Because they suck. Oh, @LafayetteBear will LOVE that one...... lol....
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/why-dem...ss-politics-policy-parties-704f792b?st=vSwmT8
Democrats are wandering somewhere between the desert and the wilderness. Their Trump thumping left them without power, a leader or a message, and their current, near total irrelevance is one result. Mr. Trump blazes his way through Washington while Democrats—a day late, and two topics short—stage stand-ins outside the Treasury building, Chuck Schumer shout-gasping “We will win!”
Win what? The Democratic Party can’t effectively oppose Mr. Trump’s worldview if it doesn’t formulate a coherent one of its own. Many Democrats rolled out of the election acknowledging the urgent need for a change in direction—for moderation, an end to cultural radicalism, a reconnect with working-class Americans. They immediately crashed into the left-wing base, threatening political death to heretics. Even if the party had the spine to push back, who exactly on the Democratic bench even remembers how to be a moderate?
What looks like a rapid collapse was years in the making. The left’s takeover of the Democratic Party began with the rise of Barack Obama and it steadily eradicated dissenting voices. Nancy Pelosi’s “majority makers”—the Blue Dogs and moderates who won her the speakership in 2006—were made to support unpopular legislation and paid for it in lost elections. Progressives targeted and polarized other holdouts, picked them off in primaries, or drove them to resignation. It was Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.”
The Squad’s wild proposals for the Green New Deal, open borders, Medicare for all—a program of socialism that traditional Democrats initially rejected—is now mainstream thinking, the policy litmus test for party entry. Who even remembers the politics of Sens. Mark Pryor, Evan Bayh and Mary Landrieu, much less those of John Breaux, Sam Nunn and Fritz Hollings? Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema tried imposing a smidgen of fiscal sanity and energy reality on Joe Biden’s agenda. Their reward was to be hounded in their homes, chased into bathrooms by activists, and discouraged from seeking re-election.
The problem isn’t so much that Democrats won’t embrace moderation as they no longer know how. Today’s Democratic “moderate” is a lawmaker who ventures the occasional criticism of Hamas or of men in women’s sports while hurrying to flag his support for gun control, climate absolutism, racial “equity” and the “human rights” of government-provided health, housing, education and daycare. To agree with Bernie Sanders only 95% of the time is, in today’s Democratic Party, iconoclastic.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/why-dem...ss-politics-policy-parties-704f792b?st=vSwmT8
Democrats are wandering somewhere between the desert and the wilderness. Their Trump thumping left them without power, a leader or a message, and their current, near total irrelevance is one result. Mr. Trump blazes his way through Washington while Democrats—a day late, and two topics short—stage stand-ins outside the Treasury building, Chuck Schumer shout-gasping “We will win!”
Win what? The Democratic Party can’t effectively oppose Mr. Trump’s worldview if it doesn’t formulate a coherent one of its own. Many Democrats rolled out of the election acknowledging the urgent need for a change in direction—for moderation, an end to cultural radicalism, a reconnect with working-class Americans. They immediately crashed into the left-wing base, threatening political death to heretics. Even if the party had the spine to push back, who exactly on the Democratic bench even remembers how to be a moderate?
What looks like a rapid collapse was years in the making. The left’s takeover of the Democratic Party began with the rise of Barack Obama and it steadily eradicated dissenting voices. Nancy Pelosi’s “majority makers”—the Blue Dogs and moderates who won her the speakership in 2006—were made to support unpopular legislation and paid for it in lost elections. Progressives targeted and polarized other holdouts, picked them off in primaries, or drove them to resignation. It was Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.”
The Squad’s wild proposals for the Green New Deal, open borders, Medicare for all—a program of socialism that traditional Democrats initially rejected—is now mainstream thinking, the policy litmus test for party entry. Who even remembers the politics of Sens. Mark Pryor, Evan Bayh and Mary Landrieu, much less those of John Breaux, Sam Nunn and Fritz Hollings? Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema tried imposing a smidgen of fiscal sanity and energy reality on Joe Biden’s agenda. Their reward was to be hounded in their homes, chased into bathrooms by activists, and discouraged from seeking re-election.
The problem isn’t so much that Democrats won’t embrace moderation as they no longer know how. Today’s Democratic “moderate” is a lawmaker who ventures the occasional criticism of Hamas or of men in women’s sports while hurrying to flag his support for gun control, climate absolutism, racial “equity” and the “human rights” of government-provided health, housing, education and daycare. To agree with Bernie Sanders only 95% of the time is, in today’s Democratic Party, iconoclastic.
