Our Self-Inflicted Wounds
Why the Democratic Establishment is Failing
Comfort, conformity, and a disconnect from everyday Americans are crippling the Democratic Party. It's time for a reckoning with outdated structures and personnel.
The psychohistoric trend of a planet-full of people contains a huge inertia. To be changed it must be met with something possessing a similar inertia.
— Dr. Hari Seldon
If Democrats want to win this war, we need to confront an uncomfortable truth: our own people are holding us back. Too many party operatives, advocacy groups, and staffers are entrenched in a system that rewards them for staying out of touch. They’re not the enemy, but they’re an anchor, and we need to cut the rope.
The political class - consultants, mid-level aides, nonprofit leaders - thrives in the current setup. They’re well-paid, insulated from inflation’s bite, and surrounded by peers who nod along to their every word. This bubble is lethal because it blinds them to how most voters see the Democratic Party: as elitist, performative, and obsessed with issues that don’t resonate with the working-class families we claim to champion.
Consider the younger staffers, the 20- and 30-somethings working for senators, governors, or progressive NGOs. Their world is a cocoon of safety - stable salaries, urban enclaves, and social media echo chambers. They have the luxury to pick their battles, like shoppers at a policy buffet. Why fight for gritty, unsexy, difficult issues like K-12 education reform when you can tweet about pro-Palestine marches or DEI metrics and get instant likes?
Social media’s speed amplifies this, turning any deviation from the groupthink into career suicide. A 2024 study from the Pew Research Center found that 68% of young political professionals fear being “canceled” for expressing unpopular views within their own circles. So they play it safe, championing causes that signal virtue but often alienate swing voters - like equal outcomes over equal opportunity, or symbolic gestures over substantive policy.
This isn’t just a staffing problem; it’s a structural one. The advocacy groups that dominate Democratic strategy - think environmental lobbies, identity-focused coalitions, or labor unions - aren’t built for a crisis phase. They’re fat and happy, flush with donor cash and accustomed to setting the party’s agenda.
When inflation hit 9% in 2022, their leaders didn’t feel the pinch; their salaries kept pace. But the truck driver in Ohio or the nurse in Arizona? They’re drowning. These groups push policies that sound great in D.C. conference rooms - net-zero by 2035, universal basic income - but feel like luxuries to voters worried about gas prices or crime.
Worse, they’ll fight any change to their fiefdoms. In 2023, when a moderate Democratic senator proposed streamlining environmental regulations to speed up infrastructure, green groups buried him in ads, even though voters supported the idea 2-to-1 in polls.1
The solution is brutal but necessary. Party leadership must replace staff who can’t read the room. We need operatives who feel the ground shaking - people who’ve lived paycheck to paycheck, who know what it’s like to choose between groceries and rent.2
And those advocacy groups? It’s time for a come-to-Jesus moment. Leadership needs to sit them down and say: “Get in line, accept half a loaf, or we’re done with you.” This isn’t about betraying progressive ideals; it’s about survival. If we keep letting insulated elites steer the party, we’ll lose the voters we need to win - not just in 2026 or 2028, but for the entire crisis phase. The stakes are too high for business as usual.
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That legislation would have sped up wind & solar generation. But environmental groups are not willing to discuss the trade-offs required to reduce carbon emissions.
The recent story of Democratic groups meeting at a luxury hotel is a poster child for this disconnect.
"If Democrats want to win this war..."
start by not calling it a war. War is not about listening and negotiation. War mentality has been the problem for democrats.
One thing I have noticed is the Dems is difficulty in adjusting their policies in response to failure. They always fall back to better messaging. Or get louder. Or stop the other side from talking. Or just do the same thing, but even harder. But never a re-evaluation of the best method for achieving their goals. And their goals are often laudable.
"championing causes that signal virtue." I think there is more to it than that - focus on problems that can't or won't ever be solved. There is no desire, seemingly, to address any potentially solvable problems. In fact, those problems get sidelined to focus on insoluble problems, where performance can't be measured. Climate change is a wonderful, and all-consuming issue, because you can spend and spend on it, talk and talk about it, and no one actually expects or can measure any tangible results.
Climate change - if reducing emissions meant reducing power costs, would any of this have to be mandated or subsidized? The program would be self-implementing. So instead of mandating and subsidizing, maybe we should be looking at how to make clean energy cheaper?
Just an example, there is a long-standing principle in economics known as Wright's law. The law says that each doubling of production reduces costs by about 20%. So, building one, bespoke thing costs X, building 2 costs 0.80X each, building 4 costs 0.64X each, and so on. Building just eight of something reduces your unit costs to about half. You gain a LOT of savings by building in bulk.
Terra power is building a nuclear power plant in Wyoming. If we built 2, each would be 20% cheaper. If we built 8, they'd be half price. That would be 2,760 MW of power, capable of surging to 4,000 MW. The first plant is $4 billion, building 8 would get you to $2 billion per unit. $16 billion for the entire installation. It's a lot, but then again, it isn't that much - it would have to be paid back over the 80-year lifetime of the reactors. Such a system would support wind and solar with huge amounts of inertia and load following.
But, to do this, Dems would have to confront the antinuclear wing of their own party. They would have to admit that costs and reliability are important. That wind and solar cannot and will not get the job done. It would require an... adjustment in thinking.