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One of the things about the 2016 presidential election that most shocked the political elite and Democrats was the failure of the “blue wall.” “What happened?”, they wondered. How is it possible that people in states that Hillary didn’t bother even to fly over deserted her? How could decades of being told that they—as mostly white, mostly Christian, mostly middle class Americans—represented all that was wrong with America possibly have such a devastating effect on Democrats?
On Meet the Press, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews states that the Democrats have simply moved too far left on cultural issues, specifically on abortion.
The Washington Free Beacon reports:
MSNBC host Chris Matthews said the Democratic Party has moved too far to the left on cultural issues during an appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”
Host Chuck Todd spotlighted Washington Free Beacon editor Matthew Continetti’s Friday column about the Democratic Party’s struggles in the first 100 days of the Trump administration. Continetti’s piece discussed the party’s current weak governing position and lack of an agenda beyond opposition to President Trump.
In his assessment of the Democrats’ first 100 days, Continetti concluded:
That establishment is just as befuddled as its Republican counterpart at the current political scene. “I don’t know what’s happening in the country,” Hillary Clinton is said to have told a friend at some point during the recent campaign. This apprehension of distance between herself and the everyday lives of her co-nationals is one of the most perceptive observations Clinton has ever made.
Her problem was she never figured out the answer, never came to realize that the various guesses she and Obama and other professional Democrats have wagered about “what’s happening in the country”—racism, sexism, nativism, gerrymandering, Citizens United, Fox News Channel and talk radio, Russia—are insufficient. What the Democratic Party has yet to understand is that its social and cultural agenda is irrelevant or inimical to the material and spiritual well being of their former constituents. And until the Democrats recognize this fact, their next 100 days will be no better than their first. [my emphasis]
Meet the Press‘s Chuck Todd read the concluding two sentences and then turned to Matthews stating that he thought Matthews would agree with Continetti’s conclusion.
Matthews nodded in the affirmative and provided an example of Hillary’s position on late-term abortions and the Hyde Amendment as evidence that the Democrats had “moved too far left on cultural issues.”
Watch:
The Washington Free Beacon continues:
Todd said he felt Matthews, the longtime liberal host of “Hardball” and a former Democratic aide, would agree with Continetti’s sentiment. Matthews pointed to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s shift to the left on abortion rights as something that alienated more moderate voters in states like Pennsylvania.
“A lot of it’s cultural, not just economics,” Matthews said. “I think that the position Hillary Clinton, for example, took, on abortion, late-term abortions … get rid of the Hyde Amendment, pushed too far. I think a lot of the people [who] came out and voted in Pennsylvania, where I’m from, were pro-lifers. With all of Trump’s problems, morally, personally, whatever, they didn’t like Hillary’s position. I think the party moved too far to the left on cultural issues.”
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Given that they have moved even farther left post-election, it doesn’t seem that they have learned any lessons. It is also important to realize that “social issues” involve a lot more than abortion, SSM and transgenderism. It includes such traditional American values as personal responsibility, hard work, treating others with respect and more. All of which Democrats, if they don’t actively denigrate them, rarely offer up support.
Blind squirrel, meet nut. Er… acorn.
HERETIC! HERETIC! BURN THE WITCH, BURN HIM WE SAY!!!
Don’t ask the Democrats to abandon their religion. Encourage them to follow the light that’s just beyond the cliff’s edge.
What the Demorats have become is not the representatives of the people but the enforcers of their far left beliefs on to the people. They have taken extreme views on many issues both economic and cultural and told their party members that this is what they too must believe. Look at the lunatic Perez and how he is full of hatred and anger at anything that is not far left. If they continue on this path the Republicans will have many more years of success. However, after seeing the new spending bill where the Dems got everything they wanted and Trump and his gang got almost nothing, I am not sure we want them to have a successful future. Who do we vote for next time?
With respect to abortion, there are other solutions, beginning with moral (and industry) reform. Life worthy.
With respect to [class] diversity, reject it. Judge people by the content of their character (e.g. principles), not the “color of their skin”.
With respect to smoothing functions (e.g. welfare), they are useful, even effective, in the short-term to maintain stability and to aid unplanned transitions. However, there are other, hybrid solutions, and the welfare industry is spiritually destructive and social corrosive in the long-term.
With respect to classifying behaviors, not merely orientations, it is normalization with cause, tolerance when possible, rejection when it is not.
With respect to “separation of church and state”, it is a simple lie told by people pursing establishment of their church, including religious/moral philosophy (e.g. Pro-Choice), articles of faith (e.g. spontaneous conception, predictions of the future, certainties about the past – chaos precludes both and forces a narrow scientific domain), cultural traditions (e.g. [class] diversity).
Yeah, Democrats have diverged from normal (e.g. reconcilable), and it may be a progressive condition for some factions.
Chris Matthews makes a rational comment. How very odd. But then even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while. Matthews is definitely a blind pig when it comes to being rational. Perhaps he’s on new meds.
I recall one interview where the year 2008 was picked out as the pivotal year that the Democrat Party went ‘full Planned Parenethood”
In a generic sort of way, Matthews is right. But which part of the “fundamental transformation of the country” actually moved too far?
What the Dems are doing to us is classic “frog in hot water” stuff. Heat it slowly and the frog will do nothing until he’s cooked. Do it quickly and he’ll realize he’s mighty uncomfortable and jump out of the pot.
From where I’m sitting, is seems that the Progressive program of gradually increasing outrages and absurdities reached sudden crises points in two cases.
First, too may people were hit with outrageous cost increases in their “affordable” health care insurance, and too close to the election to forget about. The Dem tactic of smothering criticism with numbers (real or imaginary, it hardly matters) of how many Americans were now insured who weren’t before … well, that’s all very nice, but it doesn’t help anyone (anyone who actually pays his own bills, that is) come up with the scratch to keep his family covered right now, and all for crappier coverage than he had in the pre-Obama era. An epic fail for the march toward “free” health care for all … and such an obvious one I’m surprised the Dems didn’t think of a way to disguise it, or at least blame it on the Republicans, as per standard practice.
Second, the Potty Pervert program. This is a violation of principles far more basic than mere “liberalism” or “conservatism”, but more at the level of evolution. As in Cologne last New Year’s Eve, the bulls are faced with the obvious and fundamental fact that they cannot allow hordes of sex-crazed “refugees”, or flocks of hairy guys with cameras and claims that they “feel like women today”, to rape or otherwise terrorize the cows. A Pajama Boy like Obama or a heifer like Merkel might have trouble grasping this, but the bulls can see it and can’t ignore it.
At some point even the vaguest voter has to realize that the water is boiling and he has to jump out of that pot.
None of which means that the Leftoids won’t get away with it next time.
I would add that it is not just the issues themselves, but also the smug, condescending, morally self-righteous way that Democrats address those issues. They have forgotten that Americans become ornery when disrespected.
The rot is deep, and Democrats would have to look a lot farther back than Nov 8, 2016. But they won’t, because their party is one of the dubious beneficiaries of what Bill Ayers called “the Long March through the institutions” of civil society. To accomplish this, members of the New Left joined up with the Democrat party in the 1970s. Their influence gradually made the party what it is today.
The Dems’ current political “narrative” equates America’s Constitutional foundations with the evils of absolute monarchy and the once-powerful European states that colonized undeveloped areas of the world. This slant on the American founding is so widely taught in public schools, it’s no wonder the Dems are mystified that their poison hasn’t had the desired effect.
The malign cultural innovations of the left are best understood by reviewing the history of the Frankfurt School of cultural Marxism, which became influential in the 1960s and 1970s, again courtesy of the New Left. (See “The Origins of Political Correctness”, published on the Accuracy in Academia website.)
So all of a sudden, it’s not “we” moved too far left but “the Democratic Party”. “Us” becomes “them”. And moving “too far left” means even further left than loony left wing whack job Matthews.
Left vs right, Dem vs Rep, lib vs con,….. These discussions are always about labels. Okay now, everyone run back to your echo chambers! Discussing the real issues that people care about is forbidden!
It goes way beyond just abortion, as bad as abortion is How about black lives matter? Or, how about forcing psycho sicko male predators into little girls bathrooms? Or, how about CAGW alarmism? To name three others. And there are more.
I think Matthews simply raised the issue of abortion because the Democrats just threw out all their pro-life supporters. That issue is convenient, but is only a sliver of the story.
It is telling, because it demonstrates that the Democratic Party adheres to no over-arching moral or ethical principles, and raises the question of what, exactly, motivates them.
I can trace a long slide in popularity of the Democratic Party from shortly after the vote to enter the Iraq war after the attacks of 9/11. That was when I started watching closely, and when I caught Tom Daschle D-SD, former Senate Majority leader, decide to first vote to commit to war, and then “ride the Iraq war all the way to the White House.”
His constituents sent him back home. It is true that the Republicans targeted him when he stood for re-election, but they would not have succeeded if they did not have a point.
The Democrats ran Obama, and he won, but he had no coattails, in part because local constituents had started to wake up to the corruption in their party.
I believe that the decision by the leadership of the Democratic Party, to enhance their personal, financial and political interests at the expense of our national blood and treasure, has been critical to their loss of prestige and credibility.
It has been so bloody obvious. There is endless material illustrating this point.
For example, from yesterday
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/68hck7/photo_of_president_trump_helping_the_poor/
This is essentially a cartoon that points out the difference between the response of Obama and Trump to the Louisiana flood in 2016. The only reason it bites is because it encapsulates a truth borne out by multiple experiences, with many Democrats involved.
How much money that was supposed to be directed to environmental restoration went to political payoffs for the administration’s friends and family? Just how many of Obama’s books did the State Department and other executive branch entities buy? Why did State Department money go to both John F. Kerry’s and Hillary Clinton’s kids? Why didn’t Hillary act to save Ambassador Stevens’ life? Why did Barack Obama make announcement after announcement that cut the ground out from under our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why did the Obama administration allow straw-man sales flagged by the sellers to go through, to the tune of at least two dead American agents and about 300 Mexicans?
And yes, it looks like the Democratic Party is going to take the Republican Party down with it.
Both sides of the uniparty have lost control of the establishment kabuki where two purportedly opposing sides take us to the same place regardless of whichever wins. So establishment Dems and Reps are now united in opposition of the voters as represented by a popular Trump.
“Both” are desperately trying to sell their versions of how this represents the will of “the people” who, it is always assumed are “on their side”. So the new kabuki will require that voters accept that THEY are the enemy.
Please, oh great Matthews, save us from the mandate we gave to Trump! What were our founding fathers thinking! What were WE thinking! We are too stupid to know what we want! Stop us before we get what we want! We don’t deserve to be free!
Cultural issues? LMAO…those crackpots have gone full marxist.
They’ve done a LOT to alienate the Heartland. It’s not only abortion. I think they have two main problems. One, when the Dems were the party of the New Deal, they had tremendous support of workers in the Heartland. They were happy to take union money for campaigns, and then workers believed elected Democrats had their interests at heart. But that has changed. The “knowledge” or information economy has been taking share away from manufacturing and the information economy is not unionized. So Democrats need a new money source. Very rich Silicon Valley oligarchs and hedge fund guys like Tom Steyer have filled the void.
But Silicon Valley’s job is to destroy jobs. Silicon Valley exists to replace human labor with technology. That is the exact opposite of being on the side of workers, which was the promise of the New Deal. So the “working man” part of the Democrat coalition is now the enemy of one of their largest donors.
The other master Democrats now have is the academic left. Dems seem to think that all the idiocy the academic left dreams up is what Americans care about. Transgenderism, climate change, white privilege and so on.
There was hardly a day that went by when you did not see the media – people fresh from academia and nearly all Democrat surrogates – signaling they effectively want to destroy the lives of people who work in the oil fields, natural gas fields, refineries, pipelines and coal mines. Heavily populated Democratic precincts like the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Puget Sound, Martha’s Vineyard, or wherever Silicon Valley billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg live don’t have any oil fields or coal mines. But there are lots of people in the Heartland who work in oil fields, coal mines, and pipelines.
The other thing they picked up from the academic left is demonizing white people and accusing tens of millions of poor white people struggling to get by that they benefit from imaginary white privilege. You think those folks don’t think Democrats hate them?
Until they can break free from the hold that the Silicon Valley oligarchs and the academic left have on them, it is going to be hard for Dems to connect with people who do not have graduate degrees, live on the coasts, or live in a city with a population less than 500,000.
Captain Obvious.
There is no difference between the left of the right. Both want to control people and tell us commoners how to live our lives.
Could be they had the worst possible candidate in the Presidential history.
She sucked and no one liked her.
I don’t think it was abortion. It was the gay issues and the transgender accommodation that the left is looking for was way too much for many. And the Democrats not only believe that you can choose your gender, but it appears there is a movement of choosing your race too. They even have a potential Democratic presidential candidate who claims to be part Indian because she has high cheekbones.
The Democrats seem to be determined to make laughing stocks of themselves.