Wrong Lessons Learned RE: 2024

Anyone (like myself) hoping for the Democrats to soul-search and offer a real (read: pro-freedom) alternative to the Trump Party will be disappointed in what has been happening over there lately.

I'm seeing headlines to the effect that the far-left loons who turned off enough voters to get Trump reelected -- and who control the Democratic Party -- are going to double down on their nuttiness.

At The Spectator World is a short piece on the phenomenon:

Take the confidently clueless David Hogg, a Jacobin child of Eden, the Democratic party vice-chair. His strategy for growing the party? Purge it. Drive out moderates in primaries. Burn the center to save the movement. To win the middle in general elections, Hogg would abolish it in primaries. Hogg might agree with Robespierre: “Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice.” Hogg has sent a signal that the base will consider not being sufficiently enthusiastic about the revolution a punishable offense in Democratic primaries.

And Hogg is not alone.

If that sounds familiar, it's because it is. This is exactly what Trump did to the Republican Party ahead of his election, with his version of abolishing the middle in the primaries being to shorten them so much that no insurgent could make a case, much less win.

One should note that this got Trump elected mainly because he was the last man standing and his alternative was so unpopular. It certainly wasn't because Trump made a resolute, uncompromising case for freedom that appealed to the hearts and minds of the most voters.

Does Hogg genuinely (but wrongly) believe that he is preparing his party to make such a winning pitch, or is he, with a politician's low cunning, betting that Trump will have set the table for his party this time around?

Your guess is as good as mine, but the end result is the same: The Democrats are, so far, taking exactly the wrong lesson from their defeat to Trump. They are not asking themselves why they didn't appeal to enough ordinary Americans ("the middle"), but how they can be the beneficiaries of yet another farce of an election with no good alternative at all.

Interestingly, the analyst also learns the wrong lesson. I am otherwise unfamiliar with Alex Castellanos, who describes himself as having "been a Republican when our party has lost the middle," but here he urges what traditional Republicans have done for generations, often losing in the process: abandon "extremism."

Has he forgotten Ronald Reagan, who for all his many flaws, stood his ground and championed economic freedom (both comparatively to the vast majority of modern politicians) on his way to victory?

Hogg and Castellanos are each half-right. A wishy-washy "centrist" who stands for nothing but the status quo (ante?) will galvanize no one in the primaries or the general, but Hogg's own kind of anti-freedom beliefs will lose against any sane candidate (or any candidate who can look sane by comparison) in the general.

Castellanos sees the problem a far leftist will have winning the general, but, like other Republicans, doesn't grasp what freedom is or why most voters should value it enough to see that that "extreme" could win an election.

Someone who can make a positive case for freedom to enough voters can win, and I think whichever party (including a new one, if need be) frees up its selection process, such as by using ranked-choice voting, could find someone "the middle" would favor and subsequently win the election. That person could govern well-enough not to merely set the table for the other party in the next election. Wouldn't that be a breath of fresh air!

So far, I don't see anyone in politics out there who seems aware of this possibility.

-- CAV