If only Democrats would stop talking and start hating

There is no shortage of post-election analyses. Pundits, politicians, and armchair tacticians continue to trot out their hot takes on how Democrats can come in out of the marginal wilderness and recapture the hearts and minds of working-class Americans.

Many of those insights from the people whose job it is to know these things have come to the same conclusion: If only Democrats had not run on a platform of putting trans girls on every soccer team, erecting welcome booths at the border, and burning down every police station in America, they might have stood a chance.

I mean, look at the policy statements from Kamala Harris. She intended to ... help Americans with money for buying their first homes. Yeah, okay, but she also wanted to restore the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit so working and middle-class Americans could keep more of their money and ... Hang on. She wanted to bring down the cost of child care and long-term care for the elderly. She wanted the government to invest in small businesses and help entrepreneurs. She wanted to help with the soaring cost of rent. She wanted to protect consumers from corporations that took advantage of emergencies to engage in price gouging. She wanted to make getting healthcare simpler and cheaper.

But surely making girls shower with boys was in there, along with taking away everyone's guns, making people give up their cars, and telling all the police to go home. It had to be in there. Because otherwise, all these pundits aren't diagnosing the problems with Democrats at all.

They're engaging in convenient strawman arguments that attack non-existent Democratic campaigns. Those arguments are defined by accepting nothing but Republican talking points. And the prescriptions for how to "fix" the Democratic Party all seem to come down to the same thing: Surrender.

Nothing may define the Beltway prescriptions to fix all the things straw Democrats did wrong better than the list provided by Semafor founder and eternal fount of conventional wisdom, Matthew Yglesias.

Each of Yglesias' points requires a bit of translation. So let's break it down.

The first one may sound like "you should tell working-class people that all those economic numbers in the news are good for them." However, this is the one thing that Democrats did extensively in this cycle. Both President Biden and Vice President Harris explained that inflation was down, jobs were plentiful, the stock markets were hitting records, and national economic growth was strong. Maybe the biggest bafflement in this entire campaign is that none of these things was able to move the needle against social media posts showing that the price of free-range organic eggs from hand-groomed vegetarian chickens was higher than a carton of Walmart's best had been four years ago.

But that's not what Yglesias means. He means that Democrats should do what Republicans have done: Explain to voters that it's better for them if billionaires have more billions.

For his next act, Yglesias has a clear solution for the climate crisis: Ignore it. Stop having goals. Stop trying to slow the damage. Just accept that the floods that wiped out Asheville, North Carolina and the fires that burned down Paradise, California represent the fate of Everytown, USA.

Don't you worry folks. The new wall we're building will keep out the millions of climate refugees, and cities won't start to sink until sometime after the next election cycle. So it's all good. Stop talking about new energy jobs. Stop hoping to make things better. Get your Mad Max on and "manage" the existential consequences. A ton of cure is better than an ounce of prevention. Or something like that.

It's really in the third point where Yglesias gets down to his central theme: "normal people." The government has to protect normal people.

How does Yglesias define normal people? He makes that clear in upcoming points. But here, it seems to be in contrast to anyone who engages in "antisocial behavior" Might that be women speaking out against men who routinely subject them to sexual abuse and degradation? Or is it workers who protest against unfair labor practices? Or anyone who stands up against hate?

Yes to all of the above. Normal people only speak up when they agree with those in power. That's how you know they are normal.

Yglesias' fourth point is simply that people should stop complaining about racism. Just as with how Democrats could better their game by shutting up over any concerns about the environment, they'd do so much better with that coveted working-class vote if they'd just accept that maybe Black people deserve to be pulled over more often, jailed more often, and shot more often.

What Yglesias is saying is simply what Tucker Carlson has been selling for ages—white people are the real victims of racism.

Yglesias's fifth point is a doozy. Race is not a thing, and neither are trans people. Because science.

If you're reading that as a call to join in with trans hate, you're partly right. It also underscores the previous point by doubling down on the idea that anyone who is the victim of racism did something to deserve it.

Six is an easy one: don't trust the experts. Guys like Anthony Fauci don't know more about disease than you do just because they've spent their whole lives studying and working to learn everything they can. Democrats should stop listening to scientists, doctors, and people with direct experience in dealing with issues. None of those people are smarter than your gut. Or the other half of your brainworm.

Next up, Yglesias talks about his distaste for "politeness." What he means is "political correctness." And what he really means is that he's angry that people get upset when he tells racist or misogynistic jokes.

Loosen up. Democrats. Use more racist language. Sneer at the idea of women being equal to men. That's the way to win in America.

Number eight continues the [insert hatred here] trend. This time it's immigrants. Not Cuban immigrants who came to America at some time in the past to escape oppressive government or seek economic opportunity. But Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and every other form of immigrant who is trying to come to America now to escape oppressive governments, seek economic opportunity, and find relief from the effects of that Climate Crisis that we're not talking about.

These immigrants have no rights, and God will look the other way while we abuse them as we please.

Number nine is just that the FAA, FEC, FCC, OSHA, EEOC, and labor board should stop getting in Elon's way when he wants to force his employees to work in unsafe conditions, promote racism, suppress unions, and bribe voters. Who does the government think it's working for anyway?

To bring Yglesias' list into plain English, here's his plan for Democrats

1. Cut taxes for billionaires
2. Drill, baby, drill
3. Protesters are perverts
4. All lives matter
5. Trans people are perverts
6. Experts don't know more than you.
7. Racist, sexist, and abusive language is cool
8. Build the wall. build the camps, deport them all
9. The government exists to help corporations

This platform may be slightly familiar to you. It's the Republican platform. It also happens to be the platform that Yglesias and others in the why-can't-Democrats-just-be-Republicans? faction have been pushing for eternity.

What's most astounding is that some people seem to be taking this seriously. Yglesias has been backed up by his partner in analytical crime, Dave Weigel. Similar arguments have come from former George W. Bush speechwriter turned "journalist" Mark Thiessen–a man who once wrote an entire book defending the use of torture.

In this post-election disaster zone, media outlets are holding up their missives as if they are Jerimiads that explain the sorrowful outcome of the election and point the way to how Democrats "fix things" for the future.

Let me give you my entire campaign for President of National Punditry: Matthew Yglesias, Dave Weigel, and Mark Thessien suck ass. They have been wrong about everything for years before the election (decades in the case of Thiessen), and there is absolutely no reason to believe they're one neuron smarter today than they were before November 5.

Their arguments are worse than surrender; they're collaboration. These are people who have hankered for nothing so much as the downfall of the Democratic Party and progressive values. They see this moment as an opportunity to sell disheartened Democrats on the benefits of hate, disdain, and ignorance.

Anyone who buys their arguments might as well pop on that MAGA hat and unfurl a Confederate flag.