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The barnyard metaphor “lipstick on a pig” expresses the old wisdom that cosmetic changes can’t alter the essential nature of anything. Ever since the election, the Democrats, with a few exceptions, have been flailing about trying to explain how the unthinkable happened. Usually, the analysis––scapegoating is more accurate–– is accompanied by remedies that claim to make sure such a disaster never happens again. Most, however, are just variations of putting lipstick on their ideological pig.

Last week the Democrats elected a new chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, the point of the leftist spear carried by the leftist Dems that have dominated their party in the House for more than a decade. According to NBC’s Sahil Kapur, the prog’s new honcho, Greg Casar of Texas, is advising that the Democrats should finesse culture-war issues as actually economic ones, and thus create opportunities to plump for more dirigiste and redistributionist economic policies:

“The progressive movement needs to change. We need to re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up,” Casar said. “So when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did — with Republican help. We need to connect the dots for people that the Republican Party obsession with these culture war issues is driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.”

In other words, put more lipstick on the antiquated cultural Marxism pig that provides the foundations for modern progressivism. But more class warfare and big government interference in the economy is what drove voters to the Republican side. They could contrast for themselves the Biden-Harris flailing and failing “Bidenomics” and its record inflation, brought on by drunken-sailor spending, with Donald Trump’s previous success at improving people’s economic lives.

Several other defining leftist bad ideas that contributed to the Dems’ debacle are reprised in Casar’s suggestions. First, the gist of his prescriptions rely on the big, fat begged question that the “personal is political,” that everything about our lives and beliefs derive from the interests of free-market capitalism and corporations, which deflect attention from their nefarious, greedy machinations by fomenting sexism, racism, xenophobia, and “attacks on queer Americans,” as Casar puts it.

This juvenile and reductive postmodern vulgar materialism denies the personal agency and free will that define our humanity. In reality, the fable goes, we are manipulated by the capitalist hegemons into believing, for example, that patriotism and love for one’s own culture and mores is really just xenophobia, fascism, or racism. Or that our virtues, beliefs, principles, morality, and truth itself are nothing more than arbitrary delusory “constructs” that the ruling powers use to control and oppress others. This determinism doesn’t just demean our humanity, but provides the actual tyrants with pretexts for their oppression, such as the fanciful utopia that will follow their tyranny once enough eggs are broken.

Another feature of this pernicious canard is the arrogance of those who have “raised their consciousness” or become “woke,” and now know what’s really happening, their “enlightenment” evident in their disdain and contempt for the red-state “deplorable” masses, “bitter clingers to guns and religion,” “smelly Walmart shoppers,” “semi-fascists,” or just plain “garbage,” as Biden called them.

And typical of hubris, the “cognitive elite” with their mediocre college degrees and juvenile activism just can’t get it that the “deplorables” may not have college degrees, but they know when they’re being patronized and talked down to. And they particularly don’t like it when self-appointed “brights” try to “connect the dots” for them, as Casar advises, especially when these geniuses think sex identity is just one option of many, rather than a fact of actual biological science.

Also typical of the left-over left is the glaring incoherence of their flogging capitalism and its plutocrats for “social injustices” like “income inequality.” That big lie feeds on a premodern view of wealth as fixed and limited, and hence zero-sum, meaning the more one person has, the less there is for others. For Dems, the federal government must redistribute wealth to the “poor” in order to create “equity,” their Orwellian term for a radical egalitarianism that discards merit and ignores the uneven distribution of talents, abilities, and virtues required for success.

But we’ve known for a long time that “income inequality” is a grotesque simplification. As Michael Barone recently reminded us, the U.S. in fact has the most progressive tax regime among the world’s advanced economies: “In tax year 2022, for example, 48% of all federal income tax revenues came from the top 1% of earners, who paid an average tax rate of 26%. The top 10% of earners paid 72% of revenues, while the bottom 50% accounted for just 3% of revenues.”

Moreover, trillions of those dollars impounded by the IRS are redistributed to the so-called poor. But as Barone reports from The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate, “The authors show how government statistics, scrupulously compiled but defined in ways that made sense decades ago, now significantly understate the incomes of low-income earners.

As they point out,” Barone continues, “Census Bureau income statistics don’t take into account government transfer payments — food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and child tax credits. These are substantial enough that, when you take account of transfers and taxes, the lowest three quintiles (fifths) of the income scale end up with similar take-home pay, between (rounded off) $50,000 and $66,000.”

The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman points out another flaw in Casar’s diagnosis of the Dems’ failures. The election didn’t hinge primarily on issues like transgenderism and its violation of science, but on the stubborn inflation stoked by Biden and his feckless tax, borrow, and spend economic policies. Not just stopping inflation, but lowering prices was more critical for voters.

But “Sadly,” Freeman writes, “it seems that rather than listening to voters about the failures of progressive economic policy, Mr. Casar wants to finalize his party’s divorce from the private economy.” According to Kapur, Casar said “the Democratic Party needs to ‘shed off some of its more corporate elements,’ to sharpen the economic-populist contrast with Republicans and not let voters equate the two parties.’” Note the preposterous implication that the technocratic big-government Dems are “populist” by any legitimate definition of the word.

Finally, this counsel completely avoids the most fundamental problem with the “woke” Democrat Party––its century-long occupation by progressivism, one of Marxism’s collectivist cousins with the same lethal flaws: technocratic pretenses, class warfare clichés, political scientism, abysmal ignorance about how the economy actually functions, contempt for half of Americans, unseemly obsession with power and its trappings, and an amoral “any means necessary” modus operandi that targets the Constitution and its unalienable rights and freedoms.

There is no ideological lipstick that can improve those terminal flaws that line “the road to serfdom.” Only painful experience, as the Romans said, can be the teacher of such fools.