One reason why the Democrats lost the 2024 election is that voters stopped believing the Democratic candidates’ lies about what they would do if elected, and figured out what they actually would do if elected, which was far more radical. The way to figure out what a Democratic candidate actually will do if elected is to monitor what their staff and key supporters are saying to each other — such as on progressive social media — and see what those people want the government to do most. What they want is much more radical than the campaign promises made by Democratic candidates to normal voters.
In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned on enacting a “net spending cut.” This was a lie designed to deceive centrist voters. Obama never intended to cut spending, and increased government spending almost as soon as he took office, such as by pushing through an $800 billion stimulus package. Obama’s key supporters never expected him to cut spending, and Obama made all sorts of costly promises to the Democratic base that made it almost impossible to achieve a “net spending cut.” A prudent voter in 2008 would have paid little attention to Obama’s own statements, and more attention to the more radical statements by his supporters.
On the progressive social media website Bluesky, Nicholas Grossman laments that the Democrats lost because conservatives convinced “a lot of people that the Democratic Party is whoever you think is the most radical, most annoying person on the internet. Therefore, voting Republican is a vote against them.”
But the Democratic Party DOES consist of the most radical, annoying people on the internet. Those radicals end up staffing civil-rights bureaucracies and administrative agencies under a Democratic president, and those are the people who account for a disproportionate share of the judges appointed by Democratic presidents. Once appointed to the bench, such radical, annoying people back campus censorship aimed at shutting up normal people and conservative and non-woke faculty and students. As Park MacDougald points out, “The Biden administration governed by using Biden as a moderate symbolic figurehead while handing the reins of power to left-wing activists in the bureaucracy & NGO sphere.”
Try following a Democratic legislative staffer in a place like Virginia on social media, and see the staffer unctuously praise Alexandria Ocasion-Cortez and democratic socialism, even while working for a legislator who pretends to be a mainstream liberal in a place like Fairfax County. Such staffers are among the most radical, annoying people on the internet. And they are the people who draft legislation behind the scenes.
Some voters figure this out. Even when Democratic politicians don’t say woke things themselves, to avoid offending voters, “Voters can tell that Democrats are the Woke party because Dems won’t criticize woke activists. Instead they defer to ‘the [woke] groups’ when they are in power” by adopting woke policies, even when those woke policies are very unpopular with normal voters.
Before the internet, it was hard to see how radical many Democrats were. The smuggest, most annoying progressive student at Harvard Law School in the early 1990s — David Barron — was later appointed by President Obama to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Social media didn’t exist back then. If it had, he might have posted his smug, radical viewpoints there, and his radical support for various kinds of censorship might later have been discovered by a large number of people (Barron was a big supporter of restricting politically-incorrect speech and enforcing restrictions on broadcast speech that would both chill discussion of controversial issues and result in “nut-picking” by broadcasters that leaves viewers even more misinformed. But the smug, pompous Barron was confirmed by a Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate, despite his insufferable arrogance and condescending nature, on a party-line vote, with no Republican support. As a result of his appointment to the bench, he was able to rule in favor of censorship in case after case.
Democrats impose these woke policies of censorship and social engineering once in office, even thought doing so is unpopular and they sometimes hide it during political campaigns. As Wes Yang explains, “Wokeness is a non-electoral politics of institutional capture aimed at bending left-leaning institutions to an identitarian agenda. It has been hugely successful in its goals. That it may alienate the majority and occasionally find itself rebuked at the polls is of little concern or consequence to those running the permanent institutional coup.”
Even with Trump taking office, most civil-rights officials, and many judges, still adhere to a woke ideology that supports censorship and infringements on freedom of conscience. That is what the Democratic base wants, and so it will continue, even under a Republican president (although it would be far worse under a President Kamala Harris, who had many bad policy ideas).
