The No (Intellectual) Growth Party

Why the Democrats Stagnate

You know, there’s no candidate in this party that I agree 100% of the time with, to be honest with you. There’s things that I don’t agree with Mamdani that he said.

But at the end of the day, I always believe, as a Democratic Party chair in Minnesota for the last 14 years, and now the chair of the DNC, that you win through addition. You win by bringing people into your coalition. We have conservative Democrats. We have centrist Democrats. We have labor progressives like me. And we have this new brand of Democrat, which is the leftist.

—Ken Martin, the Democratic Party Chair

To which I say, yeeesh. In an interview with the PBS News Hour, Martin went on to say that he wanted a big tent party. I do, too. Just no lefties. They are not a “new brand” but the same old soreheads. Especially dilettantes like Zohran Mamdani. My big tent is closed to QAnon, Proud Boys…and to the Democratic Socialists of America. But the Dems are wobbly on Mamdani. Where the hell are you, Chuck Schumer? Indeed, they are wobbly on America: 90% of Republicans describe themselves as patriots; about a third of Democrats do. It is hard to win elections when you hate your country.

Hakeem Jeffries will accept Zohran if he says he will protect New York City’s Jews. Boy, is that a tough test! Walking away from “global intifada” should have been a no-brainer—you must read Bret Stephens on what intifada actually meant in his Jerusalem neighborhood—but Zohran couldn’t do it. Just as Kamala Harris couldn’t step back from teaching pre-pubescent children about sexual fluidity (or paying for sex change operations for prisoners). Just as Joe Biden couldn’t close the southern border, until he could. Just as the biggest, but not smartest teachers union, the National Education Association, just passed an anti-Israel resolution at its national convention. Just as the fact that a group called the Democratic Socialists of America even exists, spawning atrocities like Mamdani.

The Democratic Socialists are the Proud Boys of the Democratic Party. Indeed, the Democratic left has more in common with the Republican right than it does with the Sanity Caucus. Leftism is a form of infantilism. It is based on an obvious falsehood: that government functionaries—and there are a smattering of brilliant ones, but not a critical mass—know more than the free market. It is a rebellion that you play with when you’re young, when you have idealism but no experience. I toyed with it, mildly, as a kid. That ended when I covered busing in Boston and couldn’t find any black parents in favor of it. Oh, some black “Activists” were pushing for it, and a great many white liberals, but they didn’t have skin in the game. I remained a populist for a while; I hung with Ralph Nader, who had some good ideas and many terrible ones. He admitted to me he was a socialist. It made a lot of sense if you had no sense of how things actually work: I mean, if you cut out the profit motive—if you establish state-run grocery stores—you can make everything cost less. You can believe the “logic” of that if you don’t understand the entrepreneurial intelligence and creativity of competition. You can believe that state-run grocery stores will be better than family-run grocery stores where everyone—yes, including the children—work their butts off to produce the best product.

And now, the left wing of the Democratic Party—including some people I’ve known for a long time—is rationalizing Mamdani. The American Prospect crowd, including old friend Bob Kuttner, are rationalizing as fast as they can, slagging Ezra Klein and his promising “abundance” agenda—which would take the regulatory shackles off of housing and energy and highway sectors. No, Kuttner argues, it’s not overweening regulations, it’s corporate power that has caused the problem. Except that is palpably not true. In New York, for example, it was rent control that limited the desire of developers to build; Mamdani wants a rent freeze. Kuttner uses the current left fantasy of corporate-created “food deserts” as rationale for Mamdani’s plan to launch state-run grocery stores. In New York, food is never more than a subway stop away…or the nearest corner store. There is the local bodega—owned by upwardly striving Latino families—where prices may be higher, but the food is, conveniently, down the corner. And are the bodega owners really the people Dems want to target? Latino small businesspeople? Come on.

The populist left imagines, as the populist right does, that the working class is suffering for want of manufacturing jobs. More nonsense: According to the New York Times, there are currently 400,000 American manufacturing jobs that need to be filled. We do need a larger manufacturing base, especially for national defense industries—this was one thing Joe Biden and Trump agreed on—but the left generally opposes national defense spending, as reliably as it doesn’t fly the American flag.

And what are the Democrats offering? Litigation. The party has hired a new Litigation Director named Dan Freeman, who says:

We’re going to use legal action to enforce voting rights laws when states around the country violate them, and we’ll intervene and defend your right to vote when the Republican Party tries to make it harder for you to cast a ballot that will be counted.

Another silliness: The right has its election fraud conspiracists; the left has its voting rights conspiracists. Both are false flags. Blacks, for example, punch above their weight when it comes to voting: they are about 12% of the population and 14% of the electorate. Whites—including Hispanic whites—represent 75% of the population and 71% of the electorate.

Now, given Trump’s predilections, it is a good thing for Democrats to keep a weather eye on any attempts to limit the electorate, but what about everything else? A friend writes, where is the Democratic plan to expand legal immigration? Where is the Democratic tax reform—shouldn’t capital gains be taxed at the same rate as labor? Where is the Democratic plan for a 21st century military? Where are the Democrats on a 21st century education system, except in the pocket of the Luddite teachers unions? Why aren’t Bernie and his Bros selling salaried as opposed to fee-for-service medicine?

Nothing there. Crickets are louder. Instead, we get anti-zionism and state-run grocery stores…and a near-total absence of appreciation for the free enterprise system, which created world-historic prosperity in this country. And we get an adolescent socialism from the aging gang at the American Prospect. In that way, too, the Democrats are the No (Intellectual) Growth Party.

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