"These broad interpretations are the only ones that makes sense to me."
The second article is by a right of centre commentator, Christopher Caldwell who had thoughts on how the Democrats have changed:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/5203db48-62fb-4ad1-bf48-4a900c6a9b2e?shareToken=7ab18e25b13818861c5512490f025b7e
The Democrat fantasy is dead. They’re no longer the workers’ party
Kamala Harris’s comprehensive defeat shows the fatal flaw in a political party whose humble origins have given way to social elites and racial grievances
In the days since the US elections, as exit polls and electoral maps have delivered a more detailed account of why Kamala Harris lost so badly, a terrified calm has descended on Democratic Party strategists in Washington. What looked for most of 2024 like a down-to-the-wire race — in which the tide could be turned by a well-crafted speech here or a little more targeted advertising there — now looks more like a rout across the board.
President Biden, Harris and the Democrats held the White House for four years, spending more money on government programmes than any administration in American history and flooding the news media with invective against Trump. They even prosecuted him in a New York criminal court. And yet election day revealed that, over that time, Americans of virtually every ethnicity, every generation and every region came to like Democrats less and Trump more.
Biden and Harris certainly stumbled and bumbled. But what became starkly apparent on Tuesday night is that the Democratic Party has lost its electoral formula, its ideological coherence and its claim to rule. Over the past three decades, a gap has opened in what the Democratic Party is and what Democrats think it is.
What the Democratic Party is, is the party of the overwhelming majority of elites in the four interlinked industries — entertainment, technology, finance, and university education — to which the United States owes its global economic pre-eminence. The Democratic Party’s America is what the whole rest of the world thinks about when it thinks about America — the prowess, the novelty, the glamour.
The Democrats are the party of the Manhattan skyline and Wall Street, of Santa Monica and Hollywood, of Harvard and Yale, of Miami Beach and the Chicago Loop. Trump supporters exist in such circles — consider Elon Musk, who owns X, or Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal — but they are an exception. This is why the Harris campaign committee’s fundraising outstripped Trump’s by nearly a factor of almost three, hauling in more than $1 billion.
The Democratic Party is also the inheritor of the great civil rights crusade, which culminated in the end of racial segregation in the 1960s and has since become the model for progressive causes in all walks of American life. Some of these causes are popular, like feminism. Some are unpopular, like transgender rights.
Barack Obama, a politician of unusually high calibre, was able to meld elite preoccupations and race-and-gender issues to produce winning campaigns in 2008 and 2012. But in the process he seems to have created a monster. When you marry social elites on one hand and racial grievances on the other, you get the authoritarian politics of wokeness, with its workplace mandates and its speech rules. As they showed on Tuesday, many Americans have grown heartily sick of the Obama agenda. And this presents Democrats with a problem of electoral strategy.
Until this election, they solved this problem with myth-making. Democrats told themselves they were still the party of the mid-20th century industrial working class, the class that built the New Deal and defeated the Nazis. Two decades ago, a sizeable tranche of senior citizens carried the memory of that party, and they swelled Obama’s majorities. Biden continued this tradition, giving speeches suffused with this world of union dues and shop floor foremen. “I’ve walked the picket lines,” he told the graduates of Morehouse College, a traditionally black, all-male liberal arts institution in Atlanta, last spring. But there is something pathetic about Biden’s vision of the party: to have picket lines you need unions, and to have unions you need the industry that Biden’s Democrats collaborated in eagerly shipping overseas.
There was something canny about Biden’s vision too, though. Democrats have been criticised for not ousting the doddering Biden earlier in this presidential cycle, when it might still have been possible to choose a winning candidate. The problem is, his doddering had an upside. The party of Biden’s nostalgic 20th century imagination was more attractive to voters than the woke and plutocratic Democratic Party of the 21st. In 2020, it was white people, drifting back into the Democratic fold on their memories of the Truman and Kennedy administrations, who tipped the election for Democrats. You could do worse than Biden. Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
But Biden’s victory in 2020 does not make him a successful, or even a competent, president. He has been credited by partisan journalists and sympathetic biographers with having run, in his unassuming way, the most capable Democratic administration since Lyndon Johnson. Something more like the opposite is true, and historians will be merciless in correcting the error.
Biden’s 2020 primary campaign stank. He struggled in the early contests, but got the nomination when the party’s powerful donors decided he would be strongest against Trump. The donors froze other candidates out of the primaries with the same kind of campaign-funding strike that they used this summer to force Biden out of the race in favour of Harris.
The party’s various lobbies then rallied behind Biden’s anti-Trump popular front. The Biden White House was run by an interest-group junta: there were diversity, equity and inclusion decrees for Black Lives Matter, open borders for immigrants’ rights groups, a muscular policy of “defending democracy” (in Ukraine and elsewhere) for neoconservatives, and lavish subsidies for Democrat-friendly green-energy firms. The Biden administration overextended and overspent. It passed a wholly unnecessary $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that amplified high inflation at a time of stagnant wages, just as many economists had warned it would.
Biden was slow to react. Inflation took two years to tame. Security was eventually tightened at the border, but not until at least seven million illegal immigrants had crossed it, and by then the election was only months away. Spending on the Ukraine war is approaching a quarter of a trillion dollars, with no end in sight. In office, the real Democratic Party of Washington powerbrokers elbowed aside the misty-eyed campaign trail Democratic Party of “lunch bucket” Joe. President Biden lacked the vigour and the cognitive wherewithal to resist. This is what will make the history of the Biden administration so fascinating. Its hyperactivity was due not to the president’s energy but to his lack of it.
Harris can hardly be blamed for what followed. When the secret of Biden’s incapacity was revealed to the voting public in a catastrophic June debate with Trump, she was almost certainly the best Plan B. Democrats had once hoped she might be the natural inheritor of Obama’s mantle — a civil rights activist who was at home with billionaires. Her husband was a Silicon Valley lawyer and her brother-in-law a top executive at Uber. But, as noted, in the past decade, civil rights and tech entrepreneurship have merged into a corporate diversity, equity and inclusion regime, making them a less attractive combination than they were in Obama’s day.
Harris was conspicuously lacking in oratorical flair. She did not appear at a regular press conference for almost two months after the nomination was conferred on her. In the final days of the campaign, voters saw why. Many Democrats have criticised Harris for not going on The Joe Rogan Experience, an unscripted three-hour-long podcast on which Trump and his running mate JD Vance appeared to great effect. The reason Harris didn’t appear on Joe Rogan was that she couldn’t. She had certain gifts as a speaker — an on-stage warmth, a relatable style — but they would be unlikely to show to her advantage in three hours of disputation and wisecracking.
The world has changed and the Democrats today now have little resemblance to the working class party they are descended from. They are in some ways its antithesis, bearing a resemblance to the Republican Party of 150 years ago.
The Republican Party was originally founded in the mid-19th century to abolish slavery, and fought a civil war to do so. But once they had triumphed in that war, Republicans found themselves entitled to speak on the whole nation’s behalf, and were soon corrupted by absolute power. So they enriched themselves as a party of railway tycoons and financiers in a period that came to be known (disparagingly) as the Gilded Age, and as a result spent most of the 20th century out of power.
The Democrats’ road from civil rights crusaders to tech and Wall Street plutocrats resembles the Republicans’ road from abolitionism to the railroad barons. There are a lot of ways that the Democrats can reinvent themselves — they have a lot of good options and a lot of canny strategists. But their 21st century coalition of wealth and woke has been renounced by the American electorate. Clinging to it will cost Democrats a long time in the wilderness.