As elected Democrats dwell on the deeper meaning to their electoral beatdown, slivers of genuine insight occasionally pop to the surface of what remains a deep sea of denial. Authority imposed from on high was soundly defeated on November 5 by grassroots anger over issues of fundamental concern to average Americans. That’s not supposed to happen. What does this mean for a party that spent decades assiduously securing a stranglehold over the gatekeepers of a carefully constructed cultural dominion that now finds itself bereft of all resonance with the public at large?
“Campaigns, in many ways, are last-mile marketers that exist on terrain that is set by culture, and the institutions by which Democrats have historically had the ability to influence culture are losing relevance,” Kamala Harris’ deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, acknowledged to Semafor on December 15 in a stunningly blunt admission. “You don’t get a national eight-point shift to the right without losing hold of culture.”
Flaherty even specifically pointed out the total uselessness of having the dominant press in the party’s back pocket.
“There’s just no value – with respect to my colleagues in the mainstream press – in a general election, to speaking to The New York Times or speaking to The Washington Post, because those are already with us,” he told the news site.
Epiphany for Democrats: ‘They Don’t Trust All This Stuff’
Here’s the worst part for the floundering party: It’s not only the media. An entire cozy credentialed elite orbiting the blue nexus has seen its “ability to influence culture,” as Flaherty puts it, completely collapse over the four-year course of a deeply unpopular Biden administration.
It was quite the miscalculation. What good is it to control the levers of big-box journalism, the entertainment industry, major universities, the medical and science establishment, and other prized entities if a ruling political party refuses to address basic problems such as inflation and the scourge of massive unchecked illegal immigration?
Did leading Democrats really believe they could forever sway Americans to support policies that profoundly harm their personal health, homes, and communities merely by having progressive Ivy League professors or Hollywood movie stars brand them as “racist” or “enemies of democracy” should they resist? Sure, it worked for a while during the Barack Obama years, but there is always an expiration date attached to the politics of emotion and fear – and a severe price to pay for those institutions that played their part in the game.
Call it the Boy Scouts phenomenon. When you co-opt and radically transform (subvert) something, it loses the very qualities that made it valuable to you in the first place. You don’t get the prized asset you thought you were repurposing for your agenda. In the end, you’re still locked into your little cocoon of like-minded people.
“The reason folks are seeking alternative sources of media and are turning away from political news is because they don’t trust our institutions,” Flaherty explained to Semafor. “They don’t trust elites, they don’t trust the media, they don’t trust all this stuff. So the party of elites and institutions is going to have a hard time selling to people in these places.”
But why has this occurred, Mr. Flaherty? Here are a few clues to munch on.
Self-Inflicted Cultural Marginalization
When the Boy Scouts of America can’t even define what a boy is, you’re going to have a credibility gap with your new “Scouting America” model.
When The American Academy of Pediatrics, an organization that represents 67,000 children’s doctors, publicly states that a Republican president’s opposition to illegal immigration represents a threat to kids’ health, as it did in January 2017 at the beginning of the first Donald Trump administration, trust in the medical profession will erode.
When late-night television “comedy” talk shows meant to showcase Hollywood guests are devoted to humorless recitation of rigid progressive political action points with no effort to exhibit the slightest bit of artistic imagination or talent, infatuation with “celebrities” disintegrates.
When the American Civil Liberties Union declares that mandatory coronavirus vaccinations upon pain of job loss “actually further civil liberties” instead of violating them, as that once celebrated organization did in a September 2021 op-ed in The New York Times, it self-immolates its entire stated reason for existence.
We could go on ad nauseam. Democrats and their progressive allies didn’t lose all these cultural touchstones they thought they could rely on. They broke them. They shattered them into a thousand pieces in a spirit of unbridled disdain for customers, members, viewers, fans, patients and clients. They will never get that forfeited trust back. And so a potent, if always artificial, social construct is gone forever. How painful it must be for glum party officials to realize that so much of it was frittered away to prop up Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
