In the news vacuum between Christmas and New Year’s, I’ve been seeing a few things on YouTube where leftists engage in Schadenfreude at an apparent civil war on the Right concerning the outright racists like Laura Loomer who want to bar all immigration to this country and President-elect Elon Musk who wants to keep most of the rules as they are so he can get more “qualified professionals” from places like India (who coincidentally would not command the same wages as American professionals).
And that is good in that conflict between the MAGAts makes it less likely that they will be able to pass laws against the rest of us who just want to live our lives in peace. But ultimately they’re still in charge. Because if you’re not voting for the Democrat, you’re effectively voting for the Republican. The reason The Election happened the way it did is that Trump only got 3 million votes over his 2020 total while Kamala Harris had over 6 million votes less compared to Biden.
And that’s if you voted Green, voted Libertarian or voted for Democrats down ballot and left the presidential choice blank. Or just stayed home. When you don’t vote, you vote. Because you know that the Republicans are motivated to get out and vote, and if you don’t vote, you’re effectively voting for all those people to let their choices win out over yours.
But politically what that means is that if Democrats don’t give people something to vote for, Republicans are going to keep winning by default. So that means the Democratic Party needs to ask itself what it needs to do to win elections again.
First off, like James Carville says, they need to recognize that the purpose of a political party is to win elections, without which none of their ideals can be realized. If your goal is to debate some hypothetical perfect government amongst yourselves when you can’t even agree with each other, much less convert the population at large, welcome to the Libertarian Party.
A good rule of thumb is to adopt the Constanza Maneuver. What is that, you ask? Well, if you don’t know, you are probably not real old and uncool like I am. But there was this one episode of Seinfeld where Jerry was talking with his schmuck friend George Constanza and George was going over his bad luck and bad decisions and realizing that everything he did got the opposite result of what he wanted. So Jerry tells him, “if what you do always gets the opposite of what you want, why don’t you do the opposite of what you want, and get that?” So George tries it. He sees a girl at the deli and rather than try to pick her up with some bullshit story about how he is cooler than he actually is, he just walks up to her and says “My name is George. I have no job, and I live with my parents.” And it works. Obviously it doesn’t work for long, but this is how he ended up getting a job with the New York Yankees, and that lasted for several years.
If you’re old enough to remember that episode, you know what I’m talking about. And unfortunately that means your first application of the Constanza Maneuver is to go against the Democratic Party’s innate tendency to prioritize its seniors over the younger people who actually know how to communicate.
Because in addition to many, many previous examples, such as the continuing presence of Dianne Feinstein in the Senate right up to her death of old age, we recently had an expose’ in the Wall Street Journal about Joe Biden’s general lack of acuity in the White House leading to (among other things) lack of communication within government in regard to our Afghanistan withdrawal, and keeping him on a tight schedule with limited access to others “to limit potential missteps”. And then on the Republican side, in addition to the general ill health of Mitch McConnell who is stepping down as Senate Leader after this term but continuing to be Senator from Kentucky, you had a Texas Congresswoman, Kay Granger, having been missing in action for the last six months, being found in a memory care facility where she was admitted “after being found wandering through her neighborhood while seemingly lost and confused.”
But more relevant for the Democratic Party right now, Nancy Pelosi of California, who is 3 years older than Joe Biden herself, who is no longer Democratic House Leader but has been running a lot of things behind the scenes (including the pressure campaign to end Joe Biden’s run for president) was apparently the big factor in pushing aside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-New York) for the leading Democratic seat in the House Oversight Committee, in favor of Gerry Connolly (D.-Virginia), who is not only elderly but suffering from esophageal cancer.
Again, this is hardly a problem unique to Democrats, but we already know that Republicans don’t particularly care about getting new voices or listening to different viewpoints, because they have a base that doesn’t care about that either. But in the long run that’s going to be a problem for them too. Because to go back, we already know from the 2020 elections that the potential Democratic/non-Trumpnik vote is a lot bigger than the total that actually showed up this year. And whoever can appeal to the people that didn’t show up could win the next election.
And as I had said just after the Brian Thompson shooting, if it seems like it’s odd that the youth of today – along with a lot of other people – are willing to support the murder of an executive but are not willing to support the one party that might have stopped Musk’s current tech oligarchy, the common factor is that people don’t think that that one party really cares about them. The Democrats don’t really care about ending oligarchy when they effectively practice it themselves. And I can see that a lot of the party bigwigs didn’t want a rabble-rouser like AOC in a position of authority on a major committee, but part of the Constanza Maneuver is not giving a damn what the safe position is. Because that’s all the Democrats have been doing since Obama ended his second term, and even during his Administration. Playing it safe. They played it safe picking Hillary over Biden cause it was “her turn”, they then picked Biden over a whole host of younger people cause it was “his turn”, he picked Kamala Harris as his running mate cause she ran all the demographic boxes, then refused to hand over the 2024 campaign to her after the midterms because he thought he would be a safer candidate, then when he had no choice he and the other Democrats transitioned to Harris – who is only 60 – because that was safer than an open convention. The Democrats have been playing it safe while Republicans continue to put all their chips on the riskiest bet imaginable. And where are they now?
This is completely independent of whether the Democrats should be all in on socialists like AOC or doing more to appeal to the center, or even if they know how to appeal to anybody. But that’s a broader issue I intend to discuss in the next few weeks.
But for this essay, I think one way to start general reform is by addressing the gerontocracy in politics, which might be a non-partisan issue but is that much less likely to be addressed by the Trump Party than the Democrats, given that their Dear Leader makes Joe Biden look like Bill Nye the Science Guy. Strictly as a hypothetical, among the many, many changes I would make to the American government – such as, changing the official language to Swedish – I would recommend putting a maximum age limit of 75 on any federal office. After all, if the Founders saw the wisdom of putting a minimum age limit on presidents, it’s just as wise to state maybe someone older than 75 would be too old for office, especially since most people in the 1700s didn’t even live to 75. You wouldn’t be ineligible to run any time before that, but if the end of your term takes you past the age of 75, you can’t run again. The specific exception being Supreme Court justices and lower court judges, who would have to retire at 75, in addition to having term limits. Because as a lot of liberals pointed out, it was Ruth Bader Ginsburg staying on the Court in hopes of outlasting a Republican President that helped bring things to this point. And that decision, along with much of Joe Biden’s presidency, only points up an issue with people in power: the longer they stay in power, the more likely they are to make very unwise decisions, such as, staying in power in the first place.
And if there is anything that I have learned in my lifetime it is this: Human beings are like milk cartons. They should come with a sell-by date.