The Democrats' Daunting Task

It's been great fun for the Democrats to spend the last four years damning President Trump and everything he stands for, but now they've caught the car they were chasing. And here's the problem. Well, here are a bunch of problems.

We need to boost the economy from the COVID depression. But we already spent all the money. Tax increases? Hmm. Back in 2009, after the Great Recession, President Obama passed a "stimulus" that mainly handed loot to Democratic constituencies. So I expect very slow growth for the next few years. Voters won't like that.

We need to reform the welfare state -- 30 years ago! I mean pensions, health care. Oh and welfare. I suspect Democrats have No Idea of the social cost of the administrative welfare state; all the conservative critiques have been brushed aside.

We need to put climate change on hold. Leave aside whether climate change really is a problem: all the plans to phase out fossil fuels will cause untold damage to the economy. Think Five Year Plan.

We need to stop the "systemic racism" canard. I get it: Democrats need to rile up their minority supporters to get them to the polls. And I get that politics is division. But in the end division ends in civil war.

We need to make the economy and the culture more "commoner friendly." That means making it easy for people to start businesses, with less regulations, and to revalue the commoner life of wiving, thriving, and childing over elite feminism and LGBT.

 Then there's education. The COVID time has taught us the eternal lesson of government bureaucracy: in the end the bureaucrats do nothing except pick up their pay and pensions. I say that politics must not define how people educate their children. We need a lot more informal education, from home schools to apprenticeships and internships, and a lot less supercalifragilistic-tenured-for-life-ism. What should education do? I don't know; I just think that most education reformers, from Horace Mann on down to James Conant, are fools and knaves.

Democrats think it is first-and-ten, with the opposing team ordered off the field for penalties. As John Hinderaker notes, Democrats think that both Trump and his policies are discredited:

Tax cuts? Discredited! An America-First foreign policy? Discredited! Enforcing the immigration laws, which is the president’s constitutional duty? Discredited! Stopping the China sellout? Discredited! Standing up to Russia? Discredited! Supporting the Israelis? Discredited! Cutting back on unproductive federal regulations? Discredited! Encouraging U.S. energy production and independence? Discredited! Objecting to political correctness and cancel culture? Discredited! Standing up for America as a positive force in world history? Discredited!

All the "discredited" policies are meat-and-drink to the globalist educated gentry: it's in the air they breathe. My judgement is that all those policies lead to trouble, and if the Democrats return to them they will create misery and mayhem -- for the American people and for themselves at the ballot box. 

Problem is that the elite, the educated gentry, don't pay for their mistakes: their errors, their crimes, their conceits. It's the ordinary schmuck that pays. That will never change, but it sure would be nice if ruling classes thought a bit about who-whom -- and not the way Lenin thought about it.

But why should I care? Even though I identify as a Commoner, I am really educated Gentry. And I'm sure the Democrats will take care of people like me.