This analysis hits the bullseye on explaining why the national Democrat party has long lost its way. I say this as a lifelong Democrat so far stubbornly loyal when in the voting booth but otherwise feeling as an outcast for every single reason listed in the article as to why the “progressive” or “ liberal” policy choices have been so pigheadedly unpopular and simply wrong. I call myself a fiscally conservative and socially moderate Democrat, which are oxymorons in today’s party.
Thanks for this contribution to what I hope will be a meaningful debate within and a self correction by the party, which has lost its way having been hijacked by leadership that has no connection with the overwhelming majority of Americans.
Dems would not require any other consultants, if they just listened to Ruy.
The irrefutable proof of failed Dem policies is found in the next Reapportionment Map. The map is truly historical. The losses are nearly all Blue and the gains all Red. Beautiful and mild climate CA is vast, with plenty of space that could supply new housing, but does not. CA is a veritable cornucopia of Progressive devastation. The highest US poverty and homeless rates, worst homeownership rate, horrendous public schools and high taxes, now outshine Hollywood's bright lights.
The Poster Boy for Progressive policy will lose 3-4 Congressional Districts in 2030. In 250 years, no other US state has ever lost that many Districts in 1 Census.
Nor is the Blue bloodletting contained to the West Coast. It, literally, spans from sea to shining sea. NY will lose 2 seats. That should not be a surprise ,since more financial workers are now employed in Texas than NY. The new massive and beautiful Goldman Sachs campus in North Dallas might as well include a "Welcome Home" sign. The recently founded Texas Stock Exchange is nearby.
In the Midwest, Indiana shares similar topography and demographics with neighboring IL. Yet IL will shed 2 House seats in 2030, while Indiana grows robustly. Politics is the difference. Rep Indiana is one of best governed US states. Low taxes and crime rates, plentiful jobs, affordable housing and good public schools draw many Big 10 grads to IN cities that are much smaller and less exciting than Chicago.
Once many Big 10 grads nearly automatically decamped to Chicago. Now decades of Dem rule has left Chicago with the incurable Progressive disease. The city is dying from crime, homelessness, sky high taxes, unaffordable housing, lousy schools and unsafe public transportation.
Nationwide, many other Blue states are on the electoral chopping block. Without Biden's 10 million migrants replacing fleeing Americans in many Blue States, the carnage would be far, far worse. Other than often being migrant population dependent, all but 1 state losing a House District, have 1 thing in common. They all marinate in the Progressive policies Ruy describes, while being governed by Dems. And Americans are fleeing them, as if they just heard a Tsunami warning.
My granddaughter teaches at a junior college in LA and tells me the CA public schools are the best in the nation. My grandson is contemplating moving there with my 4 year old great-grandson (who already reads chapter books). His wife is communist who wants to move to blue state. I can't figure it out.
We were there for nearly 25 years. CA schools were once some of the best in the nation. Now outside those districts where small starter homes begin at $3 or 4 million dollars and up, their tests scores rank in the bottom 2 quintiles of US states.
Nearly 40% of CA families speak a language different from English at home, and they are different languages . So teachers cannot just be bilingual, they may have kids speaking 4 different primary languages, in their classroom.
Moreover, most CA districts are in session only 8am -2pm, 4 days a week and 8-noon on a 5th day. Kids that go to school the traditional 8-3, 5 days a week, have nearly an extra day a week of schooling.
Help me to understand Ruy? Are not the current administrations policies almost completely supportive, at least in principle, not always in execution, of how you describe energy, growth, governance, immigration, merit, biology and patriotic realism, especially with governance (understanding the great importance of feeling safe in your community and making this is a big priority), immigration, merit (eliminating DEI foolishness), and biology (did Trump not say on day one there are only 2 sexes, and you cannot change your sex?)
Yet, we are right populists, implying this is unworthy of serious consideration, who must be put in our places? What am I missing? If being a 'right populist' means I have the fear of God, fist and foremost, above all else, the love of country and the appreciation of the amazing people's shoulders we stand on that goes with it, that I greatly appreciate a President who honors our Constitution, clearly wants law and order and merit based policies (flawed and driven by his flesh as much as he is), and can see the immense folly of progressives who live by man's word and not God's word, then I am a proud Right Populist.
Rejoice always, pray unceasingly and in everything give thanks.
Democrats will not reach realism on merit, biology, patriotism and energy unless they expel progressives, because progressives do not appear willing or able to change their views on those topics.
The Whigs are gone. Jim Crow supporting Democrats became the party of civil rights. It's entirely possible one or both of our current parties will be gone, or Republicans who are increasingly the party of the working class, could ditch CATO, Americans for Prosperity, and Globalisation.
The one big problem with representative democracy is that our reps can be bought, and once bought their campaign funding makes them very hard to dislodge. All it takes to support convicted perverts in pre teen girls locker rooms is one multi million dollar contributor per congressman. It's similar on every issue. Worker drone H1b visas, illegal border crossers, do nothing environmental groups, or in the case de jour, food for poor covid kids in Minneapolis.
I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump, but I do like that he has shaken things up.
While the George W Bush, globalist, CATO wing of the Rep Party keeps shrinking every day, the Progressive wing of the Dem Party keeps growing.
The crowing over the victory by Dem "moderates" Spanbeger and Sherrill is over, because in days both were revealed to be AOC clones, or possibly to her Left. Viva la Open Borders and Price Controls, seriously? They barely had time to reassure Dems, in actuality, neither woman still sees a problem with 14 year olds with different genitalia, sharing showers and athletic fields. Climate Change hysteria may finally be dying in Europe, but NJ they will continue to worship at the alter of cap and trade, until their lights go out, permanently?
Looking at the likely Apportionment Map, that few expected to be this one sided, I keep thinking "does a house need to fall on Dem leadership", a la the Wizard of Oz? Dems seem nearly wholly reliant on Trump hatred and migrants for their survival.
While certainly not ordained, it seems very possible once Trump is gone, a less polarizing, more articulate and unifying Rep is going to tout successful Rep polices, and marginalize the Dem Party to permanent minority Party status, if nothing changes.
> "While certainly not ordained, it seems very possible once Trump is gone, a less polarizing, more articulate and unifying Rep is going to tout successful Rep polices, and marginalize the Dem Party to permanent minority Party status"
I often wonder about that. I suspect the left will hate Vance or Rubio even more than they hate Trump. To the left, they'd be the more evil and calculating version of Trump. But it will be hard to sell moderates on the idea.
Trump is a turnout machine for the left, but I don't see their turnout dropping even without Trump. They're in it to win it--to remake the culture in their own image. Would Republican turnout drop without Trump? It might. I was initially a reluctant Trump voter, but I've come to see why he is so beloved.
I share your sentiments. Im hardly a fan of all Trump policies, and I refuse to listen to him speak, but if he happens to aid the departure of the Mullahs , he will have helped release 120 million people from bondage, between Venezuela and Iran. Few world leaders in all of human history, could match that accomplishment.
Just as interesting to me is the flow of Americans from Blue to Red States. We use the term historic for much that is not , but this is a major shift in how Americans live. The outcomes produced by dueling policies could not be more stark. Red states work, Blue States not so much .
If any of this is to happen the Democratic Party needs true open primaries. Candidates with some of these characteristics who have run as Democrats have been shut out of Democratic primaries. The party has chosen who they want, provided support to that person and ignored viable candidates with different points of view. In Florida this happened during the 2024 presidential primary and in state and local elections as well.
I began copying quotes to the clipboard to commend you on, but the clipboard got too long to deal with. I found myself agreeing with this article on every point. Bravo, sir! Well done.
If only the Democratic Party would pay attention...
It's interesting to note that the Amazing Zohran is acting like a city deficit just "poof" materialized out of nowhere. He didn't notice it when he was running? And now he wants to increase that deficit? And where were the NYC assemblymen and city council? No one saw this coming under Adams---who WARNED about it relative to all the illegal invaders the city was paying for.
This fits into multiple principles of honesty, first and foremost admitting there is no free lunch, and that without a Federal Reserve to print money, city and state officials are going to have to actually stop spending or tax more. And given that CA is about to face a major corporate revolution over the threat to increase wealth taxes, or that Zohran wants to spend even more, giving illegals day care, the exodus has only started. Reports today are that CA again lost population. What happens to either when, say, an addition 10% of the wealthiest taxpayers leave?
How about #8. Radical Islam Denialism. Stop ignoring or pretending the creeping Islamisation of the West is not a threat. Democratic politicians, who are otherwise intelligent and rational, either out of fear or political correctness, will never say the words Jihad, Radical Islam or Sharia Law.
Excellent piece. Also a perfect summation of why I never vote for Democrats in their current form. No matter what Democratic politicians say publicly, they almost all fall into line behind ideas like America as a failed project, need for DEI, climate catastrophism, police as villains, trans supremacy, and open borders. Trump has made plenty of mistakes, but I still trust Republicans over Democrats to run the country.
See Spanbeger and Sherrill -- although anyone with half a brain knew neither of these two candidates were "moderate." Sherrill has just established an ICE snitch line and banned ICE agents on state property.
Ruy's Seven Principles are OK, but they are tactical. I believe we need to learn the strategiic lesson of the modern era. I encapsulate the lesson into Four Laws:
1. Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). Prices need to be understood as an emergent self-organizing phenomenon, not a cunning trick of the evil capitalists.
2. Administrative governmment cannot work because of the "knowledge problem" (Hayek). An administrative hierarchy does not have the bandwidth to to all the things that liberals want.
3. Economic regulation cannot work because of "regulatory capture" (Stigler). Nuff said.
4. Government programs cannot work because they are always about gifting the rulers' supporters. Hello Somali fraud in Minnesota.
The first three laws were discovered by "experts." The fourth law we all know in our gut.
Please define right populism. Could you or someone do a compare and contrast between right populism and the seven principles you have eloquently outlined?
As they say, Good Luck with That. I am not seeing any move so far towards realism from the Left. Rahm Emanuel is the only potential candidate who is trying to corner the market on it, and he gets little if any attention, alas.
This analysis is correct on everything except climate. It is true that climate advocates have botched the rhetoric, and botched the rhetorical competition with the fossil fuel industry and the nihilistic right. But that does not negate the fact that climate change is turning out to be everything the scientific analysis of the past 40 years has predicted, except that it's coming faster than anticipated (this sets aside some of the extreme rhetoric, which seems to be the main beef of this column). The left has to find better rhetoric, better lines of advocacy, true. But accepting the Trump denialist approach as this discussion seems to do will only exacerbate the problems deriving from climate change, including migration (already driven by climate issues in several cases), environmental degradation, growing agricultural problems in some emerging-market countries, changes making certain crops less viable than they used to be (e.g. cherries in Michigan), damage from wildfires and extreme weather events, insurance cost and actual destruction of coastal properties, etc. No one will benefit from turning away from promoting renewables (already cheaper than fossil fuels in many cases), nuclear, geothermal and possible future power sources. The next generation will surely suffer if the left does not take the lead in developing the energy sources (which will include fossil fuel for some time, of courses), that will support something like the current standard of living while reducing the very real and damaging impacts of climate changes. Moreover, following the Trump approach will concede the necessary technological lead to China, surely something that the left could counter, and which future US voters will not forgive.
Nuclear power is the acid test of whether environmentalists are fundamentally serious.
We could have had a green energy grid that was 70% nuclear power by the 1990s except the environmental movement killed it. NEPA and the Calvert Cliffs decision made meeting environmental regulations prohibitively expensive.
Let that sink in. The most tangible accomplishment of environmentalists is to make global warming worse.
We see this take place over and over again. High speed rail in California was supposed to lower carbon emissions. The Cape Wind farm was supposed to lower carbon emissions, but rich white liberals in Nantucket didn't want it hurting their views. Sun Zia wind farm was fast-tracked and it still took 21 years (IIRC) to get a permit.
Now do some math. There are about 350 million people in the US. 450 million in Europe. Add in Japan, South Korea and so on and you've got at most 1.5 billion people in the developed world. There are perhaps another 1.5 billion people in the developing world who enjoy developed standards of living. So that's 3 billion out of a population of 8 billion.
The other 5 billion want what we have. In the 60s and 70s, leftists enamored with Population Bomb convinced the developing world to take one for the team and mass sterilize their populations, notably China and India. That's not going to work a second time. They want cheap energy. And although a few liberal wonks nod at nuclear, environmentalists on the ground still reject it.
While I agree that climate change is real, and regular scientists were right on the issue though hyped by extremists, and we will change to mostly electric etc., in the end there's not much to be done. The world has a lot more people and they all want to have AC and drive cars etc. and they don't care where the electricity comes from. Things will become and are getting worse.
A solid analysis as always. A few points/quibbles:
I find it odd that you placed “they have mostly set the terms of “respectable” discourse in elite circles” as a positive. I think this is the root of their problems. They have no clue the extent to which they are out of step with the public.
You are of course 100% correct about merit. Progressives do however have a point, in that not everyone starts in the same place. Where they lose the plot is when they ascribe this to race as opposed to social circumstances, primarily the lack of a father at home. Even worse rather than attempt to hold kids from disadvantaged backgrounds to the same high standards they do their own kids they simply lower standards, which hurts poor kids even more. In addition to refocusing on merit we need to get discipline back into public schools along with a rigorous focus on teaching the basics of a classical western education. Then we will have the closest thing possible to equal opportunity in a free society.
You want the Democrats to be something they are not. Nor do they want to be. AOC, Mandami, the VA and NJ governor ladies. These are the up and coming Dems. These seven principals are well-thought out, and if there was such a thing as the Sane Party, maybe they would adopt them. But there is no Sane Party.
This analysis hits the bullseye on explaining why the national Democrat party has long lost its way. I say this as a lifelong Democrat so far stubbornly loyal when in the voting booth but otherwise feeling as an outcast for every single reason listed in the article as to why the “progressive” or “ liberal” policy choices have been so pigheadedly unpopular and simply wrong. I call myself a fiscally conservative and socially moderate Democrat, which are oxymorons in today’s party.
Thanks for this contribution to what I hope will be a meaningful debate within and a self correction by the party, which has lost its way having been hijacked by leadership that has no connection with the overwhelming majority of Americans.
Dems would not require any other consultants, if they just listened to Ruy.
The irrefutable proof of failed Dem policies is found in the next Reapportionment Map. The map is truly historical. The losses are nearly all Blue and the gains all Red. Beautiful and mild climate CA is vast, with plenty of space that could supply new housing, but does not. CA is a veritable cornucopia of Progressive devastation. The highest US poverty and homeless rates, worst homeownership rate, horrendous public schools and high taxes, now outshine Hollywood's bright lights.
The Poster Boy for Progressive policy will lose 3-4 Congressional Districts in 2030. In 250 years, no other US state has ever lost that many Districts in 1 Census.
Nor is the Blue bloodletting contained to the West Coast. It, literally, spans from sea to shining sea. NY will lose 2 seats. That should not be a surprise ,since more financial workers are now employed in Texas than NY. The new massive and beautiful Goldman Sachs campus in North Dallas might as well include a "Welcome Home" sign. The recently founded Texas Stock Exchange is nearby.
In the Midwest, Indiana shares similar topography and demographics with neighboring IL. Yet IL will shed 2 House seats in 2030, while Indiana grows robustly. Politics is the difference. Rep Indiana is one of best governed US states. Low taxes and crime rates, plentiful jobs, affordable housing and good public schools draw many Big 10 grads to IN cities that are much smaller and less exciting than Chicago.
Once many Big 10 grads nearly automatically decamped to Chicago. Now decades of Dem rule has left Chicago with the incurable Progressive disease. The city is dying from crime, homelessness, sky high taxes, unaffordable housing, lousy schools and unsafe public transportation.
Nationwide, many other Blue states are on the electoral chopping block. Without Biden's 10 million migrants replacing fleeing Americans in many Blue States, the carnage would be far, far worse. Other than often being migrant population dependent, all but 1 state losing a House District, have 1 thing in common. They all marinate in the Progressive policies Ruy describes, while being governed by Dems. And Americans are fleeing them, as if they just heard a Tsunami warning.
My granddaughter teaches at a junior college in LA and tells me the CA public schools are the best in the nation. My grandson is contemplating moving there with my 4 year old great-grandson (who already reads chapter books). His wife is communist who wants to move to blue state. I can't figure it out.
We were there for nearly 25 years. CA schools were once some of the best in the nation. Now outside those districts where small starter homes begin at $3 or 4 million dollars and up, their tests scores rank in the bottom 2 quintiles of US states.
Nearly 40% of CA families speak a language different from English at home, and they are different languages . So teachers cannot just be bilingual, they may have kids speaking 4 different primary languages, in their classroom.
Moreover, most CA districts are in session only 8am -2pm, 4 days a week and 8-noon on a 5th day. Kids that go to school the traditional 8-3, 5 days a week, have nearly an extra day a week of schooling.
Looks like I will (after careful investigation) be funding private school.
Help me to understand Ruy? Are not the current administrations policies almost completely supportive, at least in principle, not always in execution, of how you describe energy, growth, governance, immigration, merit, biology and patriotic realism, especially with governance (understanding the great importance of feeling safe in your community and making this is a big priority), immigration, merit (eliminating DEI foolishness), and biology (did Trump not say on day one there are only 2 sexes, and you cannot change your sex?)
Yet, we are right populists, implying this is unworthy of serious consideration, who must be put in our places? What am I missing? If being a 'right populist' means I have the fear of God, fist and foremost, above all else, the love of country and the appreciation of the amazing people's shoulders we stand on that goes with it, that I greatly appreciate a President who honors our Constitution, clearly wants law and order and merit based policies (flawed and driven by his flesh as much as he is), and can see the immense folly of progressives who live by man's word and not God's word, then I am a proud Right Populist.
Rejoice always, pray unceasingly and in everything give thanks.
Democrats will not reach realism on merit, biology, patriotism and energy unless they expel progressives, because progressives do not appear willing or able to change their views on those topics.
The Whigs are gone. Jim Crow supporting Democrats became the party of civil rights. It's entirely possible one or both of our current parties will be gone, or Republicans who are increasingly the party of the working class, could ditch CATO, Americans for Prosperity, and Globalisation.
The one big problem with representative democracy is that our reps can be bought, and once bought their campaign funding makes them very hard to dislodge. All it takes to support convicted perverts in pre teen girls locker rooms is one multi million dollar contributor per congressman. It's similar on every issue. Worker drone H1b visas, illegal border crossers, do nothing environmental groups, or in the case de jour, food for poor covid kids in Minneapolis.
I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump, but I do like that he has shaken things up.
While the George W Bush, globalist, CATO wing of the Rep Party keeps shrinking every day, the Progressive wing of the Dem Party keeps growing.
The crowing over the victory by Dem "moderates" Spanbeger and Sherrill is over, because in days both were revealed to be AOC clones, or possibly to her Left. Viva la Open Borders and Price Controls, seriously? They barely had time to reassure Dems, in actuality, neither woman still sees a problem with 14 year olds with different genitalia, sharing showers and athletic fields. Climate Change hysteria may finally be dying in Europe, but NJ they will continue to worship at the alter of cap and trade, until their lights go out, permanently?
Looking at the likely Apportionment Map, that few expected to be this one sided, I keep thinking "does a house need to fall on Dem leadership", a la the Wizard of Oz? Dems seem nearly wholly reliant on Trump hatred and migrants for their survival.
While certainly not ordained, it seems very possible once Trump is gone, a less polarizing, more articulate and unifying Rep is going to tout successful Rep polices, and marginalize the Dem Party to permanent minority Party status, if nothing changes.
> "While certainly not ordained, it seems very possible once Trump is gone, a less polarizing, more articulate and unifying Rep is going to tout successful Rep polices, and marginalize the Dem Party to permanent minority Party status"
I often wonder about that. I suspect the left will hate Vance or Rubio even more than they hate Trump. To the left, they'd be the more evil and calculating version of Trump. But it will be hard to sell moderates on the idea.
Trump is a turnout machine for the left, but I don't see their turnout dropping even without Trump. They're in it to win it--to remake the culture in their own image. Would Republican turnout drop without Trump? It might. I was initially a reluctant Trump voter, but I've come to see why he is so beloved.
I share your sentiments. Im hardly a fan of all Trump policies, and I refuse to listen to him speak, but if he happens to aid the departure of the Mullahs , he will have helped release 120 million people from bondage, between Venezuela and Iran. Few world leaders in all of human history, could match that accomplishment.
Just as interesting to me is the flow of Americans from Blue to Red States. We use the term historic for much that is not , but this is a major shift in how Americans live. The outcomes produced by dueling policies could not be more stark. Red states work, Blue States not so much .
Hey now... We have the best Congress that money can buy!
If any of this is to happen the Democratic Party needs true open primaries. Candidates with some of these characteristics who have run as Democrats have been shut out of Democratic primaries. The party has chosen who they want, provided support to that person and ignored viable candidates with different points of view. In Florida this happened during the 2024 presidential primary and in state and local elections as well.
Marc Elias is a Dem attorney whose sole purpose is to keep other candidates off ballots. For democracy.
and he gets paid to do that.
I began copying quotes to the clipboard to commend you on, but the clipboard got too long to deal with. I found myself agreeing with this article on every point. Bravo, sir! Well done.
If only the Democratic Party would pay attention...
It's interesting to note that the Amazing Zohran is acting like a city deficit just "poof" materialized out of nowhere. He didn't notice it when he was running? And now he wants to increase that deficit? And where were the NYC assemblymen and city council? No one saw this coming under Adams---who WARNED about it relative to all the illegal invaders the city was paying for.
This fits into multiple principles of honesty, first and foremost admitting there is no free lunch, and that without a Federal Reserve to print money, city and state officials are going to have to actually stop spending or tax more. And given that CA is about to face a major corporate revolution over the threat to increase wealth taxes, or that Zohran wants to spend even more, giving illegals day care, the exodus has only started. Reports today are that CA again lost population. What happens to either when, say, an addition 10% of the wealthiest taxpayers leave?
How about #8. Radical Islam Denialism. Stop ignoring or pretending the creeping Islamisation of the West is not a threat. Democratic politicians, who are otherwise intelligent and rational, either out of fear or political correctness, will never say the words Jihad, Radical Islam or Sharia Law.
Excellent piece. Also a perfect summation of why I never vote for Democrats in their current form. No matter what Democratic politicians say publicly, they almost all fall into line behind ideas like America as a failed project, need for DEI, climate catastrophism, police as villains, trans supremacy, and open borders. Trump has made plenty of mistakes, but I still trust Republicans over Democrats to run the country.
See Spanbeger and Sherrill -- although anyone with half a brain knew neither of these two candidates were "moderate." Sherrill has just established an ICE snitch line and banned ICE agents on state property.
No surprise there.
Ruy's Seven Principles are OK, but they are tactical. I believe we need to learn the strategiic lesson of the modern era. I encapsulate the lesson into Four Laws:
1. Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). Prices need to be understood as an emergent self-organizing phenomenon, not a cunning trick of the evil capitalists.
2. Administrative governmment cannot work because of the "knowledge problem" (Hayek). An administrative hierarchy does not have the bandwidth to to all the things that liberals want.
3. Economic regulation cannot work because of "regulatory capture" (Stigler). Nuff said.
4. Government programs cannot work because they are always about gifting the rulers' supporters. Hello Somali fraud in Minnesota.
The first three laws were discovered by "experts." The fourth law we all know in our gut.
Please define right populism. Could you or someone do a compare and contrast between right populism and the seven principles you have eloquently outlined?
oh yes, it’s a dismissive description
As they say, Good Luck with That. I am not seeing any move so far towards realism from the Left. Rahm Emanuel is the only potential candidate who is trying to corner the market on it, and he gets little if any attention, alas.
This analysis is correct on everything except climate. It is true that climate advocates have botched the rhetoric, and botched the rhetorical competition with the fossil fuel industry and the nihilistic right. But that does not negate the fact that climate change is turning out to be everything the scientific analysis of the past 40 years has predicted, except that it's coming faster than anticipated (this sets aside some of the extreme rhetoric, which seems to be the main beef of this column). The left has to find better rhetoric, better lines of advocacy, true. But accepting the Trump denialist approach as this discussion seems to do will only exacerbate the problems deriving from climate change, including migration (already driven by climate issues in several cases), environmental degradation, growing agricultural problems in some emerging-market countries, changes making certain crops less viable than they used to be (e.g. cherries in Michigan), damage from wildfires and extreme weather events, insurance cost and actual destruction of coastal properties, etc. No one will benefit from turning away from promoting renewables (already cheaper than fossil fuels in many cases), nuclear, geothermal and possible future power sources. The next generation will surely suffer if the left does not take the lead in developing the energy sources (which will include fossil fuel for some time, of courses), that will support something like the current standard of living while reducing the very real and damaging impacts of climate changes. Moreover, following the Trump approach will concede the necessary technological lead to China, surely something that the left could counter, and which future US voters will not forgive.
Nuclear power is the acid test of whether environmentalists are fundamentally serious.
We could have had a green energy grid that was 70% nuclear power by the 1990s except the environmental movement killed it. NEPA and the Calvert Cliffs decision made meeting environmental regulations prohibitively expensive.
Let that sink in. The most tangible accomplishment of environmentalists is to make global warming worse.
We see this take place over and over again. High speed rail in California was supposed to lower carbon emissions. The Cape Wind farm was supposed to lower carbon emissions, but rich white liberals in Nantucket didn't want it hurting their views. Sun Zia wind farm was fast-tracked and it still took 21 years (IIRC) to get a permit.
Now do some math. There are about 350 million people in the US. 450 million in Europe. Add in Japan, South Korea and so on and you've got at most 1.5 billion people in the developed world. There are perhaps another 1.5 billion people in the developing world who enjoy developed standards of living. So that's 3 billion out of a population of 8 billion.
The other 5 billion want what we have. In the 60s and 70s, leftists enamored with Population Bomb convinced the developing world to take one for the team and mass sterilize their populations, notably China and India. That's not going to work a second time. They want cheap energy. And although a few liberal wonks nod at nuclear, environmentalists on the ground still reject it.
While I agree that climate change is real, and regular scientists were right on the issue though hyped by extremists, and we will change to mostly electric etc., in the end there's not much to be done. The world has a lot more people and they all want to have AC and drive cars etc. and they don't care where the electricity comes from. Things will become and are getting worse.
A solid analysis as always. A few points/quibbles:
I find it odd that you placed “they have mostly set the terms of “respectable” discourse in elite circles” as a positive. I think this is the root of their problems. They have no clue the extent to which they are out of step with the public.
You are of course 100% correct about merit. Progressives do however have a point, in that not everyone starts in the same place. Where they lose the plot is when they ascribe this to race as opposed to social circumstances, primarily the lack of a father at home. Even worse rather than attempt to hold kids from disadvantaged backgrounds to the same high standards they do their own kids they simply lower standards, which hurts poor kids even more. In addition to refocusing on merit we need to get discipline back into public schools along with a rigorous focus on teaching the basics of a classical western education. Then we will have the closest thing possible to equal opportunity in a free society.
You want the Democrats to be something they are not. Nor do they want to be. AOC, Mandami, the VA and NJ governor ladies. These are the up and coming Dems. These seven principals are well-thought out, and if there was such a thing as the Sane Party, maybe they would adopt them. But there is no Sane Party.