Biden leads Democrats to a sad ending, even though he's seen this movie before | Washington Examiner

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) doesn't remember when inflation and crime undid the last period of Democratic dominance and sustained liberal governance. She was born in 1989.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is old enough to remember, but he was also a socialist at the height of the Cold War. He is committed, regardless of the electoral consequences.

President Joe Biden spent the bulk of his political career watching Democrats slide from New Deal and Great Society-era dominance, only to repeat the same errors that ushered in a string of Republican presidents, followed by the first GOP congressional majorities in 40 years.

The supposed advantage of nominating Biden, who will turn 80 after the midterm elections, was that having lived through this history he might not be doomed to repeat it.

Democrats themselves chose Biden over more radical alternatives because they believed police-defunding, border-obliterating socialists and progressives would be unable to win a national majority even during a pandemic.

Biden hasn't been quite as leftist on policy as he could have been, though some of that is due to the constraints of governing with a 50-50 Senate. He has tried to thread the needle on crime, even as it continues to rage out of control in many cities, by positioning himself as pro-police. He has, however, remained stubbornly in denial about how piling trillions on top of trillions of dollars in new federal spending contributes to inflation. Biden even pretends he doesn't want much spending at all.

But what really caused the country to turn away from the Democrats between the 1960s and the 1980s was their belief that voters concerned about public safety, inflation, and basic quality of life issues had ulterior motives. They were racist, selfish, acting out of white backlash before the vernacular switched to white privilege.

This made the most liberal Democrats unable to see that people were really worried about violent crime, high consumer prices, and the state of their neighborhoods and schools, for non-nefarious reasons. Some of their mayors and other elected officials stopped taking these matters seriously enough to govern effectively, while others lost their vocabulary for talking about them in a way that made sense to the average voter.

That's why liberalism went from being the ideology of the middle and working class to a more elite phenomenon. Blue-collar workers voted for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. Biden often says today's GOP is not your father's Republican Party. But that is true of his own party as well.

Biden witnessed the exodus of voters from the Democratic Party during his early years in the Senate. He watched Bill Clinton win some of them back. He served as vice president when Barack Obama excited new voters. He was there when both men frittered away that goodwill, lost their congressional majorities, and were replaced by Republican presidents even after managing to get themselves reelected.

And yet, less than two weeks out from this year's elections, Democrats stand on the precipice of defeat once again on Biden's watch.

Biden pledged to unite the country, being a president for all Americans, while routinely campaigning against nearly half the electorate as latent fascists. (When called out on this, he retreats to saying the mainstream Republican majority is merely under the control of latent fascists).

He downplays public anxieties about inflation, gas prices, and the economy, which he describes as "strong as hell." He says instead that democracy itself is on the ballot, characterizing voting laws compatible with high turnout and black electoral success as "Jim Crow 2.0."

Democrats and pundits to Biden's left are worse, to be sure. They find it suspect that parents are interested in what is taught in their childrens' schools or even whether those schools are open in the first place. They mock people who care more about the price of eggs or the availability of baby formula today more than the Capitol riot almost two years ago.

In Washington, Democrats seek to pour more fuel onto the inflationary fire with the claim that the solution is still more spending. In blue cities, left-wing district attorneys are being lenient with criminals like the liberal judges who came before them a generation ago.

Barring a polling failure that would rival 2016 but in the opposite direction, Biden's party is about to reap the electoral whirlwind largely for repeating past errors with a 2020s twist.

If only they'd had an elder statesman who could have warned them.