The Unlearned Lessons of the Democratic Party

Thinking purely as a partisan, it is good to see that very few Democrats are willing to learn any lessons from this past week’s election. Thinking as an American patriot, it is very bad. One yard sign glimpsed in a picture online read, “Republicans are not perfect, but the other party is insane.”

Just so. It would be good for Americans to have two imperfect but sane parties to push each other to be better. But that it will happen in the immediate future is doubtful. The other party’s insanity is a many splendored thing, but its deepest layer is the variety that has been described as doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same results. Open up the news, political websites, or the social media of your choice and you will discover that “the other party” is filled with politicians, analysts, activists, and voters who seem to have no capacity for learning something new. They are ready to repeat all the mistakes they have made over the last decade. Though there are many more that could be named, here are five of the most important unlearned lessons of the Democratic Party in the wake of the 2024 election.

It’s Not (Just) Your Messaging; It’s Substance

The cry of the Democrats is always that their real problem is that they just couldn’t get it through to the American people how wonderful they are, how wonderfully they have governed, and how bad their opposition is. We wonky Democrats, they say, just can’t compete with the media savvy GOP.

Now, this one actually has a bit of truth in it this time. Democratic messaging in this election was atrocious. Tim Walz, who strode onto the national stage with well-practiced jazz hands and Rockette kicks, was partnered with Doug Emhoff, who knocked up the nanny during his first marriage and allegedly smacked a girlfriend so hard she spun completely around, as the avatars of a new and non-toxic masculinity. Walz’s comical attempts to use a firearm and talk football (he apparently thought a “pick 6,” which refers to an interception run back for a touchdown, was a type of offensive scheme) were only compelling in comparison to the “Man Enough” ad created by Jimmy Kimmel’s team that even many on the right thought was a parody.

Ads directly featuring Kamala Harris herself were uniformly forgettable, despite the fact that they interrupted seemingly every song on YouTube. Even former Obama advisor Van Jones said, with reference to her ads directed to black men, that they “sucked.”

So, yes, messaging was terrible. But it’s not simply that. It’s that the substance was terrible. People voted for Trump because of concerns about the economy, border security, and crime. They were voting for a foreign policy that brings peace. They were voting for Trump because they didn’t want women’s sports to be filled with men and hospitals to be mutilating the bodies of boys and girls in the name of ideology. They were voting against the scourge of DEI in government and business. They were voting against government censorship in the media. They were voting for religious freedom. Even though the Harris-Walz campaign tried to downplay some of the issues involved here, the problem is that they couldn’t cover their own record on these issues. It may not have been a woke campaign, but Harris’s woke agenda was always visible just below the surface. 

Don’t Believe Your Own B.S.

Democrats have been weeping and lamenting this week in part because so many of them seemed to believe the story they told themselves about the “grassroots” enthusiasm for Harris-Walz. They convinced themselves that full rallies were signs of imminent victory, despite the news reports that the campaign was often bussing people in from one state to another to achieve those numbers. They convinced themselves that Donald Trump rallies were half-empty because of Democrat influencer videos taken before the rallies began or at the very end when people were trying to beat the crowd to the parking lot—something real Americans who are not political activists tend to do. They even convinced themselves that there were millions of “shy Harris voters” who were afraid of their MAGA husbands or neighbors. They believed that women would rise up and vote for an unlimited abortion license but wouldn’t vote based on their pocketbooks and other concerns.

That all of this was patently nonsense didn’t stop Democrats from believing it. One can’t help but laugh at figures such as Dr. Arlene Battishill, a retired political scientist at Temple Hill University, who now posts videos on social media. Her cackling video on election day about how she told a liquor store employee he had “wasted” his vote for Trump because women were all voting on abortion went viral after her arrogance was brought low.

Too many figures on the left still believe the pre-election fictions. Eddie Glaude, a current Princeton professor, told MSNBC viewers that people could not have voted on pocketbook issues. It must have been—you’ll never guess—racism that motivated them. He explained Trump voters with an impersonation: “There’s this sense that ‘whiteness is under threat. All of these racially ambiguous children on Cheerios commercials are confusing the hell out of me.’”

The big lesson might be to listen and take seriously what Americans say, but few Democrats seem capable of doing so. Joe Scarborough might be an exception. The Morning Joe host earlier this week evinced a glimmer of recognition when he found out how much butter is being sold for. “Is it framed in gold?” he asked.

But most of the people speaking and writing this week were content with the narratives they had created—never challenging the ideas that the economy is superb, crime is way down, and Trump is a “convicted felon.” The problem, they all convinced themselves, was again about messaging.

Don’t Think You Can B.S. The American People

Joe Rogan’s situation is indicative of the problem. Whatever the final call on the effectiveness of Ivermectin to treat Covid-19, when Rogan said he was using it to treat himself in 2021, CNN said that he was taking a “horse dewormer.” It was a gross bit of lying that some CNN figures eventually apologized for. But this is the problem. Democrats haven’t just been telling lies that they believe. They tell lies that they themselves know are untrue. And the last four years have seen a great many of them. 

Donald Trump is colluding with the Russians. Hunter Biden’s laptop is “Russian disinformation.” Crime went down in 2022. Jussie Smollett. If you take the shot, you won’t get Covid. Women are dying because of abortion laws in red states. Inflation isn’t a problem.

All baldfaced lies.

Lincoln famously said that though you might be able to fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. In a country like ours, the internet is making it harder and harder to fool all of the people even some of the time. What we have seen is that what is labeled a “conspiracy theory” by Democrats is usually converted into a fact with the simple addition of time. After the election, Americans found yet another converted conspiracy: a FEMA employee was fired for telling her aid workers to not help those in homes with Trump signs during one of the recent hurricanes (rank discrimination that had earlier been dismissed as wildly implausible).   

Circular Firing Squads Are No Way to Build a Coalition

Democrats have been stuck in a purity spiral since at least the second term of Obama. What was called in the 90’s “political correctness” turned into an impulse toward ideological purging of anyone who didn’t toe the party line. Pro-life Democrats have become nearly extinct in federal government. Those who disagreed with Covid policies were treated as pariahs. Those who dissented on the trans movement or teaching CRT have been treated as “transphobes” and “white supremacists.” Suburban moms who didn’t want their kids masked and their daughters facing young men on the sports field were treated as “terrorists.” Pretty much anybody who dissented on anything was treated as a non-person or an enemy of Americans.

The result has been the defection of a whole host of interesting figures from the Democratic Party: Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Bill Ackman, Jennifer Sey, Bari Weiss, and a host of others who now seem to be more aligned with Trump and the Republicans, even if they aren’t down-the-line conservatives. The current mood of the Democrats doesn’t look as though it will change. In fact, they are upping the ante in a serious way even as the country rebels against these stifling trends.

Americans Don’t Want to be Divided or Canceled

Sadly, Democrats are not just excommunicating each other from the Party. Some of their most vociferous figures are calling for a wholesale excommunication of Republicans from American life. This week, Joy Reid encouraged CNN viewers to avoid their family and friends who voted for Trump over the Christmas holidays. This was a not uncommon piece of advice. And there are enough people taking it to destroy a lot of relationships. Individuals on X (Twitter) boasted of having cut off family from inheritances, grandchildren, and themselves for daring to vote the wrong way. Lucid_Lotus, an X user whose bio identifies her as a Midwestern housewife, wrote of cutting off her children and grandchildren: “We became estranged from our daughter. Eventually we went no contact 2 years ago. It’s heartbreaking, but it had to be done. I miss my grandsons, and I still love them all (3) fiercely but we will not give hate a safe harbor here in our home.”

Such is the party of “joy.”

This kind of ideological insanity is not going to attract more Democrats. It’s going to make people start treating Democrats as a deranged cult that wants to cut its true believers off from those who love them and whom they love. It will perhaps cause even worse outcomes.

In Duluth, Minnesota, this week, a 46-year-old man who had become convinced of the apocalyptic darkness of Trump’s victory killed his wife, his seven-year-old son, his ex-wife, her son, and himself after writing recently of his worries about religion and the possibility of A Handmaid’s Tale-type situation in America.

This brand of dread over impending facism is staple Democratic rhetoric. Does this mean Democrats are responsible for his act? The man seems to have had mental health problems and, in any case, responsibility isn’t that simple. But let us ask if the kind of extreme rhetoric that encourages people to cut off all contact with Trump voters and to see them as evil fascists, Nazis, white supremacists, and religious tyrants is good for our country.

For all their rhetoric about Trump’s divisiveness, Democrats are encouraging division and enmity in Americans for each other. They are encouraging the break-up of families and communities. They are encouraging nasty confrontations. This writer had an unknown woman stop her car on Wednesday and scream obscenities at him when she inferred that he was a Trump voter.

Republicans have long been labeled the stupid party. Those of us inside know that there are plenty of reasons for that moniker. But Democrats have decided to give us a run for our money, refusing to learn any lessons that are there before their eyes. The problem is that their failure is not just a political problem for them. It is a problem for all of us. We want the truth. We want peace and prosperity. We don’t want to be divided on racial and other lines. And we want to get along with each other even when we disagree.    

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.