while his administration’s changing positions on masking and vaccine mandates have created confusion and generated resistance to vaccines instead of fostering confidence in his leadership on this crucial issue.
BIDEN HAS SQUANDERED THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT
For the first few months of his presidency, voters were willing to continue giving Biden the benefit of the doubt. Most preferred to believe he would eventually revert to the bipartisan governing style, consistent with his long political record, upon which he campaigned for president against Donald Trump last year.
But in mid-summer, the embarrassing fiasco of the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan burst Biden’s bubble of popularity and revealed his stubborn incompetence for everyone to see. Since that point, Biden’s job approval rating has continued to decline, as voters increasingly recognize his administration’s pattern of broken promises, mixed messages, deliberate misstatements, and partisan policy proposals which are mostly out-of-touch with the main concerns and priorities of the American people.
According to recent polls of independent voters who mostly voted for Biden last year, they now say by a 7-1 margin that he has performed worse than they expected as president, despite the overwhelmingly positive coverage he has continued to receive from the mainstream media.
As a result, most Democrat strategists assume they will lose control of the House and likely the Senate, as well, for reasons that go much deeper than President Biden’s cratering public approval ratings. These range from spiking inflation, to a nationwide parents’ revolt against progressive domination of the public schools, to the immigration crisis along the border with Mexico, to the growing distrust of our foreign allies, to the increasingly dysfunctional federal government in Washington.
DEMOCRAT BRAND NOW IN JEOPARDY
Because of President Biden’s numerous blunders, mixed messages, and disappointments since he took office in January, the good reputation of the Democrat party brand itself has now been broken in the eyes of most independent voters. As a result, the party is facing its most serious identity crisis since Ronald Reagan entered the White House 40 years ago.
Underlying all these problems is that the Democrats are no longer answerable to their traditional voter base, dominated by ethnic and religious minorities and working-class families living in middle America. Instead, their agenda is being driven by a small group of cultural elites promoting the impractical demands of a socialist-inspired progressive agenda and the radical ideology of identity politics. The media is a willing participant in this effort, because it generally follows the narrative created by the liberal Democrat officials, regardless of the known facts, to reward their cultural elite supporters and wealthy campaign donors by promoting their partisan political goals.
Making matters worse, the interests of the elites are fundamentally hostile to most traditional poorer and working-class Democrat voters, whom the elites also hold in thinly disguised contempt.
SALT DEDUCTION HYPOCRISY
The most blatant example of Democrat and Biden administration hypocrisy with regard to the best interests of traditional working-class Democrat voters is the last-minute addition to the version of Biden’s Build Back Better plan of a huge tax cut that benefits only the top 13% of higher income American taxpayers who still claim itemized deductions on their 1040 annual tax returns instead of taking the standard deduction.
Before President Trump’s 2017 tax cut bill, those wealthier taxpayers were able to declare all the state and local income taxes and property taxes they paid as federal tax deductions, effectively requiring the other 87% of American taxpayers to subsidize the steep blue state taxes on their high incomes and fancy homes. Trump helped pay for his tax cut by reducing the maximum allowable SALT (State and Local Tax) deduction to no more than $10,000, which is still enough to cover what a typical working-class homeowner in a red state would typically pay in such taxes.
The provision added to the Biden Build Back Better plan would almost fully restore the SALT tax deduction, creating a windfall tax break for wealthy, high income homeowners who would be able to deduct as much as $80,000 a year in such state and local taxes if the bill becomes law.
Part of the irony is that in promoting the Build Back Better Plan, Biden claimed that its social welfare and other benefits would be entirely paid for by tax increases affecting only those wealthy families and businesses earning more than $400,000 a year. That claim was never really true, because it ignored the fact that corporations invariably pass their increases in taxes on to their customers in the form of higher prices for their goods and services, their employees in the former of lower wage increase, and their stockholders in the form of smaller dividends.
However, the near total restoration of the SALT deduction means that the net effect of the House version of the Biden bill would be to give a net federal tax cut of an average of $16,800 next year for two-thirds of American families making over $1 million, mostly those living in high-tax blue states.
In addition, the restoration of the SALT tax deduction is now the second largest expenditure in Biden’s bill, second only to $555 billion in green energy spending, but more than any of the bill’s social welfare benefits, including increased child care credits, free pre-K education, and adult home care payments.
CATERING TO THE WEALTHY CULTURAL ELITE
Why have Democrats opened themselves to credible Republican charges of hypocrisy in the Biden bill on which their candidates plan to run in next year’s midterms? One answer is that lifting the SALT cap is one way they can directly reward the wealthy cultural elite and campaign donors, who are the real power behind the party today, for their support for the other progressive policies in Biden’s bill.
The potent political issue the restored SALT deduction hands Republicans is obvious. Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina recently tweeted, “The Democrats’ SALT tax deduction is almost exclusively a tax cut for the rich. They’re out here yelling ‘tax the rich’ while crafting handouts for the wealthy behind closed doors.”
Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s comment was, “even as our colleagues draft the biggest tax hikes in half a century, they cannot resist the concept of special tax cuts for high earners in blue states.”
Another threat posed by Biden’s bill to the best interest of working-class Americans is its huge cost, which is only thinly disguised by the cynical accounting tricks Democrats used to manipulate the official budget estimate to come in under a theoretical spending cap, which is only about half the real-world government spending it will ultimately require.
Republican Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming said that, “for Joe Biden to say ‘We have to spend even more money on top of inflation,’ to me this is ‘Alice in Wonderland’ logic.”
In further comments in a Fox News interview about Biden’s Build Back Better bill, which has cleared the House and is now up for Senate consideration, Barrasso said, “I view this as a back-breaking bill for the country with the kind of expenses, the spending, the adding to the debt, the inflation, the taxes that are going to hit the American people.”
In that sense, Republicans are more in touch with the primary concerns of American consumers, as measured in every opinion poll, about the highest rate of inflation in decades. They realize that the massive spending increases Biden’s bill is calling for will not solve that problem but rather inevitably lead to further prices increases.
THE GROWING PROSPECT OF ANOTHER LONG-TERM DEFEAT
The last time Democrats controlled the White House and both Houses of Congress after the 2008 election, they were quickly brought down by a voter revolt against their elitist big spending programs benefitting the corporate elite in a time of economic crisis. When Democrats ignored the pain of their working-class voters who were losing their homes while bailing out the big banks and Wall Street firms which generated the crisis, and which were run by major Democrat campaign donors who escaped relatively unscathed, furious grassroots activists organized the Tea Party rebellion, which swept the 2010 midterms and forced President Obama to make major concessions out of recognition that “elections have consequences.”
Twelve years later, Democrats are making many of the same mistakes again and are facing the prospect of similarly painful electoral consequences, as national opinion polls show that nearly two-thirds of Americans see their party as “out of touch with the concerns of most people.”
PROGRESSIVES EVEN MORE OUT-OF-TOUCH WITH REALITY
But progressive Democrats refuse to acknowledge that their ideologically-driven agenda is further alienating voters and driving the party to the brink of electoral disaster because of its huge costs.
The leader of the House progressives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, argues that most Democrat voters are disappointed with what the party has achieved since Biden took office and won control of both houses of Congress, because they believe that Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi compromised too much to get moderate Senate Democrats to support Biden’s current spending bill and other progressive proposals that haven’t even gotten that far.
“Democrats have a trifecta and have been unable to pass voting-rights protections,” AOC said. “And so, people can wring their hands and say ‘but Manchin’ all they want, or ‘but the filibuster’ all they want, but at the end of the day, what people see are the results of their actions and the results of investing their time.
“I think that if we pass the Build Back Better Act as the House passed it, that we have a shot to go back to our communities and say we delivered. But that’s not to say that this process has not been demoralizing for a lot of folks, because there were enormous promises made. Not just at the beginning, and not just during the election, but that continued to be made. And this is where I have sounded the alarm, because what really dampens turnout is when Democrats make promises that they don’t keep.”
Because of this stubborn progressive mindset, Biden and Pelosi abandoned their two-month-long effort to give the Build Back Better bill a realistic chance at passage by meeting with the practical objections raised by moderate Democrat Senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. Instead, they gave in to pressures from various party factions to add new, expensive provisions to the bill, such as lifting the SALT cap, that will have no chance to pass the Senate without major alterations, which will then have to go back to the House again for a final vote.
Meanwhile, the many controversial provisions added to the bill will turn it into a veritable political piñata for Republicans to attack, making its final approval early next year even more problematic.
DEMOCRATS LOST TOUCH WITH THEIR OWN IDENTITY
Having deliberately cut themselves off from their party’s historic roots, liberal Democrats and their special interest groups are now enemies instead of advocates for working class voters. The liberal Democrats have also abandoned the party’s traditional support for classic American concepts of civil liberty. Today, Democrat officials are the enemies of Constitutional guarantees for free speech, freedom of religion, and gun ownership rights, as well as free market capitalism, the American dream, and the Founding Fathers’ unique system of checks and balances in our government.
Instead, liberal Democrats are promoting the progressive myth of systemic American racism and the insulting, false claim that all “white” Americans are automatically guilty of having oppressed a wide variety of groups of self-identified victims.
With the encouragement of progressives, Biden has now abandoned all pretense of seeking to govern the country in a bipartisan fashion, He and other liberal Democrats, with the continued unquestioning support of the mainstream media, now govern by promoting fear of the public enemy de jour, whether it be the alleged conspiracy of domestic terrorists plotting to return Donald Trump to power, white supremacy, climate change, the big oil companies, or the latest variant of the coronavirus.
At the same time, Democrats have encouraged the corporate-supported cancel culture to ruthlessly attack and destroy anyone on the left or the right who dares to publicly disagree with their radical ideology, methods, and goals, or to expose their lies, hypocrisies, and failures.
THE LAW AND ORDER ISSUE
Democrat state and local officials are also increasingly associated with the sharp recent decline in the safety and quality of life in the large cities and blue states they have long governed.
This is not a new problem for Democrats. By the early 1990s, the American left had spent a generation earning a soft-on-crime image in an era of growing lawlessness. In 1988, Democrat presidential nominee Mike Dukakis secured the party’s third landslide loss in a national election, thanks in part to his stalwart opposition to the death penalty regardless of the severity of the crime, which he awkwardly reiterated in a televised presidential debate.
Now Democrats seem intent on reviving that reputation for indifference to violent crime when it cannot be easily explained by their preferred narrative of blaming white racism.
In Waukesha, Wisconsin, two weeks ago, six people were killed and at least 60 injured when a black man named Darrell E. Brooks deliberately drove his red Ford Escape SUV through the middle of a holiday parade. Brooks already had a long criminal record, including running over a woman with the same SUV in nearby Milwaukee three weeks earlier. But instead of being kept in jail, Brooks was freed after putting up a minimal $1000 bond that the liberal Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office had recommended, which enabled him to carry out the mass murder in Waukesha. It is the latest example of the deadly consequences of liberal campaigns to reduce or eliminate cash bail for dangerous suspects who have been arrested for serious crimes in cities and states across the country.
Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm now admits that the bail amount he had recommended for Brooks was “inappropriately low.” But such minimal bail recommendations even for those accused of serious, violent crimes has been a hallmark of the Democrat DA’s record ever since he was elected in 2007.
Chisholm’s office failed to even prosecute more than 200 arrested suspects charged with such serious offenses as armed robbery, assault of a police officer, child abuse, and high-volume drug trafficking. Furthermore, of 900 defendants who were given reduced bail on Chisholm’s office recommendations, 30% violated the court’s bail requirements by committing new crimes or failing to make their next scheduled appearance in court. Chisholm also refused to admit that his bail reforms were failing, even though, according to FBI statistics, Milwaukee’s violent crime rate steadily rose during the first eight years after he took office, while the nationwide violent crime rate was dropping.
Chisholm is not alone. Liberal district attorneys in several other major cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, now decide whether to prosecute crimes on the basis of ideology and race.
SILENCE IN THE FACE OF AN AVOIDABLE TRAGEDY
Brooks killed five members of the marching group known as Milwaukee Dancing Grannies, including Jane Kulich, 52; Tamara Durand, 52; Wilhelm Hospel, 81; Leanna Owen, 71; and Virginia Sorenson, 79. An eight-year-old boy, Jackson Sparks, also later died in hospital. The lack of outrage by liberals and the media in reaction to that brutal act of mass murder stands in vivid contrast to the rush to judgement by the same people who condemned the not-guilty verdict handed down by a Kenosha jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial a week earlier, on the basis of the clear evidence presented at the trial that the young man had acted in self-defense in shooting his three attackers.
Brooks, 39, had been given the low bail following an earlier car attack despite his record of multiple previous arrests on drug abuse, resisting arrest, possession of a stolen gun, assault, and domestic violence. He was known to harbor black supremacist attitudes.
Brooks has effectively been given a pass by mainstream and social media for his current and earlier crimes because he is black. His lenient and forgiving treatment once again reveals the double standard behind liberal efforts to deny some defendants with unpopular political beliefs their right to a fair trial, while excusing other violent criminals, and in so doing, undermining public confidence in the criminal justice system. Their racially selective moral outrage is identity politics at its worst, ignoring all facts that do not fit their preconceived narrative of systemic racism, and hurling accusations intended to permanently divide the country into warring factions instead of trying to reunite it.
Political commentator Brendan O’Neill writes that in their coverage of the Rittenhouse trial and the Waukesha massacre, “much of the woke modern media is far more concerned with narrative rather than facts, far more interested in propagating the ‘correct’ view of the world than in telling readers and viewers what is happening in the world.”
While the basic facts of the attack in Waukesha were reported, there was none of the sense of moral outrage and condemnation which dominated the mainstream media coverage of the Rittenhouse shooting and his subsequent trial. In an effort to justify their knee-jerk condemnation of Rittenhouse simply because he was white and carrying a gun, the media repeatedly reported false facts about him in an attempt to influence the outcome of his trial. But the jury deciding the verdict were never allowed to consider the media’s narrative, and acquitted him on the basis of the clear facts and proper evidence presented during the trial.
LIBERAL ANARCHY IN CALIFORNIA
Since liberal Californians passed Proposition 47 in 2014, reclassifying as minor misdemeanors the possession of illegal drugs for personal use and the theft of up to $950 worth of merchandise from retail stores, deaths due to drug overdoses in San Francisco rose from 19 per 100,000 people to 81 per 100,000 people in 2020, and a wave of organized mob lootings and ransacking of high-end retail stores has hit the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.
In his new book, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, conservative environmental critic Michael Shellenberger has warned that unless California’s liberal elected officials put a stop to the crime wave, it could lead to “the breakdown of civilization on America’s West Coast.”
These rising crime trends have also been observed in other big cities, including Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, and New York City. Rates of homelessness increased the most between 2007 and 2020 in left-leaning states like New York, California, and Massachusetts, while decreasing in right-leaning states like Florida, Texas, and Georgia.
ORDINARY AMERICANS ARE LOSING FAITH IN THEIR GOVERNMENT
After 120 days of mostly unchecked riots, arson, looting, and violent protests during the summer of 2020, many members of the public lost their confidence in government agencies responsible for protecting law and order.
In the current crime wave, brazen lawbreakers enjoy de facto immunity from arrest and prosecution. Mass looting goes unpunished. Ordinary citizens, like Kyle Rittenhouse, who refuse to stand by in the face of brazen criminal acts, are often at greater risk of arrest and prosecution than the leftist-led rioters and vandals instigating the violent attacks.
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens notes that once the criminal violence has become condoned, its escalation becomes inevitable. “If you permit petty vices and crimes to flourish, greater ones will usually follow. If you refuse to police quality-of-life infractions like public drug use or aggressive panhandling, the quality of life will decline. If you increase the incentives for bad behavior, and reduce the ones for good, you will inevitably achieve catastrophic results.”
This is not an idle theory. It was proven in New York City, starting in 1994, when tough-on-crime Republican mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg achieved major crime reductions and made the city’s streets feel far safer for its residents — especially those living in minority neighborhoods, whose cause progressives have long claimed to champion, but in fact, have ignored.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, Democrat officials, including President Biden, have deliberately thrown away those gains in law and order at the behest of crime tolerant progressive radicals and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Democrat officials and the mainstream media closed their eyes to the blatant violence and criminal conduct carried out in the name of “racial equity,” and the considerable damage it did to the faith of most American citizens in the rule of law in this country.
CONSERVATIVE OPINIONS CHANGING TOO
That helps to explain why conservatives have lost their former confidence in the administration of justice, in the federal government’s intelligence and investigatory agencies, and in the criminal justice system.
Conservatives have always been amused by the liberal biases of the old network news and big-city print media. But they grudgingly admitted that even liberal journalists during the 20th century generally acted like professionals. News divisions of national networks or respected publications such as the New York Times or Washington Post mostly reported the news accurately rather than making it up or coloring it with blatant political bias. But that is no longer true.
The turning point for the mainstream media was the 2016 presidential election, when many respected journalists abandoned their professional principles in a deliberate effort to help Hillary Clinton defeat Donald Trump. Few reporters have offered apologies for helping to hatch and spread the Russian collusion hoax that originated as a Clinton campaign dirty trick, and which haunted the Trump administration for the next three years. Only now are some of the media organizations which vigorously promoted the hoax as truth beginning to correct their previous false reporting.
The mainstream media continues to report as fact the invented myths concerning the deaths of the martyrs of the Black Lives Matter movement, such as Michael Brown, who never actually said “hands up don’t shoot” before he was shot to death by the white cop he had attacked in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
Some moderate Democrats, such as New York City Mayor-elect Eric Adams, have gotten the message that most voters believe that progressive tolerance for lawlessness has gotten completely out of hand — but not before Democrats as a party have once again earned a reputation for being “soft on crime” and for progressive misgovernance.
Most independents who voted for Biden last year, as well as working-class voters in the American heartland who used to vote for Democrats, are now aware that the party and its liberal candidates are no longer working for their best interests. Instead, Biden and the liberals are pushing a progressive ideological agenda which will drive up the cost of gasoline and energy for poor and working-class families, slow economic growth, and attract more illegal immigrants to compete for their entry level jobs. Because they realize they have been abandoned, these former members of the Democrat voter base are expected to take their revenge on Democrat candidates in local, state, and national elections for years to come, starting with next November’s midterms.
FRUSTRATED FAMILIES ARE VOTING WITH THEIR FEET
Other frustrated working class and minority voters have not waited until the next election to respond to the deterioration of the quality of their lives and their personal safety in Democrat-ruled cities. Many have been voting with their feet and their U-Hauls, fleeing their longtime urban neighborhood to sink roots in another state where they can afford to buy a nice middle-class house, raise their family in safety and comfort, send their children to a local public school where they will not be brainwashed by liberal dogmas, and live a normal life again without fear of arbitrary Covid restrictions imposed by local government leaders.
Chicago had once a been magnet attracting poor blacks from the rural South seeking better economic opportunities. But over the past years, as the city has become notorious for its deadly shootings and other violent street crimes, thousands of black Cook County residents have abandoned left it to sink their roots in other states. According to recent census data, the reverse migration out of Chicago has reduced the city’s black population by about 10% over the past decade. The city once home to the nation’s second largest black community has seen its black population sink to the lowest total since the mid-1950s. As Chicago’s Hispanic and white populations increased over the last decade, Illinois saw the largest loss of black residents of any state except New York.
According to a recent profile published by the Chicago Tribune, Jason and Jennifer Parks and their four daughters are typical of the thousands of black middle-class families who have fled the dangerous South Side of Chicago. Today, they live happily in a new, spacious four-bedroom home they built in the northwest Indiana town of St. John’s, which offers them the security and quality of life no longer available in Chicago.
They appreciate the local school, where their 15-year-old twin daughters are thriving, and the fact that their younger daughters can play in the yard without the threat of gunfire. They are also pleased that their new community has convenient local shopping and more amenities of all kinds, and that their money goes further than in their former South Euclid Avenue neighborhood in Chicago.
BLACKS FLEEING CHICAGO TO SAFER COMMUNITIES
Jennifer, a triage nurse at University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center, who grew up in Chicago, told a Tribune reporter, “I’m glad that we’re out here. I have friends. I have a sense of community. We feel safe. We really do.”
Her husband Jason, who works in finance, agreed that safety was an issue, but his major motivation for the move was the improved quality of life that his family now enjoys. “What I expect if I’m paying property taxes and the like is, within a 10-minute drive in my community, I should be able to have access to most of what I need,” he said. “And that’s what we have here. We got what we were looking for in terms of space to raise our family and more of a neighborhood feel.”
Their experience appears to be typical for the average of nearly 8,000 former black residents of Chicago who moved to Indiana each year between 2015 and 2019, according to a study by the Brookings Institution. Furthermore, black Americans with less education and few skills are no longer attracted to Chicago by dreams of finding good jobs in its manufacturing and food industries, and are now instead looking elsewhere for such opportunities. A study by the Metropolitan Planning Council found that low-wage and low-skill workers are among the most likely to leave Chicago’s Cook County, outnumbering new arrivals by about two to one.
After Indiana, Southern states like Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and Florida were preferred destinations for black residents leaving Illinois between 2015 and 2019. Nationwide, the Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston metro areas have gained the most black residents between 2010 and 2020.
The ongoing exodus of the black families who had served as a force for stability in Chicago’s troubled South and West Side communities has become a serious challenge for officials hoping to reverse the deterioration of the city’s image. In response, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who is black, has touted the Invest South/West program, a $1.4-billion partnership between city departments, private corporations, and philanthropies that seeks to make improvements in 10 of the city’s struggling communities, as well as a $400-million program to address citywide public safety and mental health issues.
“Our goal is for every resident of Chicago to see their future here, and to address the chronic disinvestment spanning decades that is driving many Black Chicagoans to leave,” Mayor Lightfoot’s statement read.
But the initiative comes far too late for many of the city’s native black residents, who got fed up with its high crime and deteriorating quality of life and left at the first opportunity.
“WE ALL HAD TO GET OUT”
Gerald Anthony Kelly, who had lived on the South Side since he was three years old and who had worked as Chicago city bus driver, moved to Tempe, Arizona, in 2013, and says he has no desire to return. “Things you can do here you can’t do in Chicago, like sit outside at night. Go for walks at night. I saw the cost of living was so much cheaper here, and the job market was wide open here.”
Most of the rest of his family has also abandoned the city. “Every [sibling I had] that was there, with the exception of my older sister, left. I have 14 siblings — now all of us are gone. In Indiana, California, Texas, Arizona. We all had to get out. It’s just not the place you want to raise a family,” the 50-year-old said.
Kelly said he grew weary of the city and felt traumatized after being victimized several times by violent crime. “It made me nervous, honestly,” he said. “I got carjacked. It was a rough experience. I’ve been shot at on the CTA bus twice. Two burglaries in Oak Park and twice more in Chicago. There was a lot going on in Chicago. A lot of violence. A lot of death. I felt like I didn’t have peace.”
There is a similar trend in California, where incompetent Democrats control all large cities and statewide offices, including supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature and 75% of the state’s congressional seats. As a result, California politics is under the total control of Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay Area Democrat party bosses, including Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, and Dianne Feinstein.
Homelessness is rampant, in large part because California’s progressive leaders, with the support of the wealthy Democrat top 1%, resist all affordable home construction, as well as other necessary infrastructure investment in freeways, power plants, and oil and gas production. Few people with even good-paying jobs under the age of 40 can afford even a modest home in California today, forcing many lower income residents to live in their cars and trailers parked on the streets if they want to stay in the state.
The current Democrat political situation is simply unsustainable on numerous issues. Many of Biden’s former supporters have lost their patience with a president who has been, at best, fundamentally dishonest with American voters, and at worst, an incompetent puppet ruler with progressive activists pulling all his political strings.
Since the summer, the president’s popularity has fallen about as steeply as prices have risen. Democrat candidates have also lost their previous advantage over Republicans in the congressional “generic ballot,” and suffered the embarrassing loss of the governor’s mansion in what has recently been solidly “blue-voting” Virginia.
DEMOCRATS’ POLITICAL SITUATION IS UNSUSTAINABLE
President Biden and his fellow Democrats are now desperate to do something to halt the spiraling increase in prices — or to at least look like they are doing something — but they are still not willing to sacrifice their proposed tax and spending increases and their anti-fossil fuel policies which have been driving the current inflation spurt, which they can no longer credibly dismiss as “transitory.”
Biden is also facing strong disapproval of the disastrous consequences of his other progressive policies. These include the immigration chaos that Biden instigated along the Mexican border, and his helplessness in trying to confront the supply chain bottlenecks at ports and on highways.
Similarly, Biden’s overly generous Covid relief payments, expanded child car credits, and extended unemployment benefits are largely responsible for the reluctance of millions of workers who were temporarily unemployed due to the pandemic to return to the workforce, creating an artificial national worker shortage.
Pollsters running focus groups with voters in Virginia and New Jersey who revolted a month ago against the entrenched Democrat control in the states were shocked by their findings. “Voters couldn’t name anything Democrats had done,” one group of pollsters wrote. Participants were unhappy with the general direction of the country under Biden’s rule. They saw Democrats as “only focused on equality and fairness” and not on helping ordinary people like them.
And most surprising of all, the researchers found that on a personal basis, “Biden is hurting, even among [his] supporters. . . They were reluctant to say [Biden] is not up to the job, but they don’t feel like he’s getting it done right now.”
Add the negative impact on voters of the current law and order crisis in Democrat-governed cities across the country, and the growing parent revolt against the progressive woke curriculums and teachers union rule over the country’s public schools, and the possibility emerges that it may take a decade or more before Democrats can regroup and regain dominant national political power.
While a year is a long time in politics, Biden and the Democrats will need to make major internal policy changes to avoid the likelihood that their candidates will get wiped out at the ballot box next November.
There is even the possibility that Biden’s current constellation of political problems could lead to a fundamental change in the structure of American politics, similar to the dramatic impact of the Second Intifada on Israeli politics 20 years ago. The collapse of the peace process combined with the serious threat to law and order in Israel resulted in the effective destruction of the once dominant Israeli left wing. The vast majority of Israelis old enough to remember the terror of the Intifada will still not consider a return to the left-wing policies which led to the discredited Oslo peace process.
If Biden’s level of support does not recover from its current low point, he will remain just one more blunder away from a total political meltdown that could permanently discredit the Democrat party brand name.
