COMPARE AND CONTRAST.

I have long maintained that National Governance is nearly impossible because the political bundles are too big: and that the intent of the voters in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections was to gridlock the government.

To the true believers, though, that's being annoying.  Consider Common Dreams contributor Miles Kampf-Lassin.

In 2020, voters elected a president who promised an agenda of lifting up the working class by redistributing wealth downward, investing in social programs and tackling the climate crisis. Progressives have worked relentlessly to help Biden deliver on these pledges, while right-wing Democrats have stymied him again and again. The crisis facing the administration is on their hands, no matter what the mainstream pundits try to tell you.

No, that platform wasn't a winner, but keeping the Common Dreams faithful fired up is what matters.  Yes, the Sanders people wrote the platform the Democrats ran on, but that redistributing wealth downward hasn't turned out so well.

Most lower- and middle-income Americans drive cars or trucks as part of their daily commutes; they cannot resort to urban rail, let alone the “work from home” that has become a post-COVID hallmark of the professional-managerial laptop class. Bank account–busting gasoline prices directly cut into stagnant wages, affecting blue-collar families’ very ability to put food on the table.

Yes, and in the cities, the rapid transit isn't the safest place to be.  And, according to Josh Hammer, the green bundle comes with the soft-on-crime, Weimar bundle.  "Yet, amidst these remarkable challenges confronting the American people, the Biden administration and Democratic Party elites would rather focus on the overarching imperatives of climate change hysteria, abortion up until birth, and a faraway war in Eastern Europe that has become utterly disconnected from the American national interest."  None of which interests Mr Kampf-Lassin, although he can grouse about being ignored.

If the chattering classes were serious about assessing the reason for Biden and the Democrats’ shrinking poll numbers, they would place blame on the real culprit — an unwillingness among the party establishment to take bold action to address the issues facing the country, from a broken healthcare system to economic plunder of working people by the super-rich to bought-and-paid-for politicians acting on behalf of their corporate funders.

By instead chiding the Left, these commentators are repeating the tired ritual of treating progressives not as partners in Democratic governance, but rather as whiny children who should stay quiet while the adults among the party elite take charge.

Well, no, the corporatist mixed economy has a lot more opportunities for grift and rent-seeking than any sort of socialism, let alone a devolution of federal powers.  So far, though, the party establishments, Democrat or Republican, have not yet figured out how to engage in more conventional bipartisanship.  Maybe Mr Kampf-Lassin and Mr Hammer can find common ground.

The priorities of the modern Democratic Party are comically out of touch with those of the American people, who simply want safe communities, stable prices, secure borders, and to be left alone by the COVID-era biomedical security state. Democrats don’t talk about any of that, at best — and they outright impede those prerogatives, at worst. The transformation of the Democratic Party from a one-time working man’s labor party into today’s identity politics–driven woke monstrosity did not transpire overnight, but that transformation is now complete. And the result is unseemly.

The dog that is the Democratic Party is manipulated by a multifaceted tail that is a grotesque fusion of criminal adulation, Gaia worship, Malthusian radicalism, eugenicist lust, and a gender ideology downstream of the worst excesses of American academia. Maybe that will play well for certain Upper West Side and West Hollywood voting precincts this November, but it won’t play very well in real America.

Note, dear reader, not on policy: as whiners.