There’s a big empty lane within Democrat politics, and unfortunately for the Democrats, no one seems to be smart or brave enough to merge into it. What’s that lane? It’s the “Not being completely crazy while also not being completely ancient” lane. It really is that simple. Someone could swoop into that electoral sweet spot, but so far, no one has seen fit to take the risk and fight the fight to capitalize—though they all do hate capitalism—on this tremendous opportunity. All they have to do is just act normal and not be a million years old to distinguish themselves and maybe win by appealing to normal people again.
That’s really all there is to it. Instead, they’re crowding the freak lane while leaving the normal lane empty. Several Democrats who were born after the Jurassic Age have danced around it, but none have committed. It’s apparently too much to ask that they not be complete Leftist freaks.
Let’s get the easy part out of the way, which is not being old. The Democrat Party is a gerontocracy. As we’ve seen, the boomer generation has clutched onto power, sucking the lifeblood of the young to keep themselves in office forever. U.S. Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi (CA-11), former president Joe Biden, U.S. Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters (CA-43), and many others—what do they have in common besides a relentless commitment to Moloch? They think Methuselah is a whippersnapper. Only now are they beginning to loosen their grip, and that’s simply because they’re literally too old to maintain it.
What you see now inside the Democrat Party is not so much a fight over ideology—as we’ll see, socialism has been the ideology of the Democrat Party for decades, and now they’re moving into full-scale communism. They’re just shy about telling the truth to the voters. The moderates are social democrats, and the social democrats are outright communists. There are almost no real moderates left, no Democrats of the kind you might have recognized from the 1990s.
What we hear about as an ideological fight is really nothing of the sort. They generally agree on the ideology, if not the labels. They were socialists a decade ago, but only now are any of them embracing the socialist label—the upstart young ‘uns are really communists, so they run one label behind. The socialist label is a branding exercise meant to distinguish the young progressives from the old progressives. It’s a fight between generations, not policy. They agree on the same policy. They hate America, they hate Americans, and they want to steal your money to give it to Third World peasants who will replace you and provide them with power forever.
That’s the Democrat platform, one totally committed to everything and anything that shafts normal people. Name a Democrat policy that actually helps normal people. You can’t. They talk about healthcare, but it’s their own healthcare policy they are complaining about—Obamacare. They like crime, and they like criminals, but they hate normal people protecting themselves with guns. They swoon over freaky perverts and want to inflict them on your daughters in locker rooms. They want to take your money and give it to people who shouldn’t be here in the first place. And they despise you—you’re racist and sexist and all those other things.
Understand that there’s no disagreement on this stuff among substantial numbers of Democrat politicos. The older generation agrees with it, but they cover it up better. The younger generation distinguishes itself from the older generation by trumpeting Marxism even louder to gain an advantage in the heavy blue districts where they tend to do better. But at the end of the day, it’s a matter of winning—they were both willing to eagerly endorse the rapey outhouse onanist with a Nazi tattoo and 500 other black marks on his résumé just to get some power, abandoning him only when it looked like he couldn’t pull it off at the polls.
There’s a huge space there for someone young who can also appeal to normal people. They tried that with Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger and that shrill shrew from New Jersey, whose name escapes me at the moment. They ran on the “We’re just moderate moms!” platform, though Abigail was running next to a guy who touched himself like platinum in a toilet to the thought of murdering Republicans’ children. But once they got into power, they ruled like every other lefty. They didn’t even pretend. They’re one social media campaign away from passing a bill outlawing heterosexuality.
But what if a Democrat was actually normal? What about a Democrat who could say no to the most unpopular positions of the Democrat Party? Imagine a young Democrat who could be on the 80 side of at least a few 80/20 issues. It’s not like the Republicans are beloved. The GOP’s intermittent success is largely due to the Democrats’ failure. Bill Clinton pulled this off in 1992. He came out against crime. He came out against perpetual welfare cheats. He said he wanted to stand up for the people who “worked hard and played by the rules.” And he won.
Can you imagine any Democrat doing that today? They literally want to defund the police and close the prisons. They literally want to give free money to bums. And they literally don’t want people to play by the rules. Look how they moan when we deport illegal aliens. Bill Clinton won because he made it safe to vote for Democrats again because he was a Democrat who wasn’t going to cater to the deadbeats and who wasn’t going to let criminals run rampant. If you make people safe and secure and don’t insult them by stealing their money to give it to slobs who won’t work, you’re going to get a lot of leeway from the American people to do other liberal things. And they would let things slide, like Bill Clinton’s many, many trysts to ease the agonizing pain of being married to Hillary.
It’s the obvious flex for some Democrat to stand up and steal his playbook—or in Democrats’ terms, redistribute it. But none dare to. Like Spanberger, they dance around moderation, but it’s fake and performative, and in the end, they don’t commit. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Patrick Bateman of American politics, sort of looked like he was going to go that way for a while, but he didn’t have the guts to hold on through the inevitable heat he’d face. Maybe if he had, California wouldn’t be such a bubbling cesspool, but he doesn’t have the stones because you’re going to get stoned by the rest of the Democrat Party for doing it. Yet there’s a huge value to pulling off a Sister Souljah moment, another Bill Clinton play where he took on one of the more annoying people associated with his party, repudiated her, and ended up looking good to the normals.
U.S. Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna (CA-17) was playing at that for a little while. He’s a pretty lefty guy, but he gave the impression that he didn’t hate normal people and that he might even be able to meet them halfway or more on some of the things they were concerned about. But it was too hard because to make that play, you’ve got to have the courage to resist the resistance, so Ro gave up and went more lefty than ever. What a mistake – you can never go left enough to satisfy the left. But if you go a little right, you have an opportunity with a huge swath of voters.
The obvious guy we thought might do it, the one we worried might do it, was Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. It was insane that Kamala Harris passed over this very popular Pennsylvania governor for that weird mincing Minnesotan. But again, Kamala Harris couldn’t take the heat. She couldn’t get someone who was perceived as not a radical, and she certainly couldn’t get someone who was Jewish because, well, you know, the Democrats now hate the Jews and love the Palestinians now. But if she had gone for him, she might’ve actually pulled this off.
So that put Josh Shapiro in a very favorable position. He was the obvious guy to occupy the empty sane lane. His state adores him. In many ways, he’s been competent, and competent governing is not exactly something many Democrats can put on their CVs. Plus, the rejection by Kamala Harris and her humiliating defeat handed him the argument that Democrats needed to do something different and, conveniently, he was different.
The Democrats might’ve swallowed the whole Jewish thing if they thought they had a winner. But instead of differentiating himself from the most extreme leftists, he’s chosen to cater to them. That’s stupid in several ways. The first is that it’s never going to work. They’re never going to accept him as one of their own. He was too moderate, too effective, and too Jewish. His only play was to distinguish himself by doubling down on his moderate image. He needed to be an alternative because he was never going to satisfy the weirdos, losers, and mutations of the progressive wing whose Doc Martens he’s inexplicably chosen to lick.
So, instead of establishing himself as someone normal people across the country can look at and think, “Yeah, he’s not going to do anything stupid or crazy like let criminals out of jail or castrate my kids,” he’s donned the figurative P-hat of the resistance, whining about Trump and pulling a Spanberger by governing left. He’s as down with trans kids as Texas U.S. Senate Democrat nominee James Talarico. Just look at what happened on the Fourth of July—he refused to allow Pennsylvania to have a booth on the Mall. It took Senators Dave McCormick (R-PA) and John Fetterman (D-PA) (who is actually all alone in the young-and-normal lane of the Democrat Party) working together to make a booth happen. Shapiro shouldn’t have been petty; he should’ve been all over it as Mr. Post-Partisan Unity Guy instead of being just another Trump-hating jerk.
Apparently, his vaunted political skills are over-vaunted. Neither he nor almost anybody else can see the obvious. If you’re going to make an impact, you have to distinguish yourself. You can never be left-wing enough to distinguish yourself. There’s always someone who will out-commie you. So, you have to go the other way, which will, incidentally, lead to better outcomes and good governance, which will, in turn, create a virtuous circle. But of course, the Democrat Party is against virtue.
It’s also full of cowards. You’ve got to be brave to stand up to the fanatics. Senator Fetterman is. He’s the honey badger of the Democrat Party because he doesn’t give a Schumer whose paws he steps on. But somebody else who hasn’t been collecting Social Security for two decades could come along and not antagonize the left while focusing on solid, competent governing and true compromise with normal people. That guy could do very, very well in a general election, but it will be tough in the primary, and he’ll have to fight. He’s going to get a lot of grief, so he’s got to have stones. Too bad testosterone is far from the Democrats’ favorite drug, except when injected into confused teenage girls.
And that is why the lonely normal lane is going to remain wide open for now even as the Democrats crowd into the gridlocked kook lane. Don’t look for a maverick in 2028. They’ll need another electoral humiliation or two before they’re desperate enough to try not being complete idiots.