Do the Dems Think Strategically?

Paul Gottfried thinks that the Dems are thinking strategically with their Green Energy and their open borders. Both policies are designed to grow the base of Democratic voters.

[T]he administration is successfully catering to its base. Biden is doing exactly what his voters want, and he and his handlers have no intention of changing course. There is also the possibility of processing the millions of illegal aliens Democrats have shepherded into the country to full citizenship.

Says he:

Biden’s party is always thinking ahead, particularly when it cheats and/or acts destructively. 

But is he right? After all, he writes, "Democrats are not necessarily holding a bad hand if they can pull in more independents to help bring their numbers back up."

Let's start with independents. The point about independents, I think, is that they are not that engaged with politics. So, if the Dems show them helpless immigrants being whipped at the border, they are appalled. If Dems do non-stop propaganda on green energy and how we are going to fry the world unless we act now, they have to agree.

But when independents note that there seem to be a lot of Hispanic roofers taking all the roofing jobs away from good old American workers, then they wonder. If gasoline prices start exploding then they are angry and afraid.

So, the ruling class gets to set the agenda and make its narrative the default narrative. But when things go wrong, it all falls apart.

I've been reading a biography of Andrew Mellon, banker and financier, who was Treasury Secretary in the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. In the 1920s the Republicans were the ruling party. But when the Crash of 1929 hit, and the Republicans didn't manage to right the economy, for three straight years from 1929 to 1932, well then the American people voted for the other guys.

The GOP lost 53 seats in the House in the 1930 midterms and 100 seats in the 1932 presidential election. Thy deserved to lose. Reading about Andrew Mellon in David Cannadine's Mellon: An American Life, it is clear that, for Mellon, the thousands of banks failing every year in 1930, 1931, 1932 were just the way things were. 

He and the GOP hadn't learned the lesson taught by Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street that the central bank is the lender of last resort, and its job is to keep the credit system from crashing on the rocks. If there was one thing that the New Dealers got right it was to stop the bank failures and restore the credit system in 1933.

But the New Dealers screwed up just about everything else.

The GOP lost another 29 seats in the 1934 and 1936 elections. And then gained 81 seats in the 1938 midterms. So, in 1938, the media was still all-in on FDR and the New Deal, but the voters had had enough.

Did the New Dealers have a strategy to rule forever? They thought they had, with all their National Industrial Recovery Acts and Civilian Conservation Corps and so on, but they were wrong. Those glorious policies, that my liberal friends still recall with a warm nostalgic glow, didn't work. Of course, the Dems went on to win the biggest war in human history against the most evil enemy in human history: gold stars for that!

When you start losing, on the battlefield or in the economy, then the soldiers and/or the voters start to desert the colors. It doesn't matter what glorious narrative you have, or how many voters you are bringing over the border, or how much money Mark Zuckerberg is putting into election offices in Democrat districts, when things turn South then people start to pay attention and they start to lose faith in the narrative and in the current leaders.

Now, of course, people react to bad news in different ways. Using my Three Peoples theory, we can say that for Subordinates they start to lose faith when their lord isn't sending the checks regularly. We can say that the Responsibles start to lose faith when they cannot go about their business every day without being harassed by government regulations or crazy price increases. We can say that the Creatives get antsy when the glorious vision of the prophet -- say, to save the world from CO2 pollution -- starts to crumble.

Right now, I'd say that all three of the Three Peoples are experiencing distress. For the Subordinates, their checks aren't covering their bills; for the Responsibles, the crazy mandates and restrictions are screwing up their lives; for the Creatives the glitch in the Matrix on climate change is raising questions -- even though they haven't yet even begun to think of questioning the divine prophecy of the climate gods.

Politics needs an enemy, and I'd say that right now, most Americans think that their rulers are the enemy.

And my feeling is that the Democrats really don't know what to do, except keep on keeping on.

And I say that when people start to cheat, it is a "tell" that they know they are losing.