Insolent Democrats Are Going To End Up Creating Their Own Donald Trump

Democrat leaders over the weekend did what they’ve been doing for the past two years — lecture voters about the heavenly policies they delivered to Americans, who simply fail to realize how good Democrats have been to them. They’re setting themselves up for a highly painful awakening.

The party is effectively in the same pathetic mess that Republicans were in for the first fifteen years of this century (and still are in many ways). Its leadership doesn’t know what voters need and truly doesn’t care. Getting elected is supposed to work like this: The candidates tell voters what they’d like to do in office, the candidate with the more popular proposal wins, and then, if he does what voters expect from him, he gets to keep his job. If not, he should lose it.

It’s that last step where things have gone a little wrong. Both parties make it really hard to get rid of their incumbents, no matter how god-awful they are, by using money and rules to lock out new candidates. Look what Democrats did for Joe Biden when he was running for reelection: They changed the primary calendar to ensure there could be no serious contenders for the nomination. The Republican National Committee, Sen. Mitch McConnell, and rich GOP donors have played the same games, and it leads both parties to conduct themselves in some truly remarkable ways.

That’s why Democrat Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer was on TV on Sunday chalking up his party’s devastating losses in November to “average working families who didn’t realize how much we had done and how much we care for them.” That same day, House Democrat James Clyburn similarly argued that Biden’s policies were “very positive” for Americans who will eventually “look back and give the full understanding of what he was able to do in those four years.” (At least I think that’s what Clyburn said considering he’s easily the most unintelligible official in the U.S. government.)

When these failures have little or no chance of losing their jobs, they reach this level of insolence. You not voting for them is not their problem. It’s your loss for not getting it.

Republicans have long behaved in the same way. And when the party attempted to once again saddle its voters with a nominee who would surely govern first and foremost on behalf of his wealthy backers (more immigration, lower taxes) and Washington’s weapons manufacturing industry (new wars, more government spending), voters told the party leadership to get bent and pushed a game show host into the White House. They determined they had nothing to lose and if the whole thing burned down, so be it.

Democrats have enjoyed the show. It’s been an uncomfortable ride for Republicans, and it isn’t over, which has worked out nicely for the opposition. But their side is now looking eerily similar to the GOP in 2015. Democrat leaders should probably prepare for some severe growing pains in the near future.