Callous smuggery
The Democratic Party is facing a catastrophic loss by doubling down on what makes voters hate them so much in the first place.
Hello friends! Before we get to the meat of the newsletter, I wanted to remind you all that my new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, is out in less than a month!
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Okay, on to the show.
I’ve been watching with a lot of dismay as, post-election, liberals have retreated into the kind of angry, dismissive attitude that pushed gettable voters to the right. My limit was reached last month after President Joe Biden’s commutation of the sentence of one of the Cash For Kids judges in western Pennsylvania.
If you’re not familiar, the scandal involved judges pushing juveniles into the system for cash payments, destroying lives in exchange for money. It’s one of the more enraging examples of the corruption of the criminal system in recent years.
So seeing one of those judges get his sentence commuted, especially as Biden leaves thousands in federal prison for far lesser crimes, is the kind of thing that makes people of conscience angry.
But for some liberals, it became an attack line against the left for their anti-carceral advocacy. And that is the kind of thing, as I wrote at TruthDig last week, that’s continuing liberal problems with voters.
The contradictory belief that voters who backed Trump are too stupid to understand what they voted for, but nevertheless deserve pain, is not unrelated to the Democratic Party’s image problem with a growing number of working-class voters. One of the central complaints about Democrats and liberals that comes up again and again in polling and in anecdotal reports is the sense that their ranks are full of hypocrites who claim to care about the struggles of their fellow Americans, but when they vote the wrong way, or even just live in the wrong states, they are to blame for their own misfortune. It’s an elitist view of the public that sounds patronizing at best and snobbish at worst. Why didn’t you people listen to your betters?
Time will tell if the party can reverse this trend. I’m not holding my breath.