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Rep. Raúl Grijalva, 78, is stepping down from his role as the ranking member on the Natural Resources Committee to make way for Rep. Jared Huffman, 60. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, 78, faces being ousted by Rep. Jamie Raskin, 61, from the Judiciary Committee. Apart from the prevalence of ‘J’s’ in this story, ‘young’ House Dems in their 60s are ousting older fellow Dems in their high 70s from key positions to better prepare to take on Trump and House Republicans.
Replacing people in their 70s with people in their 60s is hardly a youth movement, but seniority has crippled the Democrats with a great many party leaders who seem to be barely there.
The Biden reckoning did not swing the 2024 election, but it opened the door to vocal calls for Pelosi to stop squatting in Congress (the 84-year-old recently filed papers to run again in 2026 which would put her at 86 for a term that would end when she would be 88) and for some ranking House members who have been accused of not knowing where they are to step down.
House Dems have been sniping at Rep. David Scott, 78, who they privately say has trouble remembering and focusing on the issues at hand. If they succeed in pushing out Scott, after pushing out Grijalva, the revolution of the sixties against the seventies will be underway.
Like some primitive Eskimo clan, the Democrats are shoving their elderly out on ice floes and leaving them to drift away in the hopes that this will somehow atone for the 2024 election.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s refusal to retire before her death provided Democrats with the political urgency to violate political norms by cruelly pushing out Justice Stephen Breyer. Biden’s insistence on running again has been widely blamed for the party’s catastrophic defeat and now opens the door for a purge of the elderly.
Ageism has become just another form of the identity politics that defines the party. A party in thrall to an ideology that divides people by race, sex, ethnicity, and sexual preference will now be fighting its divisive battles over age. As if age were the real issue for the flailing party.
Blaming the party’s misfortunes on the old overlooks a few crucial things. Replacing Pelosi with Rep. Hakeem Jeffries hasn’t exactly set House Democrats on fire. The best that can be said about Jeffries is that apart from his family legacy of antisemitism, there’s not much to say.
And swapping out Biden for Kamala not only didn’t save the campaign, but didn’t even bring in a candidate who could communicate coherently or provide meaningful leadership in a crisis.
These things are not a function of age, but of character, charisma and aptitude.
Kamala proved that a 60-year-old woman (seemingly the new perfect age for a House leadership role) could stumble, flail, and spout gibberish with the worst of them. The one thing she could do that her former boss couldn’t was follow a script. And that just was not enough.
Age is a symptom of a much bigger problem. Gerrymandering has led to a handful of competitive districts. Once a Democrat congressman or woman gets in, it usually takes a priest, a procession and a coffin to get them out. Party leaders derive their power from relationships with donors or community leaders that take decades to develop. Minority House members in particular are often locked into gerrymandered districts backed by a generation of community organizers who grew old along with them, and nothing but demographic change will oust them.
The trouble with demographic change is that it’s usually for the worse.
AOC ousted the powerful Rep. Joe Crowley in a district that was part hipster and part Latino, and went on to become the unpopular face of the party youth. When Rep. John Conyers was ousted in a scandal that was part senility and part #MeToo, he was replaced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib: the first official terrorist in the House.
The lack of swing districts means that party primaries determine the seat holder and the only way to push out a generational bench warmer is some combination of identity politics, scandals or running far to the left leading to a party of ossified leaders mixed with insurgent radicals.
Democrat centrists, an endangered species, have tried to make the case that the party’s obsession with identity politics helped alienate the country. They’ve been protested for suggesting that trying to win women while erasing them may not be the best strategy.
But nobody in the party or out of it really cares what they have to say.
The Democrats have a great formula, not for winning elections, but for raising money. At over $2 billion, the Biden-Harris campaign far outraised Trump. An estimated $16 billion in election spending favored Democrats. Democrats lost the full trifecta, but that matters less to the pros.
What really matters is money and the old-timers and the radicals have the backing of key donors. That’s why the party is stuck with Pelosi and AOC. They can bring in the money.
And who cares if Americans don’t much like either one.
The real problem with the Democrats isn’t the age of their leaders, but the age of their ideas. No matter the age of their officials, the party claims to look to the future, but is stuck in the past. The party’s touchstones are the New Deal and the civil rights movement. Trump and Biden are only four years apart, but where Trump embraced new ideas, Biden pretended to be FDR 2.0.
The socialists, even if they’re no older than AOC, are even worse, strapped to guiding lights like Karl Marx and Bernie Sanders, still trying to make the same failed ideas work again. Tax hikes, anti-industrialism, nationalizing everything and promoting a revolution predate the Civil War. Even the exciting new twists aren’t that exciting. There were drag queens in the cabarets of Weimar Germany and hating the Jews is an idea that was old when the pharaohs were young.
TikTok can temporarily make old ideas seem new to an audience that knows nothing and postures for everything, but like AOC without makeup, old ideas always show their age. Teens embracing Communism in 30 second videos (only to then become fascists or transgender two weeks later) is no basis for an electorate, a movement or a system of government.
Artificially de-aging the party by purging its elders doesn’t show that the Democrats are moving forward, but that they’re trying to appear younger to fool the voters, but mostly themselves.
Biden was not the problem; he was the scapegoat. His policies were those of the party. His encroaching senility just cast a sharp and unflattering light on the policies and the party. He made the party seem old, but the party also made him seem old. Replacing him with Kamala who after trying to run on the formless joy of TikTok trends instead made her closing case by running on the same abortion plank that Democrats had been running on forever.
Age, as King Solomon warned us, can bring with it wisdom or foolishness. Wise ideas are those which have been proven, while foolish ideas are fantasies that can never be proven.
Sacrificing the elders of the leftist tribe to the cargo cult deities and magical thinking of the movement will not fix its problems or make the old, failed ideas at its heart work again.
After two centuries of relentless human sacrifice, the Left should at least have learned that.
The Democrats went full retard. It seems like there’s nowhere left to go but less retarded; but we all know that the answer for them is always that they didn’t go far enough, and we are guaranteed to see a whole ‘nother level of retard never heretofore witnessed by human eyes. I think the problem they have now is that the great majority of people, even the ones who couldn’t bear to pull the lever for Trump, are sick of their retarded bullshit.
You said that well! Good job.
I never believed there was so much scum in the bottom of the barrel, but the Democrats found them and scraped them out and gave them government jobs.
Yes, sometimes it’s hard to believe what goes on in our government. Those dirty mother fuckers, man.
What the fuck? Don’t they have any human decency? I admit I’m not a good guy but I have limits. You can only do so much wrong, you know?
I’m impressed with how limited your vocabulary is.
The Demo-Rats want to replace them with those pathetic little Collage Educated(Brainwashed)Snowflakes and want UN/Globalists Judges to run the SCOTUS
NEVER, EVER vote for a Dem, progressive, liberal or RINO. Or ANY Career pol.
Mitch. Durbin. Schumer. Nancy (50yrs). Grassley. Warren. Baldwin.
…and I’ll add Ron Johnson and Cruz. While I politically agree with these two. But they are entering the “Lifer Club.” OUT!
Oh.. This list could be much longer…
Congressional term limits. Twelve years LIFETIME maximum.
No retirement benefits. Afterall, it is “Public Service.” (They retire at the salary they received on their last paycheck. Roughly $170K.)
Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment.
Restore States Rights.
Term limits for all people in government – Congress, judges, everybody
That won’t do anything. When Rome was collapsing there were 25 emperors in 25 years, a term limit of one year per emperor, that didn’t stop Rome from collapsing.
The only thing that can save America and the West is to teach Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism at the universities.
Would that be the collapsing universities drowning in Anti-Semitism? Just what we need …..a totalitarian Randian philosophy replacing a totalitarian progressive philosophy.
Seems like we just saved the country from progressivism and objectivism at the same time.
I wonder, have you noticed that no one seems to care about your 5th grade philosophy.
Objectivism is certainly far better than subjectivism. Ensconced in subjectivism is religious tyranny, The tyranny of religion has led to most of the world’s problems that confront us today.
Iran, for example, is a religious totalitarian regime. The world does not need more of that no matter what the religion.
No one is forcing you to be a Christian or a Jew, Bobby.
Ayn Rand acolytes: just a modern day tribe of cargo cultists. Objectivism: an old philosophy whose sell-by date has expired. (And please, much as you might feel obligated to do, we don’t need more of your pseudo-intellectual explanations.
Ad hominems, smears, and personal insults are not an intellectual refutation of Objectivism.
You do know that — Mr. Intellectual?
Chris Shugart you’re really disappointing, I thought you were a better type of man than that brutish and stupid “Intrepid”.
“The highest tribute to Ayn Rand, is that her critics must distort everything she stood for in order to attack her. She advocated reason, not force; the individual’s rights to freedom of action, speech, and association; self-responsibility, NOT self-indulgence; and a live-and-let-live society in which each individual is treated as an END, not the MEANS of others’ ends. How many critics would dare honestly state these ideas and say, ” . . .and that’s what I reject”?
–Barbara Branden
THX 1138:
Religious zealots lack the necessary ability to think objectively and therefore you’re never going to get them to agree with you on much of anything that requires a modicum of objectivity. Thus it is an exercise in futility to debate them so why bother.
I’ve disagreed you before on issues but it was and continues to be from an objective point of view. I’m and engineer (now retired) by education and career. and was trained (inculcated actually) to think objectively.
To succeed in science and engineering one must be able to think objectively. Said another way, to push back the frontiers of ignorance, one must have an open mind and think objectively.
It’s how the human species went from riding horses to driving cars and flying airplanes, from living in caves to living in modern homes and buildings, from the notion that everything was made of earth, wind or fire to the periodic tables, from warring with sticks and stone to warring with guns and bullets and missiles and nuclear weapons. It’s what got us to the moon and beyond. It’s how and why we know as an indisputable fact that the sun is a star like any other star in the sky and why in the order and scale of the universe, our planet is no more than a single atom compared to the trillions upon trillions of atoms that make up a single human being.
“Cogito ergo, sum” “I think, therefore I am.) No person given to subjectivity would ever utter that Latin phrase.
Hmmm….did Shugart let you down? Well, he gets an upvote from me.
“brutish and stupid.” Simply because I am way smarter than you, but I don’t have to use it as a cudgel as you always do, doesn’t mean I can’t be an effete “intellectual” when I wanna be. It’s just so much more efficient to be brutish and stupid.
But it’s nice to see you are behaving (sort of) yourself and not resorting to your cheap dime store Christmas/Hanukah insults and your made up history, during the holiday season. I guess you have noticed that the holidays are not going away like you had hoped.
Personally, I believe that ad hominems, smears, and personal insults are the perfect intellectual refutation of Objectivism. That is all objectivism is worth these days. Your little list seems to be your stock in trade.
But then, you always were an effete coward. A real dandy lion. You do know that — Mr. Intellectual, don’t you?
“After two centuries of relentless human sacrifice”
Human sacrifice is primordial it goes back to the Aztecs and the Incas and before them. Jesus Christ was a human sacrifice.
“The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man – and he asks no other man to exist for him. This is the only form of brotherhood and mutual respect possible between men….
In all proper relationships there is no sacrifice of anyone to anyone….
The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.” ― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
I wish you would take up Rand’s admonishment for yourself.
About AOC and Joe Crowley. I have a friend who lives in the district. He told me that Crowley did nothing to campaign in the primary against AOC — no mail, no door knocking. He deserved to lose to an airhead because he took his constituents for granted. AOC’s time is coming. She is doing the same.
Thanks Daniel, very interesting topic, very well covered and analyzed.
One of the main functions of the elders is to warn the youngsters of the dangers lurking out in the world. Without those warnings the youngsters fall prey to predators and such. In the animal kingdom, the various animal “languages” include calls warning of certain dangers. If the young animals don’t learn those calls they are liable to get annihilated.
Unless they change their thinking it will be the same results with younger people. It’s not the age; It’s their horrible socialist ideas and their hate for America.
This is well thought out and argued. Yes the Democratic party is a mess. A dangerous one not only for us but for quite a lot of the rest of the world. But apart from an unknown number of ballots of unknown provenance (n just the right jurisdictions, mind you) about half the voters don’t care and vote for the rascals anyway.
Elections don’t produce the accountability they should. Yes, gerrymandering is part of the issue, most of the press are useless which doesn’t help, and voting laws in many places are crafted to turn an election result backward with the import of an emergency get out the vote and count every ballot crew. Yet, about half the country is happy with phoniness, corruption, endless lying, and ineptitude.
OFF TOPIC.
I just love this! Viva Trump!
” Trump said in a post on X this weekend. “This is where former President Obama refused to honor his commitment of protecting the RED LINE IN THE SAND, and all hell broke out, with Russia stepping in…never much of a benefit in Syria for Russia, other than to make Obama look really stupid.”
the demo-socio-marxo-wokie are running ful gas on reverse as they cannot create an advancement current. RIP
The Democrats will go even further to the left because their 30 to 40 year old up and coming leadership will want that. Their problem will be they are the product of an educational system that has been failing this country. So, they don’t know history that well and will continue to believe the only reason socialism hasn’t worked is because it hasn’t been done properly. They won’t understand that if it can’t be done properly in over a hundred years there’s a great likelihood it can’t be done properly at all.
Biden has been fading away the entire 4 years. He was the front man for Obama. Obama worked behind the scenes to fundamentally change America and yet all the changes and bad mistakes were blamed on Biden. Then when Biden showed he was becoming incapable of being the President. they left decided to put Kamala in charge. What a big mistake that was.