I found the graph above, sampled from John Halpin’s latest post at The Liberal Patriot, sufficiently eye-opening that I wanted to pass it along. Here are some of Mr. Halpin’s remarks:

For example, in a comprehensive post-election survey of 4800 working-class voters conducted by PPI and YouGov (including oversamples in the battleground states of AZ, GA, MI, WI, and PA), Republicans outperformed Democrats across every indicator of party leadership and values. As seen in the charts below, pluralities or majorities of working-class voters overall viewed Democrats as “incompetent,” “out of touch,” “not on my side,” “weak,” and “untrustworthy.” In contrast, 50 to 63 percent of working-class Americans viewed Republicans in this election as “competent,” “in touch,” “on my side,” “patriotic,” “strong,” and “trustworthy.”

To date most of the reactions of the election results by Democrats that I’ve read have suggested that tweaking the messaging or a better “get out the vote” campaign would have resulted in victory.

Mr. Halpin’s remarks continue:

If Democrats want to be honest with themselves, they will admit that their party is no longer the historic voice for blue-collar, working-class Americans. The Democrats’ national party brand is sadly a pathetic shell of its former self.

Whether it’s just a false perception or not it looks to me as though many Americans believe that the Democratic Party is the party of government. People who work for the government, want to work for the government, get paid by the government, or want to get paid by the government.

There’s a question that I’m seeing in quite a few places: who’s running the federal government? IMO the answer to this is incredibly simple. The federal government is running the federal government and doesn’t much care for interference from elected leaders (called in some sectors “the temporary help”).

As I read David Dayen’s post at The American Prospect, “What is the Democratic Party?”, a thought came to mind. I recommend Mr. Dayen’s post. This is the meat of the post:

Democrats have an unwieldy coalition of progressives and moderates, consumer advocates and Wall Street bankers, environmentalists and labor organizers, muscular foreign-policy promoters and pacifists, people who want the party to be about tax fairness and health care and abortion and democracy and any of about a hundred other silos. Little stitches together these priorities, outside of being a jumble of words on a page.

In the end, the sum of all these discrete and disparate passions is a passionless party, one that relies on focus-group testing to set priorities rather than any animating set of principles. Democrats prefer to diagnose voters, rather than take care of their concerns. And there’s no leader currently available to mold this mass into anything coherent. In that void, the other side fills in the blanks, and the public, absent any other information or clear definition, tends to believe them.

but here’s the snippet I want to focus on:

Here it’s worth thinking about the two actual realignments in American politics in the last century: Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. Nobody would confuse the two, although Reagan was an FDR Democrat when he joined the Screen Actors Guild, a union he would eventually lead.

Roosevelt defined government as an interventionist force to limit the economy’s excesses and protect the vulnerable; Reagan redefined government as an inefficient yoke on the backs of the people. But the two realigners shared an ability to convince voters that they believed in something. Trump has a vision, however wrongheaded it is, and however lacking it may prove once put in contact with reality. The Democratic vision, however, is more distant, more ephemeral, too constructed in a lab to be seen as authentic.

That zooms in on an important question. What is the federal government for? I believe there are several different views, sometimes contrasting, sometimes conflicting, sometimes held all at the same time.

1. Something approximating the Founders’ vision: a forum for managing conflicts among the states peaceably while handling defense and foreign policy and guaranteeing a small number of rights.

Remember “limited government of enumerated powers”? I don’t believe there is any way to return to that vision at this point. The best we can do would be to pare back some of the federal government’s roles that go too far beyond its limits.

2. A tool for redistributing income from “the rich” (however defined) to the needy (however defined).

What is the “tax fairness” to which Mr. Dayen alludes above? If he means that the top 1% of income earners should pay taxes equivalent to the portion of the national income they receive, we’re already there. They pay considerably more than that. As I’ve mentioned before IMO our problem is not with the top 1% of income earners but with the top 10% of income earners, far too many of whom are highly dependent on payments from the federal government in one form or another. I for one would like to see a federal government that was more energetic in constraining big businesses. Something to chew on: there are very few “natural monopolies”. Most monopolies are granted by the government in one form or another and most big businesses depend on monopoly power.

3. An employment program, particularly for people with college or post-graduate degrees.

It’s not surprising to me that people with college or post-graduate degrees support Big Government. Many of them depend on Big Government for their livelihoods.

4. A way of advancing social agendas

I for one do not believe this is a legitimate role for the federal government (or government at any level) at all.

5. A method of gaining power, riches, and privilege

In the light of recent developments I see no way that anyone could deny that there are people who see the federal government this way, indeed who see government at every level this way.

I want to commend Matt Taibbi’s latest post on the FBI to your attention. Here’s a snippet:

The transformation of the FBI back into a J. Edgar Hoover-style domestic spy service with sweeping political ambition has been a long-developing story, obscured by a political anomaly. In the first phase of this nightmare, between 2001 and 2016, the post-9/11 Bureau used the pretext of an enhanced counterintelligence mandate to throw off some mild restraints that had been placed on it the last time it had to be slapped down, i.e. after the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s. The second phase of its transformation took place after the election of Donald Trump, when the Bureau remade itself on the fly as a kind of government-in-exile, empowered by an outpouring of public and media support to view itself as a counterweight to the Trump government.

In addition to Mr. Taibbi’s main complaint which is that the FBI’s becoming a sort of Stasi is an irresistible temptation, I believe there are other issues which deserve some reflection. When the FBI was founded and empowered more than a century ago, the federal government was small and manageable. Now there are nearly 70 different agencies in different departments that are armed and have police powers. Consequently, not only is the is the FBI dangerous to a liberal democratic order, it is redundant and its authority overlaps with scores of other agencies.

The “talking heads” programs this morning were largely devoted to how awful Trump’s appointees have been, particularly Kash Patel. But there was also some attention devoted to the Democrats’ soul-searching on why they lost.

I don’t think it’s a mystery. Kamala Harris was a weak candidate. She was a weak candidate when she ran for president in 2020. She was a weak candidate when Biden picked her as his running mate. She was a weak candidate on her own steam as president. Furthermore, she either refused or was unable to separate herself from the Biden Administration so she had the baggage of his record to deal with AKA “anti-incumbency bias”.

The Democrats badly needed someone who was not part of the Biden Administration. I believe that such a candidate might actually have beaten Trump.

As it was not only did Harris get fewer votes than Biden in places that Biden carried in 2020, Trump actually carried some areas that Biden carried in 2020. Trump won in one precinct in Chicago, the first time a Republican has carried a Chicago precinct in decades. At least to my eye that suggests a graver problem than a turnout or messaging problem.

I thought you might be interested in the views of Bidenomics that the chap whom President-Elect Trump nominated as his new Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, expressed in a piece at City Journal not long ago. Here’s a snippet:

Over its eight years, the Reagan administration successfully rolled back excessive government interventions of the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter administrations, unleashing the productive capacity of the U.S. economy. This consensus mostly held through the George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations. But the Obama administration featured a return to heavy government intervention in the private sector, particularly through its turbocharged expansion of the regulatory state, delivering an economic constipation similar to the one that plagued the U.S. before the Reagan revolution. The Trump administration’s pursuit of tax reform, deregulation, and fair trade produced noninflationary growth that generated the fastest increases in real wages in a generation.

Yet the Biden administration actively chose to disregard the roadmap for economic dynamism that Presidents Reagan and Trump left behind. Instead, it reached back for the Carter model. “Bidenomics,” or to use Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s framing, “modern supply side economics,” is neither modern nor supply side nor economical. At its core, Bidenomics represents a return to the discredited economic philosophy of central planning.

Other than the imputing of motives, I didn’t find much controversial in what he had to say—he’s largely just echoing what Larry Summers said early in Joe Biden’s term, things that any Keynesian or neo-Keynesian economist would have said.

I believe I’ve mentioned it before but we still have panhandlers on just about every street corner, mostly migrants. That was Phase 1. I think that the cold weather may have motivated what may be the next phase. This week, our first really cold snap, I saw panhandlers going into restaurants and stores and plying their trade there.

Our restaurants and retail trade are still recovering from the lockdowns. Many have closed, some to be replaced with new restaurants or stores, some stand empty, “For Rent” signs on their windows. Panhandlers are about the last thing our restaurants and stores need.

I wonder if the panhandlers realize how much colder it’s going to become here?

This year we made the same menu as we have for many years for Thanksgiving—I smoked the turkey, mashed potatoes, a variation on my wife’s family’s stuffing, braised Brussels sprouts and chestnuts, the cranberry sauce we’ve made for many years, rolls, pumpkin chiffon pie. Next year I’ll need to start earlier, making what I can in advance. My pain level was incredibly high, just about as high as I can tolerate it.

There were six of us. A dear friend who’s been sharing Thanksgiving with us for decades (she always brings her homemade cranberry bread) and two longtime friends we’ve known just as long.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

The editors of the Washington Post tell us that we should be thankful for artificial intelligence in medicine:

If you’re struggling to come up with something you’re grateful for this Thanksgiving, here’s a development all feastgoers can celebrate regardless of their political leanings: Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing medicine, making health care more accurate and less expensive for everyone.

They provide a number of example. I found this one particularly interesting:

A recent study out of Boston comparing the performance of chatbot-assisted physicians in diagnosing patients with that of chatbots alone found that the bots performed considerably better. Given a patient’s case history and symptoms, the chatbot alone scored an average of 90 percent in correctly diagnosing their condition. Physicians using the technology scored only 76 percent on average — just marginally better than the 74 percent average for humans with no AI help at all.

This process will accelerate and advance faster than can be imagined. All of the incentives point that way.

There are many implications for that which I don’t believe have been fully appreciated, particularly in medical education. Who is selected to become a doctor and how they are trained will inevitably change. The traits that will make a physician effective in 2030 will be much different than those that made a physician effective in 2000.