WHAT WAS I SAYING ABOUT THOSE OVERSIZED BUNDLES?

Joe "Sanity Clause" Klein (is he the Primary Colors guy of years ago?) notes,  "Trump exhilarates his Republican base. Biden exasperates his Democrats."  He doesn't even have to mention the open borders or the neglect of East Palestine or the casual insulting of voters.

The Donks' coalition is fractious, and he focuses on that.

The Republicans are coherent, even if the ideology is a repulsive right-wing populism. The Democrats are an amalgam of identity groups, with varying agendas and beliefs. You can aim a message at black activists—on say, reparations, as the ever-foolish Jamaal Bowman did this week—and a fair number of Latinos will be turned off. You can try to stroke Latino activists on immigration, and a fair number of blacks—to say nothing of middle-class Latinos (and the rest of us, for that matter)—will wonder why on earth you can’t act to shut down the southern border. You can piss off women if you don’t have the suitable quota of Ms.’s in your administration…and that number is never quite enough. You can piss off gay activists if you question, even just a little, the current, faddish obsession with gender fluidity. About the only thing Democrats have in common is abortion and even there, the activists are so extreme that rational discussion is impossible. Democrats can not say when a late-term abortion is too late. That is disgraceful.

The Democrats’ ethnicity problems have multiplied in recent years as the identity groups have become more complicated. There is a black middle and professional class now; it holds different views from academic blackdom and from the black underclass. It was middle- and working-class blacks, angry about crime, who elected Eric Adams over the lawyerly MSNBC darling Maya Wiley for mayor of New York. (Adams turns out to be a rather sketchy character, but that’s another story.) Latinos are profoundly different from blacks: they’re not interested in government jobs. As Michael Barone once noted, blacks and the 19th century Irish are similar in that way. Latinos—like the Italian immigrants 100 years ago—figure most of the government jobs have been taken. They want to start businesses; they work construction jobs; they’re religiously conservative; they favor legal immigration, but not the mayhem we’re seeing on television. (Oh, and to complete the Barone trifecta, Asians are assimilating the same way Jews did, through an insane fixation on meritocracy.)

This has been a disaster for Democrats. They made a terrible mistake emphasizing identity over community fifty years ago. It was one of the great flubs in American political history. And now the coalition is fraying, for the very best of reasons.

The time might have come to declare victory and move on, but jamming four political parties into a false binary doesn't work that way.

There are multiple black and Latino agendas now; the most important have nothing to do with identity—but with education, crime and inflation. Women and gay people have achieved acceptance and functional equality, historically, in the blink of an eye. Women have, arguably, achieved superiority. Just look at college graduation rates. There was a simple answer that Nikki Haley could have offered when asked if America was a racist country. She could have said: “Well, it sure used to be, by law—but slavery and all those Jim Crow statutes—the ones that made distinctions according to race—are gone now. Sure, racists still exist. They always will…in, I hope, ever-declining numbers. But by law, we are no longer a racist country. And we should celebrate the progress we’ve made.”

We should celebrate the progress we’ve made.

Funny how you never hear politicians say that. This is understandable, if reprehensible, among Republicans: their white-wing populist base believes the assimilation of the past 50 years is the very opposite of progress. But what about Democrats? The Great Assimilation has been one of the triumphs of democratic governance. But you don’t hear them bragging on it because…well, because, if they don’t have all those ethnic and gender identity agendas, what do the Democrats have left?

It's also understandable, if reprehensible, among Donk court intellectuals, that skepticism about boutique multiculturalism and the antics of the alphabet people becomes resentment of "the assimilation of the past 50 years."  If there is residual white nationalism, it exists as a mirror image to that boutique multiculturalism and feminine products in the gents' can.  Mr Klein gets that in part and misses that in part.

Some of Biden’s problems are well known. He is too old for the job (so is Trump, but Biden looks it). He has to deal with the inflation hangover, even though the government’s actions to achieve a soft landing have been admirable. His excellent foreign policy has been too subtle to be appreciated. He is powerless to deal with the number one issue in the campaign to come, the Southern border—because a combination of left-wing Dems and right-wing Republicans don’t want the problem to be solved.

But there is another problem, too: Biden has nothing to say about the future. The future is beyond his imagining. If the Democrats’ record has been the human rights triumphs of the past 50 years—achieved with great honor and at great political cost—Biden’s job is to declare victory over identity politics and tell us what happens next. If the Republicans are offering right-wing populism, the Democrats can’t just continue to offer grievance agendas, especially since most of those grievances have been dramatically meliorated. The dirty little secret of Diversity, Equity and Identity (DEI) programs is that they’re indicative of past-thinking, not the future. Indeed, when someone like former Harvard President Claudine Gay—a product of the DEI-industrial complex—blames her firing on racism, not lunkheaded Congressional testimony and plagiarism, the traditional Democrat identity-rhetoric begins to seem laughable. She remained in office as long as she did—she was appointed to the office—only because she was black. The vast majority of Americans understand this.

I don't know, we could try freedom, and less looking to National Politics to fix things, couldn't we?  As far as that "excellent foreign policy ... too subtle to be appreciated," there are people with better foreign policy chops than mine who can analyze Afghanistan and the chaos in the Middle East.