Perhaps it’s irony, perhaps coincidence, or perhaps we’re both interpreting the tom-toms the same way but Ruy Teixeira’s latest post calls out Democrats for lacking what George H. W. Bush once called “the vision thing”. Here’s a snippet:
Cast your mind back to the halcyon days when American politics revolved around George H.W. Bush and his delightful locutions. A quintessential Bushism was when he referred to his (hard-to-define) overarching goal as the “the vision thing.” He wasn’t sure what it was and neither was anyone else.
Today’s Democrats have a similar problem. Nobody really knows what they stand for besides being really, really against Trump. That makes it hard to have a recognizable vision for the country since it’s a purely negative politics. What kind of society are Democrats aiming for and how would ordinary people find their place in it?
I don’t think there’s a lack of vision among Democrats. I think there’s a multitude of them.
Elected officials of both parties imagine an America that provides them with permanent sinecures garnished with cushy pensions when they retire while they devote their attentions to enriching themselves through “pay to play” and getting donations for their re-election campaigns.
The progressives at whom Mr. Teixeira levels his fire are vanguardists. They imagine themselves leading the ignorant masses to some ever-receding destination but there are far fewer willing followers than I believe they fancy.
The post is full of graphs of the results of polling data which illustrate a common conclusion: Americans see the visions of that latter group pretty clearly and recognize that they have little appeal to them. Here’s one of the graphs which I think makes the point pretty well:
Healthcare is the one interest that average folks and Democrats have in common but there’s a rub, quoting Nate Cohn:
Health care hasn’t been front and center for years. In the final New York Times/Siena poll of the 2024 campaign, less than one percent of voters said health care was the most important issue to their vote [open-ended question]…Ever since Mr. Trump came down the escalator, the basic political conflict between the two parties has changed to something very different than the one that put health care at the fore…
[H]ealth care is unlikely to return to the center of American politics—not anytime soon.
Furthermore, as I have noted increasing subsidies in the absence of increasing supply has the unfortunate effect of raising prices which in turn impels more subsidies. Democrats need to get their minds around that issue.
