The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal reflects on the outcome of the 2024 U.S. elections. A slice:
Mr. Biden veered left to unite Democrats, rather than unite the country, and he believed the historians (that means you, Jon Meacham) who told him he could be another FDR. He put Elizabeth Warren in charge of his regulators, and Nancy Pelosi in charge of his agenda for the first two years on Capitol Hill.
The result was a decline in real wages as inflation soared, a divisive cultural agenda driven by identity politics, chaos at the southern border, and the collapse of American deterrence abroad. The exit polls show the economy in particular was Mr. Trump’s best issue. No matter the media lectures that the economy is great, voters who depend on wages and salaries (not assets) felt differently.
Let me get this straight: In 2020, when Donald Trump was the sitting president of the United States and controlled all the powers of the executive branch, including the Department of Justice, federal law-enforcement agencies, and our foreign and domestic intelligence services, the Democrats — conspiring from Joe Biden’s Delaware basement — managed to steal the election out from under him.
But, in 2024, after the events of January 6, 2021, and after four years of Democratic lawfare, at a time when the Democratic Party is desperate to keep Trump from power, a Democratic president sits in the White House, Democratic governors hold office in the critical swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and the unified voice of the mainstream press and its allies in government busy themselves with explicitly calling Trump a fascist and an existential threat to American democracy, the Democrats decided to not steal the election from Trump?
Robby Soave writes that “Donald Trump won because Kamala Harris is Joe Biden but worse.” A slice:
Indeed, there are several ways in which Harris may have been a worse candidate overall than Biden. It’s true that Biden’s rapidly declining mental state made him a likely loser in the 2024 election. But Biden, at least, had a track record of winning previous elections. Harris’ only foray into national presidential campaigns ended disastrously, with her early exit from the 2019–2020 race. That was after she adopted a number of toxically unpopular progressive stances, many of which she was forced to shed over the course of the last four months. This rendered her a decidedly weak candidate; say what you will about Biden, but he had the good sense not to alienate Pennsylvania voters by endorsing a fracking ban.
Here’s George Will on the 2024 election. Two slices:
Progressives, which most Democrats more or less are, are defined by their confidence that clever people (they have themselves in mind) can manipulate society and fine-tune its complex processes. So, many months before President Joe Biden’s disqualifying decline, which many leading Democrats had fiercely denied until it became undeniable, Democrats worked to see that Republicans selected the nominee who would be best for Biden: Donald Trump.
Republican opposition to Trump’s nomination became untenable after the August 2022 FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago (pertaining to classified documents), then his indictment in the hush money case. This was concocted by an elected, flamboyantly anti-Trump Democratic prosecutor in Manhattan, who, in a marvel akin to the multiplication of the fishes and loaves, transformed a bookkeeping misdemeanor into 34 federal felonies. Democrats, who call Trump an “existential” threat to everything, endeavored to secure him another presidential nomination.
Enough has been said about the Republican Party’s eight years of self-degradation. More needs to be said about the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president. And then, via Democratic Party high-handedness, foisted her on the nation as the party’s nominee. She did not pass through the toughening furnace of competition that reveals mettle, or its absence.
…..
In October, the Obamas descended from Olympus to remind us of the meaning of “insufferable.” And to demonstrate why progressives persuade only themselves. The Obamas scolded approximately half the electorate for disappointing the Obamas, who are weary to the point of irritability by the chore of teaching their deplorable inferiors this: If you will please just vote as we Obamas consider hygienic, you will disguise your moral backwardness that requires us to stoop to instructing you.
Joseph Epstein is always worth reading. A slice:
For the past few months the U.S. has been radically divided between those suffering Trump Derangement Syndrome and those appalled by the prospect of what I have come to think of as Kamalakaze—fear of national suicide by left-wing politics. In the current climate, calmly set out opinions have become rare. People who once merely had standard opinions have now become fully opinionated.
David Barker rightly describes the Fed’s climate ‘research’ as being “beyond flawed.”
