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May 4, 2022

Twenty twenty was a bitter defeat for many of us, and the charges of fraud were not without merit.  What wasn’t true however were the tales of rigged voting machines swinging the election.  As I wrote not long afterward, the truth emerged, and it was just the same illegal ballot-harvesting operation the leftist activists always run, but this time with hundreds of millions in Silicon Valley dollars and the connivance of some election officials.

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The new documentary out this week brilliantly documents how all this happened: D’Souza’s 2000 Mules.

For all the illegality, though, I think 2020 is going to be seen as a Pyrrhic victory, with so many of the Democrats’ bad ideas catching up with them and as the black and Hispanic base sours on Biden and his party.  A wipe-out in 2022 will surprise no one.

To a certain extent, we have been here before. Voters back in the 1980s walked away from the Democrats, heralding the Reagan Revolution, and many never looked back.  But a lot of party leaders understood their problems and did something about it.  The moderate Democratic Leadership Council, the DLC, which launched Bill Clinton’s national career, were effective in pushing back on the McGovern wing and at least pretended to be sensible centrists.  “The era of big government is over,” they said.

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Today, the DLC is long gone, and even in the face of upcoming election collapse, the Democrats seem to be happy to take their marching orders from the kookiest people they can find, like AOC, who wants Biden to go even farther to the left.

We may never again see a moderate wing of the party.  Ruy Teixeira thinks the problem is that the Dems have lost touch with blue-collar workers.  So do Sohrab Ahmari and many other pundits.  But it is deeper than that.  White-collar suburban voters also hate CRT/transgender stuff in the schools, the rising crime rate, the inflation crisis, the open border, and the general obtuseness of Biden’s foreign policy.

The problem is that there really is no longer a functioning Democrat party worthy of the name.  There is just an election plaything that goes by that name, run from the gilded board rooms of America’s wealthiest non-profits.

People on the left are also starting realize this, like Sam Adler-Bell.  Michael Lind complains of the end of dissent in opinion journals, also the creature of the elite non-profits.  There is a lock-step conformity expected of all.  “Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police.”

I would go farther: although it’s often said politics is downstream from culture — at least for Democrats and the American left — politics, culture, elite media, popular media, religion, education, and anything else are all downstream from the non-profit foundation complex that writes the grant money checks.  Checks for journalists, checks for activists, checks for politicians.

Political parties must be about the business of winning arguments and winning elections, at some point, lest they wither away.  But for the foundations and their executives, there is never any pressure to achieve such popular success.  They have their billion-dollar endowments, all invested in blue-chip American stocks paying huge dividends. They are secure and go on their merry way.  The biggest shame of it is that so many of these enormous foundations were begun by businessmen on the political right — Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur, Mellon, etc. — only to have lefty activists hijack their boards.