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2024 might as well have been 2004 or 1984. In the two-decade cycle, Democrats wake up shocked to discover that their policies of treason, taxation and social collapse are unpopular and retreat to summits at expensive hotels with consultants to discover what went wrong.

The party’s public discourse blames everything on Biden. And Biden, whose picture will be featured in next year’s political encyclopedia under “Senile Old Coot”, is an easy target. But it’s not as if Biden was at the top of his game in 2020 or 2016 when Obama discouraged him from running in favor of the much more popular and crowd-pleasing charms of Hillary Clinton.

Biden isn’t the reason the Democrats lost. He’s the fall guy for it. Swapping in Kamala didn’t save the Democrats. And after the election, the party remains historically unpopular. Most of the country votes for candidates based on core issues, usually economic, not how well they speak.

Running two presidential candidates in one election, neither of whom you would trust to watch your dog overnight, let alone run your country, didn’t help, but the Democrats lost on policies. Most Americans did not believe that the economy would get any better under Democrats and they blamed them for high crime, mass migration and crazy social policies like transgenderism.

And the Dems know it. That’s why internally they’ve come up with three answers that they deliver at retreats for party operatives, prospective 2028 candidates and major donors.

The consultants urge adopting whatever policies are popular regardless of ideology. The activists urge doubling down on the crazy. Political gurus find the craziest thing this election cycle and urge the Democrats to make a show of backing away from that one thing.

But what no one in the party wants to discuss is where the “crazy stuff” came from at all.

Democrat insiders blame some of the crazier stuff, police defunding, drag queen story hour and marching with Hamas, on the vague and poorly defined “interest groups”. Why these “interest groups” have become so influential, they can’t explain because they can’t talk about the Left.

It’s easier to blame a few “interest groups” than to talk about the larger ideological war. A few interest groups couldn’t compel half the country to adopt the belief that women didn’t exist.

After the BLM riots, there was a limited reckoning among Democrats, not about the destruction and violence (which can never be discussed or acknowledged among the faithful), but about the impact of adopting the unpopular ‘Defund the Police’ program which they now mostly deny ever existed. Similarly there is now a very limited reckoning about the most unpopular element of transgenderism, men competing against women, with a few aspiring candidates like California’s Newsom and Arizona’s Gallego coming out against it in principle, but not in practical policy.

After 2024, a cottage industry of Democrat consultants telling politicians how not to talk about transgenderism boomed. Most tell candidates to describe it as a divisive non-issue, to (“as a father”) hypothetically disavow boys playing against girls and then focus on “potholes not potties”.) Whether these cynical performances work, it’s still a matter of putting lipstick on a pig, a donkey or a 300 lb man who wants to be called ‘Suzy’. Much as with BLM, the Democrats aren’t reckoning with what happened, but with how unpopular some of their policies are.

The intellectual underpinnings of the movements responsible remain unaddressed. Internally, consultants blame “interest groups” as if that could explain the sheer havoc and insanity that their party adopted, championed and is now running away from without actually talking about it.

When Democrats talk about “interest groups”, what they really mean is that the big money, from Soros to the Ford Foundation to numerous other billionaires not even on the radar, has financed large networks of organizations that push ideological and policy trends like BLM and Trans. They can’t actually mention the donor level because that’s where their own money comes from.

But blaming the donors would also fall far short of a meaningful critique of the party’s problem.

Major donors and foundations are not just financing interest groups or trends, but a larger ideological program. BLM and transgenderism are part of intellectual frameworks that conservatives and some liberals will name and shame, like ‘critical race theory’, but that Democrats refuse to analyze in terms of their impact on what their party has become.

The frameworks are those of the Left by whatever name it’s going by this week.

Past Democrats were willing to disavow and criticize the Left. Today’s Dems deny it even exists. Much as they deny that socialism is far more popular with their base than anything else. After being pulled so far leftward that their presidential nominee had to defend taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal alien criminals, all they can do is blame a few “interest groups”.

What do the Democrats actually believe? Nothing. They have no defense against being pulled leftward because their entire belief system consists of fossilized cliches from the 60s about the virtues of civil rights, immigration and unions. (These also form the core of their voting blocs.)

Biden was the perfect candidate for a party that hasn’t updated anything in 60 years.

If the Democrats were to take a hard look at the Left, they would also have to decide what they believe. Instead, they employ consultants who tell them to either minimize the craziness of their policies without addressing the craziness of the underlying ideology or to adopt whatever good government policies the public likes at any given moment (DOGE reforms, cut spending) from Republicans and then work out afterward how they’ll reorient themselves ‘Bill Clinton’ style.

Ever since the Clintons, Democrats adopted the motto that beliefs and policies don’t matter, values do. When trying to reconcile extremist views, they keep talking about how those values are theirs because they are rooted in progress, love and equality even if in practice they involve burning down neighborhoods and denying that women exist. Obama beat the ‘values’ language to death and the Hillary and Biden campaign proved how little reach it has with American voters.

Values are very nice, but not when they lead to cities being overrun by illegal aliens and girls having to shower with ‘Suzy’ who can bench press the entire team with one of his hands.

A real party reckoning wouldn’t involve teasing out the various details about Biden’s infirmity, a reality that only CNN anchors and Democrat politicians could pretend to be ignorant of, and deal with the much larger issue of what they believe and what they don’t believe. The party is historically unpopular with leftists, who believe it’s not radical enough, and with everyone else, who believe it’s too radical, and the Dems have no answer except a deeper level of denial.

Democrats had to push the denial button pretty hard to pretend that Biden was at the top of his game when he couldn’t walk a straight line or finish a coherent sentence in less than 10 minutes, but they’re in even deeper denial when they pretend that their unpopularity is just a minor messaging problem and that they haven’t adopted objectively insane positions.

The Left took over the Democrats because it’s a core of fanatics that excels at taking over institutions, but those institutions have to be vacuously lacking in identity and awareness. It’s a whole lot easier to brainwash people who don’t believe in anything than those who do.

The Democrats fell into leftist radicalism because they stopped believing in anything. The old moderates died or, like Joe Biden, became living fossils who went along with whatever their younger aides told them. The party became as much of a puppet as Biden was in his last years.

And that’s the real reason why the image of an out-of-touch confused old man in the White House is so painful for Dems. It wasn’t just Biden that was a senile puppet, it’s his whole party.

What happens when you’re part of a party of puppets? You don’t ask questions.

You don’t notice when your president is out of his mind because you already learned not to notice when your party is out of its mind. What you do is chant “Black Lives Matter” and “No Human Being is Illegal” and “Men are Women” along with other simple-minded slogans so that you don’t think. And then you see that everything is in ruins and wonder what happened.