The Left's Incompetence

Why are Democrats Always So Bad at Governing?

Recent history seems pretty clear: Democrats can’t seem to govern. Oh, people say, it’s because they’re so diverse! They accept so many types of different thinking and ways of being, no wonder they have trouble making things work out well. Codswallop! In their highest ranks, Democrats all think largely the same way, tolerating little to no dissent in their ranks.

So, if at the top, they’re so united, why do we have Presidencies such as the inept, Keystone Kops Biden era (so far), the disastrous Carter era, the terrible Lyndon Johnson era?

Well…

It's possible that top Democrats figured that they simply can’t do it, so decided not to do it at all.

The general sense of the American populace is: the Democratic Party is the party of the educated elites. Professorial-type people who, most are aware, have a strained relationship with real life. It's one of the reasons why the Democrats are constantly trying to paint really successful, but perhaps less prestigiously educated people as... idiots.

And so on from there. Just a guess, based on the understanding that top Democrats now know full well that they just can't govern well, so make no pretense of doing it, but instead stake their electoral fortunes on lying to their perceived voter base, bribing them, defrauding them, but still beguiling them with the words they’ve trained the base to want to hear.

It's a simplistic hypothesis, but sometimes these things are not all that complex. At least at a high level.

My theory holds that the Democratic Party has a detachment problem, because top luminaries and thinkers of the party understand that the intellectual foundations of their party come mostly from people in academia. People with, as mentioned above, a distant relationship with real life.

How can we see this in action? Pretty easy: Look at Democratic nominees for President in past election cycles:

· Trump vs. Biden – Successful businessman vs. Career politician (2020)

· Trump vs. Hillary Clinton – Successful businessman vs. Career politician and career first lady (in Arkansas and D.C.) (2016)

· Obama vs. Romney – Career politician vs. Successful businessman (2012)

· Obama vs. McCain – Career politician vs. War hero turned career politician (2008)

· Bush vs. Kerry – Successful businessman vs. Career politician (2004) 

· Bush vs. Gore – Successful businessman vs. Career politician (2000)

· Clinton vs. Dole – Career politician vs. War hero turned career politician (1996)

· Clinton vs. Bush, Sr. – Career politician vs. Successful businessman turned career politician (1992)

· Bush, Sr. vs Dukakis – Successful businessman vs. Career politician (1988)

· Reagan vs. Mondale – Successful entertainer vs. Career politician (1984)

· Reagan vs. Carter – Successful entertainer vs. Peanut farmer turned career politician (to find a Democrat Presidential nominee who’d spent considerable time in the private sector, you have to go back more than 40 years! (1980)

You have to go a bit further back to find the first GOP nominee who didn’t have a significant successful stint in real life (Nixon) before turning himself into a career politician. President Ford was an “accidental President,” so I haven’t included him in this overview.

Next, if you look back past President Carter, you begin another long string of Democrat career politicians: Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Truman, FDR, Wilson. Probably no need to go back further than Wilson, since at that point you’d be in the 1800’s. (Note: Truman, another accidental President in this list, who ascended to the Presidency when FDR died in office, was a haberdasher in Missouri, so this is not a perfect illustration. The other accidental President in the past century, Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded the assassinated President Kennedy, was a career politician.)

I should point out that Woodrow Wilson wasn’t always a career politician. Before he ran for political office, he was a … professor at Princeton University. Professor: that other thing that prominent Leftist thinkers do. You know, that job that has a distant relationship with real life? Yeah. That job.

So, in more than 100 years, the Democratic Party has nominated exactly… one nominee for the Presidency, who had spent appreciable time in the private sector. By way of contrast, most GOP nominees have had meaningful real-life experience.

Oh, what about that American professoriate, from which the Democrats pluck so many of their leading lights and “thinkers?” What about these people who spend so little time in the private sector? What you and I might refer to as: “real life?” They’re overwhelmingly leftists. Hard leftists. Overwhelmingly Marxists, avowed Socialists and… registered Democrats. To the tune of more than 90 percent.

The bottom line is simple: I know these things; likely you know them too... so do Democrats. Democrats  know, deep-down, that their party leadership has very little experience, with real life.

That understanding is not lost on top Dems, and they, and leftist thinkers, are deeply insecure about it… as they should be. More importantly, though, this is all a strong candidate for at least an important part of the explanation for the Democratic Party’s inability to govern well.

A really good grasp of real life would seem to be an obvious prerequisite to being able to govern people well. When was the last time you were good at doing something about which you were nearly clueless?