The Social World

Tag: Democratic party

  • Slouching towards Gavin

    Slouching towards Gavin

    More through historical accident than anything else, Gavin Newsom has emerged as the de facto leader of the Democratic resistance. His dubious attempt to redistrict California along partisan lines won at the ballot box last month. It was a gamble – an open and explicit attempt at gerrymandering – which voters have rewarded. He is conspicuously modeling his image on Bill Clinton’s and Slick Willie is returning the compliment by letting insiders know that he is hugely impressed by Newsom’s talents.

    Newsom is also audaciously recasting himself as a working-class hero. He has said he spent his childhood “hustling” and that he “raised himself.” That rather downplays his rise as a protégé of the Getty family, which employed his father as its lawyer. In 1991, a young Newsom was photographed with the Getty children as part of a newspaper story titled “The Children of the Rich.” It’s unlikely that the San Francisco elite, who have financed his ruse, are fooled; nor is anyone else for that matter. Yet the act goes on, without a hint of shame.

    In November, his former chief of staff was indicted for wire fraud and falsifying tax returns, using fake contracts to deduct the cost of luxury handbags and private jet travel. Dana Williamson’s defense team say federal investigators had sought her cooperation with an as-yet undisclosed investigation into Newsom himself. His team denies any knowledge of such an investigation – an increasingly common occurrence in the one-party state.

    Whatever the truth of the Williamson case, Newsom’s record as Governor alone ought to be fatal. California has led the globe in culture and technology for more than a century. If the state were a country, it would be the fourth-largest economy in the world, as Newsom endlessly brags. But look under the hood and California has become a disaster for most workers.

    This economic regime is, as former director of the California labor department Michael Bernick puts it, an “upstairs, downstairs” autocracy. Newsom’s state has a phenomenally wealthy class above a large, low-wage underbelly. Of course he rarely discusses the other California; the state has the highest proportion of those living in poverty, tepid job growth and the country’s highest rates of unemployment.

    Among teenagers the unemployment rate tops 21 percent, just short of twice the national average. For Gen Z, unemployment ranks second, just ahead of Mississippi. California is the single worst state at creating jobs that pay above average; it hemorrhaged 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, more than twice as many as any other state. In the past year, the only new jobs created in California were in government-financed healthcare and government itself.

    Yet the Governor likes to bask in California’s glow. He inherited an economy that is home to five of the top ten companies in the world. No other region on the planet comes close. The presence of these firms, and their capital gains, along with a highly inflated property market, do much to propel the state’s GDP. That’s partly why he now dominates the race to be the presidential candidate for 2028, as his long-time rival Kamala Harris fades towards well-deserved obscurity.

    The notion of an enlightened California coming to rescue the nation from Trump also plays well with large sections of Silicon Valley. Despite the tech world’s flirtation with MAGA, loyalties remain decisively on the side of the Democrats. The Republicans haven’t won a statewide race in almost two decades. Partly that’s down to demographics. Young workers are fleeing. Left behind is a rapidly aging population, many rich from real-estate investments, a large coterie of affluent professionals, state-dependent individuals and, most importantly, public-sector workers, whose unions funded Newsom’s successful redistricting drive. Leading Democratic pollster Paul Mitchell told me that, thanks to these demographic changes, the GOP’s chances of recapturing the Governor’s Mansion would be “a one in every 200 years event.”

    Newsom’s agenda is shaped largely by public-employee unions and tech-financed green lobbies. But these same policies have devastated the state’s blue-collar economy. Once a major oil producer, the state now suffers the nation’s highest energy prices and is utterly dependent on foreign imports from South America and Saudi Arabia. California’s regulations have added to the erosion of industrial jobs. Since 1990, one-third of manufacturing jobs – 1.3 million positions – have disappeared. Newsom likes to present himself as a member of the hustling classes and yet, in truth, he has destroyed them, encouraged by the established wealth of unions and tech oligarchs. It’s a story that makes much more sense when you learn of his early years.

    Over the past two decades, four million net domestic migrants have left California – that’s the population of San Francisco, Anaheim and San Diego combined. In the past decade, the four leading destinations for young people were all in the South – Nashville, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth. Austin’s growth in educated-millennial migration was almost three times that of New York and twice that of San Francisco. This has only accelerated under Newsom.

    Some suggest that California’s tech sector will make up for this decline in jobs. But companies, too, are leaving. Along with energy firms such as Chevron and Occidental, the recent exodus includes Tesla, SpaceX, McKesson, Jacobs Engineering and Oracle. The big winner is California’s arch-rival, Texas. Hollywood is also suffering a major loss of jobs to other states and countries. Tech employment is heading downward, with more than half of all national tech job losses occurring in the Golden State. Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina are projected to enjoy the biggest growth in tech over the next decade.

    Optimists point to artificial intelligence as a new source of growth, but California’s high energy prices make that unlikely. The soaring need for affordable electricity is leading firms such as Nvidia and Samsung to locate centers which fabricate advanced chips and processors in areas with lower prices for electricity. This includes Texas, where a new quantum-computing center is being planned, and energy-rich states such as Pennsylvania, which is seeking AI growth as a way to reanimate its industrial sector.

    To be sure, many AI firms began life in San Francisco. But they are unlikely to create more tech jobs. City economist Ted Egan suggests that layoffs from other companies, largely due to AI replacing workers, have wiped out gains from the new tech. AI will, if anything, accelerate the rewards to the investor class, a handful of entrepreneurs and well-compensated “genius” programmers. What seems to be happening is that a few highly paid executives and developers stay on their campuses, while computing power shifts to places where energy is cheaper. California is becoming the oligarch’s state, led by the oligarch-in-chief.

    Nothing drives the mass departure from America’s most blessed state more than affordability. This of one of issues that excites both the “abundance” advocates and the increasingly socialist-oriented YIMBY movement. Newsom, who bought a new $9 million house last year, claims to be taking bold steps to improve the state’s housing market. But he has overseen laughably poor results. Many Californians will never own a home or find an affordable rental. Despite hundreds of “pro-housing” initiatives, the state’s housing crisis is getting worse. California consistently lags in the construction not just of single-family homes but multifamily homes as well, while the state dominates the list of the nation’s most expensive ZIP codes.

    Home prices in coastal California are nearly 400 percent above the national average, and statewide the median cost of a home is 2.5 times higher than in the rest of the country. Not surprisingly, California has the second-lowest home-ownership rate in the nation, 56 percent (New York’s is lowest, at 54 percent). Nor have Newsom’s policies helped renters. The average cost of a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles is just shy of $3,000 a month, according to apartments.com, about $1,000 more than the national average.

    Housing is just one of the many Newsom policies that may not play so well in the vast center of America, where single-family homes are the norm and prices are far lower. Certainly, his long-standing assault on fossil fuels will win over few workers in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, the Dakotas and Pennsylvania, the epicenters of the US’s enormous energy production. Laid-off factory hands in Michigan may not welcome an agenda that includes the wiping out of profitable gasoline-fueled cars. Progressive mantras that play well in California may prove Newsom’s undoing in a 2028 presidential run.

    But it would be foolish to underestimate Newsom. Burdened by dyslexia, he has compensated with extreme discipline and hard work. Never an object of adulation, like his predecessor Ronald Reagan, or of respect like the more cerebral former California governor Jerry Brown, his career trajectory has evolved carefully, along very pragmatic lines, even while Newsom embraces progressive bromides. “He is trying to be the anti-Trump,” notes long-time Democratic consultant Dave Gershwin, “but if he needs to cut ties with the left, he’ll do it.” There is little sign of that yet in his cultural stances, such as his preference for transgender over parental rights or his embrace of climate-change religion, which still resonate with his state’s progressive-dominated media.

    An ability to shift from ideology to practicality has been a hallmark of Newsom’s career. Expect a move right on these questions in the coming months. As mayor of San Francisco, he often sided with business interests against the local radical left. As lieutenant governor under Brown, he resorted to visiting Texas in search of a more viable economic model. Just this year he displayed his skill at shifting with the winds by trying to reach out to conservatives such as the late Charlie Kirk when it seemed MAGA was on the rise.

    When necessary, Newsom is willing to jettison progressive demands. He vetoed a bill that would have legalized “shooting alleys” – so-called safe drug-injection sites. He worked to keep the state’s last nuclear and natural-gas plants in operation to prevent politically unpalatable blackouts. To do otherwise would have been madness: these plants account for half of California’s electricity. Newsom is many things, but mad is not one of them. Facing a dismal fiscal reality, he has been forced to fend off proposals from Sacramento progressives that included a 32-hour work week, raising the state’s income tax – already the nation’s highest – and adding new payroll taxes for universal healthcare.

    To balance practicality with ideology, Newsom uses his media skills – ultra-friendly Politico claims he has “won the internet” – to assert himself. The donor class, which has always liked him, now sees him as the best option at a time when a majority of under-40s embrace socialism. Particularly threatening to Palo Alto is a survey that found that a majority of under-40s now favor restricting incomes, with a large portion seeking limits of less than $1 million annually.

    GOP opponents say that Newsom is the “tier one” to fear in 2028. “He’s really smart,” according to California’s Republican national committeeman Shawn Steel, “besides having great hair.” Even the American Conservative proclaimed him “the big winner” of the 2025 elections, thanks to his gerrymandering initiative.

    Of course, Newsom’s record of failure for working people could provide fodder for a challenger from the left, and in November 2028 from the GOP. But right now, anti-Trumpism overwhelms serious progressive critiques of Newsom’s record. He is no great statesman. But, with his media savvy and good looks, he could well play one on TV, and that may be more than enough against either his party’s socialists or the remnants of a disintegrating MAGA.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Kamala 2028 by default?

    Kamala D. Harris, the career mediocrity who fell backward into a major party presidential nomination before ceding every swing state in the Electoral College to Donald Trump last fall, isn’t ruling out yet another bid for the big chair.

    Harris has been making the rounds to promote her newish campaign memoir, 107 Days, and, during a recent sit-down with the BBC, indicated that she’s considering an encore. 

    “I am not done,” declared the former vice president. “I have lived my entire career a life of service and it’s in my bones.” Whether collecting taxpayer-funded paychecks while opening the country’s borders, advocating on behalf of the fanciful Green New Deal and lying to the American people about the mental acuity of their commander-in-chief qualifies as a “life of service” in the same way that, say, a veteran, police officer, or firefighter’s might is dubious, but it’s true enough as far as the expression goes.

    Still, even the most loyal, masochistic of Democratic partisans must be flabbergasted by Harris’s presumption. This is a woman who nearly lost her first statewide race in California to a Republican, flamed out in her first White House campaign, was handed the vice presidency in large part because she checked the correct demographic boxes, played the role of right hand in a widely-reviled administration, was named her party’s presidential nominee without earning a single vote four years later because her boss was no longer compos mentis, and then was soundly defeated by an eminently beatable candidate. 

    Why anyone, least of all herself, would hold that she has something more to give in politics, is a mystery if you look only to virtues intrinsic to Harris herself. 

    She isn’t a smooth or savvy operator. Quite the opposite, she’s a walking word-salad station who has staked out positions far to the left of the median American. She doesn’t have a core electoral constituency to whom she appeals and can fall back on when the going gets rough. Indeed, Trump made significant gains among black and hispanic voters – and more modest ones among women – in 2024. And worst of all, she’s a proven loser. There is absolutely nothing in her electoral track record to suggest that she’s anything but a below average political talent who produces below average outcomes for her party.

    And yet, despite her plentiful deficiencies and the decided lack of enthusiasm for a Harris redux among her fellow Democrats, there is some reason for Harris to believe that come 2028, she could actually win the nomination she was bequeathed in 2024. 

    The Democrats’ failure to build a palatable, center-left bench could lead them, by default, back to Harris

    At the moment, the wind is at the back of the radical left in the fight for the soul of the Democratic party. Zohran Mamdani’s rise in New York City, as well as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders’s Beatlemania-like tour across the country, demonstrates that its activist wing has all of the energy and momentum it could ever want behind it. Moreover, while the Biden administration failed in large part due to its embrace of unpopular progressive policies, many continue to labor under the misimpression that the Joe Biden who ran his approval rating into the ground was the tough-talking, Blue Dog-adjacent Democrat that he was back in the 20th century, rather than the legacy-chasing, left-wing airhead that he turned into in the White House.

    It is also only this faction that has a clear favorite to be its champion in the primary fight to come. Ocasio-Cortez is the best pure political talent in the entire party. As a young, true-blue believer in the cause with a knack for communicating and connecting who will have spent nearly a decade in the national spotlight by the time she’s launching her campaign, Ocasio-Cortez will quickly consolidate Sanders’s coalition around her – and is well-equipped to build upon it.

    All that renders her a favorite to land the nomination, but some Democrats rightly fear that the general electorate would resoundingly reject her.

    She has no equal in the party’s establishment, the cohort of empty suits who would implement a diluted version of her agenda, though. This group seeks to saddle Americans with much of what they’ve already rejected – gender ideology, anti-growth climate policies, and a laissez-faire approach to border security – but without explicitly embracing the socialist label, or the language of the average Middlebury campus activist.

    Those who might run in this lane all face significant headwinds. Former mayor and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg is the most gifted, but black voters are allergic to his smug, McKinsey shtick. Governor Gavin Newsom of California can bob, weave, dip and dodge with the best of them, but his ambition and inauthenticity shines through in every syllable. Senator Cory Booker’s Spartacus act is a running gag. Senator Chris Murphy is Wonder Bread with Iranian flag packaging. Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois is a big nepo-baby whose case for a promotion collapses at the first mention of his state’s largest city. 

    Should no one else emerge, the Democrats’ failure to build a palatable, center-left bench could lead them, by default, back to Harris. Her existing name recognition – and the months-long astroturf campaign to build her up last year – arguably sets her apart from the field; and there is precedent for coalescing around imperfect establishment candidates. Look no further than 2020, when the entire party got behind Biden to stop Sanders. 

    Ultimately, though, Harris is more a symptom of Democrats’ maladies than a cure for them. The only question is whether that matters, given her competition.

  • The mainstreaming of leftist violence

    The mainstreaming of leftist violence

    In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Democratic lawmakers and commentators found themselves in a quandary. On the one hand, most of them loathed Kirk. On the other, many felt that they should try to hold the line condemning the shooting through the throat of a young husband and father at an American university.

    These so-called ‘anti-fascists’ started behaving like nothing so much as the fascists they were searching for

    The New York Times’s Ezra Klein was among those who dipped his toe into the water, writing a piece within the day titled “Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.” Unfortunately, Klein then found himself the subject of a backlash from others on the left who thought that by praising Kirk’s invitation to nonviolent debate, he was somehow “legitimizing” Kirk’s views.

    In order to try to tidy up this controversy, Klein invited on to his NYT podcast the Democratic left’s most sacred figure – the memoirist Ta-Nehisi Coates – to carry out a public struggle-session on Klein. Giving Coates all the deference that the NYT believes is his due, Coates and Klein tried to have the “difficult conversation” about why Coates had reacted negatively to Klein’s initial piece. Coates said that since Kirk’s murder he had, with his usual degree of research, watched some “clips” of the right-wing speaker. He did not like what he saw. In fact, he concluded that Kirk was anti-black, anti-gay and anti-trans. Or, as Coates elegantly summed it up: “This dude was wrong.”

    Yet the most important moment in an otherwise interminable conversation was when Klein tried to explain what he was thinking when he wrote his initial condemnation of Kirk’s murder. Coates gave the telling reply: “Was silence not an option?”

    And there it was. The same people who had been telling Americans for the past decade that “silence” in the face of violence is “complicity,” that “silence is violence,” now preaching that silence should, in fact, be an option after a political assassination. Welcome to the current state of the American left.

    It should not be necessary to rehearse the litany of left-wing violence that has scarred America for the past decade. But it is probably worth repeating some of it.

    Firstly there was the emergence, early in the past decade, of the groupings that became known as “antifa.” In fact, these so-called “anti-fascists” started from the get-go behaving like nothing so much as the fascists they everywhere searched for. While hunting for “literal Nazis” in cities such as Portland, Oregon, they got away with attacking federal buildings on a nightly basis, shooting up businesses which antifa claimed were “fascist” and attacking and hospitalizing journalists who reported on their activities.

    One of the main targets of antifa activists over the past decade has been federal buildings and any federal agency. These activists dressed head to toe in black and covered their faces with masks long before the Covid-19 virus made masking popular. Yet you would have to scour the newspapers over the past decade to find full-throated condemnation of antifa from Democratic politicians and pundits. Most either ignored antifa’s growth, minimized it or, when questioned, said that it is a good thing to be anti-fascist. Which it is. But that completely ignores the fact that antifa were the ones behaving like fascists.

    Compare that lack of condemnation with the words that prominent Democrats have used – in recent weeks alone – to describe one of the main targets of antifa: ICE. The former vice-presidential candidate and current Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, described ICE officers as the “Gestapo.” The Democratic Mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, described them as “neo-Nazis.” And the oh-so moderate Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, described them as the “secret police.” Politicians who reserve their strongest language for government agencies and their most milquetoast comments for vandals parading the streets might be said to have an extremism problem. But it is only in recent months that this has come into even plainer sight.

    The language that the Democrat left has long been using against mainstream Republican voters has spiraled out of all reasonable control. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi and almost every other major Democrat leader of recent years repeatedly insisted that Donald Trump was “an existential threat to democracy” and that his victory in a free and fair election would herald a Nazi era in America. By almost any reasonable analysis, this would be described as deranged.

    But it has long been mainstream rhetoric in the Democratic party and its organs such as MSNBC and the New York Times to describe Trump and his voters in this way. And it has remained so, even after Trump himself suffered not one but two very near misses in assassination attempts against his life. Perhaps some of the Democrats and party mouthpieces who parrot the “Nazi” line seriously believe this. Others – perhaps more often – use these slurs because they are the strongest rhetorical armory they can deploy. Last month, after Kirk’s assassination, Gavin Newsom’s press office was having a perfectly normal Friday night by posting a message on X saying, in capitalized letters: “Stephen Miller is a fascist.”

    This despite the fact that such rhetoric, used against Kirk for years, appears to have persuaded the young man who took the shot that (in the suspected assassin’s own words) he “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” The goons of antifa, whose ideology Kirk’s assassin evidently aligned with, have spouted for years the line that the only good fascist is a dead one. The helpful proviso is that they get to decide who the fascists are.

    The Democratic left had already broken the taboo on attacking federal agents, allowing them to be normalized in the “mostly peaceful” summer of 2020, when the police were the ones in the crosshairs of the left. But even that was nothing compared with the demonization of federal agents working for ICE.

    Only days after Kirk’s assassination, another young gunman got on to the roof of a building and fired. Joshua Jahn – also in his twenties – scaled a building in Dallas to shoot at an ICE facility there. Like Kirk’s assassin he ornamented his bullets with slogans. While Kirk’s assassin had inscribed antifa slogans such as “Hey fascist, catch,” on his bullets, Jahn adorned his with “Anti-ICE” slogans. Jahn fired at ICE officers but managed, in a cruel twist, to kill one detainee and wound two others before turning the gun on himself. Jahn killed a foreign immigrant in the name of anti-fascism, which is certainly another vindication for those who have pointed out that antifa are not who they say they are.

    The attack was carried out not by a MAGA Republican but by a crazed gunman acting for a ‘Free Palestine’

    At this stage, Democrats have a predictable retort: to point to acts of violence against Democrats. One of the most-cited examples is the violence carried out against the Governor of Pennsylvania. As a talking point, this is suitably vague and untrue. The reference is to the firebomb attack on Josh Shapiro’s official residence in April. The Molotov cocktail attack was indeed an appalling act. But it was carried out not by a MAGA Republican, but by a crazed man in his thirties who claimed to be acting in the name of a “Free Palestine.”

    You would have thought that an attack on a Jewish Democrat’s home in the name of Palestine might itself give off a certain “fascist” vibe. But if so, it is one that the Democratic media and politicians have chosen to gloss over. Indeed, many have hoped to turn into an example of equal violence on the political sides.

    Again, it shouldn’t need saying that political violence can come from any and all political sides. But it clearly does need saying that if one side flirts with political violence or excuses political violence or believes that “saying nothing” is, in fact, a good response to political violence, then it should be incumbent on people of all sides to (adopting the left’s loathsome vernacular) call it out.

    Some Democrats thought that they had a fine moment of “both sides-ism” when a gunman targeted Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota in June. That attack included the murder of state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in their home in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. And the (thankfully non-fatal) shooting of Senator John Hoffman and his wife at their home. Although some, including Walz, put this down as an act of political violence, one reason why the heinous attack has already receded in the collective memory is that firstly, no prominent figure on the American right failed to condemn the attack; and secondly, that the suspected gunman, one Vance Luther Boelter, turned out to have been a two-time Walz political appointee.

    It presently feels inevitable that America will continue to see acts of political violence, either orchestrated against federal agents or in attacks like that carried out by the reprehensible and radicalized young man who chose to take the life of Charlie Kirk. There are questions as to how to mitigate the risk to prominent individuals. After all, an attempt on the life of Trump-appointed Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh was successfully stopped (albeit a little late for comfort) in June 2022. But it is hard to imagine any world in which every politician, pundit and public figure in American life could be protected from violence at all times.

    The question then, is whether or not Democrats and Republicans can hold one very basic line. A line which it has been perfectly possible for people on both sides of the aisle to stick to for years. Not just to condemn violence in the pursuit of political goals, whatever those goals, but to agree that on this matter – above all others – silence is not, in fact, an option.

    Douglas Murray is an associate editor of The Spectator. His latest book is On Democracies and Death Cults. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • The Democratic establishment has fallen

    The Democratic establishment has fallen

    For nigh on two decades in Washington, the political right has envied the ability of the left to control its ranks and silence its extremists. As Republican consultants and donors groused about the irascible “jihadi wing” of their coalition through the Tea Party and MAGA eras, the Democrats exercised control over their far-left cohort using a combination of bribery and fear.

    The old guard of the left, the neoliberal and corporate-friendly media, has lost control

    Given how often the pens of Washington observers hailed the masterful ability of Nancy Pelosi to herd cats, you’d think she had aspirations of transitioning from America’s best investor to the next Andrew Lloyd Webber. What was often left out of the equation was any recognition of how the fealty of the far left was achieved: through a series of gatekeeping institutions owned or funded by Democratic donors and ideologically sympathetic corporations known to the public as the media. They were the ones whose coverage could guide and determine the limits of what the party should abide, rejecting the extremes as unacceptable to the country’s voters, tolerating their fairy tales and underpants-gnome strategies to a degree of op-ed page blather – only to stomp them whenever elections got serious. There is still only one Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only exists in the public eye because she snuck up and ambushed an out of touch ten-term boomer.

    It has been hard, very hard to break through the Democratic gatekeepers, who still wield power on a completely different scale than anyone on the right – but there were signs it could be done. The left’s volunteer army of socialist aspirants who were denied their hopes in 2016, 2020 and again in 2024 – when the Democratic-media complex cleared the path for Hillary, for Joe and then (shockingly) for Kamala – are finally seeing their work come to fruition. The old guard of the left, the neoliberal and corporate-friendly media which entertained extreme racial politics and environmental doomerism (so long as it didn’t hurt their bottom line) has lost control. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the experience of America’s largest and most important city.

    The Democratic voters of New York rejecting a Cuomo, even one with as troubled a history as Andrew, for Zohran Mamdani, an honest-to-goodness Democratic Socialists of America member, would have been laughable under the old regime. In the run-up to his primary victory, nearly every corporate media outlet of significance spoke out against Mamdani’s brand of hammer and sickle policies – the Atlantic warned “Zohran Mamdani Won’t Make Groceries Cheaper,” CNN fretted “Do Democrats have a Zohran Mamdani problem?” and the New York Times editorial board said that, given his extreme views and lack of experience, they “do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots.” All for naught. The 33-year-old failed rapper, whose big idea is a network of city-run grocery stores, triumphed in the ranked-choice system.

    Cuomo and the scandal-ridden incumbent Eric Adams (who eventually dropped out of the race entirely) were forced to turn to other policy positions to retain their chances. And almost as soon as Mamdani won, the Democratic establishment lost interest in his calls to “globalize the intifada” and arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes the next time he came to the United Nations, and started to accentuate the positives. Condé Nast publications went full throttle with their glowingly soft coverage of the mayoral aspirant.

    The New Yorker followed Mamdani’s Instagram-fueled glad-handing with fans at the US Open (“Zohran Talks Love and Deuce With New Friends”), Bon Appetit talked to him about the challenge of eating with his hands (“For Zohran Mamdani, Food Is Personal, Political, and Powerful”), and Vanity Fair gave him the cover treatment and compared him to JFK (“The Legend of ZOHRAN”).

    Media concerns about Mamdani’s pie-in-the-sky promises vanished overnight. Having failed to stop his rise, the party organs had a different job to fulfill: whitewashing his defects for a credulous public while reassuring themselves that things would still be OK. Kathryn Wylde, a spokesman for the largest corporations in her role as president of the Partnership for New York, said on CNBC that the city has proven resilient enough to survive bad mayors in the past. How much could those grocery stores cost taxpayers, anyway?

    Yet this attitude presumes that Mamdani is a one-off, a fluke brought on by scandal-spattered opponents and the far left’s backlash against Donald Trump’s return to the White House. In reality, it’s far more likely that this energetic young socialist represents a future where the old-guard institutions of the left, including their most prominent leaders, no longer exercise determinative power over the direction of their coalition. Pelosi is no longer the cat-wrangler, and the two most powerful Democrats on paper, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, could do nothing to prevent Mamdani’s ascent – despite both being from New York. It’s possible that the last great hurrah of the Democrat-media complex was clearing the path for Kamala Harris, whose flameout was so gigantic it brought the whole system down with her.

    A sign that this dynamic is potentially a permanent reality for the left is that the media outlets in question are no longer attracting the eyeballs they once did. In the past, the deployment of mass opposition to a fringe leftist by the guardians of the party’s political hopes could have worked. But the younger leftist electorate is not consuming media as their parents did. Mamdani’s rise was fueled by the massed power of TikTok, Instagram and social media combined with an existing volunteer structure built out of the city’s active DSA community.

    Social media’s influence far outstrips the legacy media that once played the tune for the left to dance to

    Combined, their influence far outstrips the legacy media that once played the tune for the left to dance to. Instead, the magazines and cable news shows and even the podcasts of the Obama-era establishment figures (who once bucked the party leadership with similar online fervor) are taking their lead from the trends they see dominating social media, not the other way around. That’s why you see one billionaire-owned entity after another bowing to the musings of a candidate who says “I don’t think we should have billionaires” – and in the case of some of them, donating money to fund his efforts directly. It’s the cost of staying relevant, even if it requires you to resemble the “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme.

    A leaderless Democratic party now risks being taken over entirely by radicals who cannot be controlled or guided by any sense of a need to appeal to the mainstream. Even the great neoliberal hope of 2028, California Governor Gavin Newsom, is smart enough to see the shift. His latent campaign, which seems largely based on his ability to swear a lot, is an attempt to model the attitude of an aggressive progressive rather than the Fox News-watching Clintonian centrist he once aspired to be. The inevitable walkback of his comments that policies around trans people playing single-sex sports are “deeply unfair,” made in his first podcast interview with the late Charlie Kirk, will be something to behold. Perhaps he can make up for it by calling for government-owned franchises of the French Laundry.

    What Democrats are currently experiencing is the inevitable danger of failing to incorporate and subsume the party’s extremes into a negotiated arrangement where the socialists remain content with a slim piece of the party’s agenda. But that was based on a misunderstanding: the Marxists were always going to demand control once the opportunity presented itself. They were not going to be kept down by the people who made peace with corporate powers and deployed a compliant media to maintain their hold on the reins. And the political pablum dished out by Democrats hoping for a palatable centrist – an Andy Beshear, a Josh Shapiro, a Wes Moore – will not be enough to satisfy the crew that can’t get enough of the Zohran.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • How the Democratic party became the party of the aggrieved

    How the Democratic party became the party of the aggrieved

    A well-known writer in the 1930s – I think John Dos Passos – compared Southern California to the lower-left corner of a board that has been tipped in that direction and into which everything in the rest of the country that is not nailed down slides. In the 21st century the mental, cultural and ideological equivalent of that geographic locality is a venerable and once mighty institution, the national Democratic party, whose name is synonymous with it.

    Throughout the 20th century, the party maintained a strong and consistent identity which accurately and effectively represented its constituency – an alliance that included the working classes, the labor unions, the small farmers, black people, the public educational establishment, colleges and universities, the arts and bohemia. Since, roughly speaking, Barack Obama’s first administration, it has grown steadily less identified with practical interests and concrete policies and more with feelings, attitudes, identities and states of mind, nearly all of them “progressive” or frankly revolutionary. In fact, the most bizarre have no political content or substance at all, being in essence purely existential.

    Today, the Donkey party is the party of the aggrieved, the resentful, the angry, the neurotic, the desperate, the illogical, the delusional, the irrational, the unchurched, the metaphysically uncentered, the unattached and childless, the anti-social, the resentful, the failures and the congenitally rebellious – all those not nailed down or secured to anything, beginning with themselves. They are the product, or rather the detritus, of an anti-traditional, aggressively secular, excessively technological, overly connected, trivialized and wholly commercialized and urbanized society divorced from nature and the direct experience of it that had been basic to human existence until a couple of hundred years ago.

    I have read that the most unhappy people in America today are white, educated, upper-middle-class, liberal women, having in common so many of the characteristics enumerated above. Of course, it would be absurd to suppose that they are the sole cohort in western societies who, in their  mental and emotional confusion, imagine that their misery, and that of the world, is plausibly attributable to such abstract historical bogeys as “imperialism,” “slavery,” “bourgeois capitalist society,” “religion,”  “the patriarchy” and “sexism,” “men” and “white people.” In fact, were it possible to identify any single agency as the party responsible for what Sigmund Freud (in a wholly different context) called the “discontents” of modern civilization, it would be liberals and liberalism itself – though even that would be a gross historical and human generalization, never mind that liberals have been chiefly responsible for the modern tendency to think in abstract, generalized and completely ahistorical terms.

    The Democratic party’s electorate, like its leadership, is heavily comprised of people who can never be happy and satisfied and who are consequently a danger to society, to the political system and to themselves. They are not, however, a majority of the voting citizens of this country; most likely, they never will be, however closely national elections in the United States continue to be run. Nonetheless, the party continues to be critically influential among the sort of people who are best positioned to amplify and extend its power through non- or anti-democratic institutions and organizations that give it a strength a good deal greater than is justified by its support among voters.

    The Donkey party is the party of the aggrieved, the resentful, the angry, the neurotic, the desperate, the illogical

    The imbalance between popularity and power is most obvious among the western democratic nations in Great Britain, which would partially account for the recent assertion (if true) of a columnist for the London Daily Telegraph that Americans view her as being on the path to extinction. To a greater extent even than the US, the UK is ruled, not by representative government, but by lawyers, quangos, NGOs, bureaucracies and the loosely assorted cranks and fanatics whom George Orwell, in the 1930s, described in shorthand as the sandal-wearers and fruit-juice drinkers in the capital city and elsewhere. Such people, as I say, can never be happy anywhere save in the next world (in which they don’t believe), and so they will continue until the crack of doom to agitate, to organize, to demonstrate, to dream up and advocate dangerously absurd legislation, and in other ways make life miserable for the sane democratic majority they hold in contempt and despise.

    On the other side of the Atlantic it is the Democratic party, not the US, that is headed for extinction unless it discovers – and quickly – the means to reimagine, redefine, repurpose and reintroduce itself for the whole of the American public. Failing that, it will go the way of the Whigs in the antebellum era, the Progressive party before the Great War and the Liberal party in Britain immediately following it.

    To judge from accounts of the convocation of the Democratic National Committee in Minnesota at the end of last month, where the committee chairman raged against the “king with swollen ankles” in the White House and another party official spoke of “fascism in a red tie,” it is nowhere close to identifying that means. I think it was the most recently failed former candidate for US vice-president who made reference to “that thing in the White House.”

    The Democrats remain convinced that they lost the election last year not on account of the caliber of their candidates or the content of their policies, but rather through the clumsy presentation of them. Even if they were right about that, they haven’t corrected their “message” yet – and show no signs of understanding how to do so. Critics have called them tone deaf. The truth is, the Democrats are stone deaf, their hearing destroyed by their own high-decibel shouts and screams against the Great Sauron in the White House.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • The Democratic party is now messianic

    The Democratic party is now messianic

    The New York Times recently announced that Democrats face a “voter registration crisis.” With its delicate, frilly font, the Times story agonized over younger voters, Latinos, and men, especially young black men, who appear to be drifting away from the Democratic party. The Times diagnosis? It’s an accounting problem: The party isn’t signing up enough people. Its cure, predictably, was more money, more organization and more clipboards.

    This is the answer you’d expect from a bureaucracy. If the shelves are full of unsold tins of beans, the problem is obviously the warehouse.

    In truth, Democrats don’t have a logistics problem. They have a product problem. Americans don’t want to buy the party they are selling.

    For decades Democrats have treated politics as an engineering exercise. Build the machine, crank the levers, identify and register the aggrieved which, conveniently, they manufacture. Registering black voters, the Times worries, “cost $575 per vote in 2020,” about the same as 100 Grande Blonde Vanilla Lattes at Starbucks! But the cost of collecting these customers is high because they keep walking out of the shop. They are spitting out the drink.

    The Democratic party has come to embody a politics of national and personal self-degradation: Democrats are required to apologize for living in a strong country, profiting from its economy, and displaying the well-known privilege of ambition. The only time Democrats can define manhood is when they demand it request forgiveness.

    Millions of young men, Latinos, and blue-collar workers are not impressed.

    It isn’t simply immigration or inflation driving men out of the Democratic party. The fuel for the exodus is cultural. When a man works hard, plays by the rules and still can’t support his family, the wound is to his identity, not just his wallet. When he’s laughed at for his alleged toxicity, it is emasculating.

    American culture has spent decades mocking fatherhood and sanding down the manly virtues of competitiveness and responsibility. Now the bill has come due. After years of derision, masculinity is walking out of the Democratic party and fighting back.

    Trump’s language of strength resonates with women who want to put back the man back into manliness. It resonates with Hispanics, young Black men, Gen Z men, and union workers. In Republican strength, they see an antidote to chaos: not just to national chaos, but the chaos of their own diminished lives.

    The Left has traded a culture of common strength for a government of weakness and separation. Democrats who used to carry rifles to defend the country now carry tote-bags to get a chai tea. But American men are not ready to give up on who they could still be.

    When Democrats invent new genders and quarrel over pronouns, they assault the connective cultural tissue that holds our nation together. The Democrats have not merely tolerated this erosion; they’ve fed on it. A confident nation does not require a self-anointed clerisy to micro-manage its language and thought. It does not need political priests to enforce woke commandments. But a weakened, divided people may. That is why the Democratic party exists.

    If Democrats were honest, they would admit their woke hierarchy has failed. Defunding police unleashed crime. Open borders invited chaos. Spending produced crushing inflation. Pretending men can be women destroyed women, not just women’s sports.

    But they cannot say these things because the Democratic party has become messianic. It does not pass laws to solve problems. It passes them to award its supporters a halo of moral superiority. Failure is irrelevant; every new radical program delivers the one thing the party truly values: a sense of being better than the rest of us.

    The Times and the Democratic party, to the vanishing degree they remain separate entities, are wrong. They don’t have a voter-registration crisis. They have an identity crisis. Our saviors can’t admit they cannot save us. The Democratic party is broken because its soul is.

  • Does Trump’s handshake deal with the EU put America first?

    Does Trump’s handshake deal with the EU put America first?

    What’s really at stake in these trade deals? That is what we are slowly discovering as Donald Trump’s handshakes with America’s trading partners are turned into specific and detailed agreements. Today we are getting the details of one of the biggest deals struck so far: a trade agreement with the famously protectionist European Union, which agreed in principle to a deal back in July, with the caveat on both the US and EU side that taxes on key sectors were still up for discussion.

    Those discussions, it seems, have produced some details. Despite early threats that America would impose tariffs of 250 percent and 100 percent on EU imports of pharmaceuticals and semiconductors respectively, the headline duties for both have been reduced to 15 percent. Indeed, most goods flowing from the EU’s 27 countries into the US will be subject to a 15 percent tariff. Still, there are some disputes. Trump is keeping the tax on EU-made vehicles at 27.5 percent until the EU drops many of the tariffs it has placed on American goods. Unlike trade deals secured with Indonesia and the Philippines, where both countries slashed their tariffs on US products, the EU has been reluctant to go as far.

    While it’s admittedly refreshing to watch the European Union grapple with the harms of protectionism – similarly to what it’s forced other countries to endure in past decades – who is really emerging as the winner? While the huge drop in proposed taxes on pharmaceutical imports is being chalked up as a good deal for the bloc, it’s perhaps better described as a less bad deal for American importers, who will be paying the new and higher taxes on these medicines and materials as they make their way from the EU to the US.

    It’s a curious tax hike from President Trump, who has been insisting that drug prices need to come down for American consumers. As my colleague Michael Simmons points out in the UK magazine this week, prices of weight-loss jabs in Britain are starting to soar as drug companies work to rebalance where their profits come from in an attempt to lower prices for these drugs in America (a little, anyway). But if Trump’s goal is to bring down the cost of drugs in the US, slapping higher taxes on imported medicine is an odd move. 

    Of course, in Trumpworld, trade-offs don’t exist. There’s no downside, no losing. There’s only “winning.” And you can bet his administration is delighted this week with a New York Times report revealing a mass exodus of registered Democrats from the party. The Democrats are “hemorrhaging” voters, according to the Times, in every one of the 30 states that tracks voters by political party. An estimated 2.1 million people abandoned their “Democrat” registration between 2020 and 2024, while an estimated 2.4 million voters signed up as Republicans.

    We didn’t necessarily need hard numbers to confirm that the Democratic party is in the midst of a crisis (the 2024 election result was evidence enough), but these figures from suggest an even bigger problem for the left: one that appears to have been brewing long before Joe Biden was switched out for Kamala Harris. Even when the Democrats were winning elections and mid-terms, they were losing parts of their base, including people who were so on message that they were happy to register their affiliation with the cause.

    One wonders if snide remarks about working Americans, or a full-fat socialist agenda, will bring left-leaning voters back home. It seems unlikely.

    This article first appeared in Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter. Subscribe here.

  • Ann Coulter: On immigration, Trump 2.0 and the Epstein Files

    Ann Coulter: On immigration, Trump 2.0 and the Epstein Files

    Ann Coulter, an American author, lawyer and conservative media pundit, joined Freddy Gray on the Americano podcast last Friday to discuss why she backs the UK’s Reform party, why she supports Trump in his second term, what’s really going on with the Epstein files and more.

    Here are some highlights from their conversation.

    Why don’t politicians follow through on illegal immigration promises?

    Ann Coulter: Americans have been voting not to give illegals benefits, to deport them, to make sure they can’t vote, for now almost half a century, and the politicians will never give it to us. That was what was so striking about Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Oh my gosh, they really seemed to mean it. At least with Trump, every single rally for 18 months, the chant was, “build the wall,” the signs “build the wall,” their etchings “build the wall” and he gets it (the presidency). And he doesn’t build the wall.

    Freddy Gray: What do you think is the real factor there? Is it the economy? Is it that businesses just have that way of pressuring? I mean, I think with what’s now called the Boris wave of the huge influx of immigration during Boris Johnson’s premiership, really, it was pressure from the Treasury to make sure that wages are suppressed because everyone was worried about Covid and so on. Is that the real driving factor?

    AC: Well, there are at least two driving factors. For the Republicans, it’s the donors. They want the cheap labor, which it’s worth pointing out as the as the cliché goes, cheap labor is only cheap for the employer. It’s the middle class that are subsidizing the rich’s poor labor or cheap labor. They are nannies. They are cooks. They are, you know, farm workers because they accept massive amounts of welfare, which leads to the other special interest group supporting illegal immigration, and that’s the entire Democratic Party, because illegals are accepting so much social welfare. Which party do they vote for and their kids can vote in? I mean, now the number of anchor babies who are of voting age is probably 20 million.

    On the future of the UK

    FG: You’ve been spending some time with Reform. What do you like about them in particular?

    AC: Immigration. Immigration. Immigration.

    FG: You think they will make good on their promises? Because quite often we see these parties, when they get into power, they can’t actually make good on.

    AC: Yeah. To take two little examples, Boris Johnson and first-term Donald Trump. That was stunning. It’s been happening in the US for 20 years. It’s been a bigger issue for us, I think. And states, I mean, this was back in the early 70s. Texas voted to have no free public education for illegals, and the Supreme Court, very left wing, overturned it. And that’s when Justice Brennan, incidentally, made up the concept of anchor babies. The court never ruled on it. No legislature has passed it.

    FG: Please explain what an anchor baby is.

    AC: An illegal pregnant Mexican runs across the border and drops a baby. The baby is allegedly an American citizen. No court has ever found that. No legislature. It was just dropped in a footnote of this Justice Brennan opinion. Maybe that’s a side note, but it’s a big, big problem in some hospitals along the border. 80 percent of the babies born are born to illegal aliens. El Chapo. You’ve heard of him? The big, massive drug lord? When his wife got pregnant, she’d run across to San Diego and drop a baby. They’re all American citizens. I’ll just give you one more. I think it was Sinaloa cartel. The cartels are just monstrous. I don’t want to hear about, you know, Hamas throwing rocks and dropping a few bombs. The cartels are beheading people. They are beheading Americans. They are committing heinous, hideous crimes.

    Ann’s disappointment with the first Trump administration

    FG: I think it is fair to say you were disappointed, even fuming, about about the first Trump administration, which was funny because at one point you were pretty much the only American who supported him.

    AC: Yes! Oh, before he got in, I was worried… I was still yelling at him for some things. I guess, it was like March. He wasn’t hiring the right people during the transition. That was a bad sign. It was February or March. I showed up in the Oval Office, and like I say, I never told anyone this, but he told people. I just stood at the resolute desk, haranguing him, hectoring him. I was not the first one to use the F- word, but once it got used… Well it was about, you’re not keeping your promises; you’re you’re not building the wall; you’ve done nothing on the wall; you’re only pushing for tax cuts. The moment when he got really angry, which I think really speaks in his favor, was when I said, “You’re governing like Jeb Bush.”

    FG: The Big, Beautiful Bill upsets fiscal conservatives, but it does give a lot of money to the border. I think it’s probably a mixed bag for people of a conservative disposition. What would you say?

    AC: Yes. I mean, overall, but I can’t blame Trump alone for this. It’s hard to cut anything. You know, a good motto is, “There are a lot of bad Republicans. There are no good Democrats.” So I kind of hate my party. I’m totally with Elon. If they could cut government by 90 percent, the world would be a better place. They’re mostly useless bureaucrats spending their days trying to make our lives worse. First – and I should say I’m not against tax cuts; I think they’re good and important – it’s just that that’s all we’ve ever gotten from the Republican Party. And what was special and different about Trump was he seemed to care about middle America and working class America. He was going to bring back manufacturing. No more stupid wars. The whole America first and mostly immigration, immigration, immigration. So when he blows off those three unusual and important parts of his campaign and does what a Bush would have done. Yes. It was a little disappointing.

    FG: We’re almost 200 days into Trump’s second term. How many marks out of ten would you give Trump in his second terms?

    AC: I guess nine. He gets one taken away for not releasing the Epstein stuff.

    Epstein, Israel, Saudi Arabia?

    FG: Why won’t he release it? Is it because there is evidence of him?

    AC: I think he has donors who are involved. Yeah. And also a favored country in the US. I’ve been following it since 2006. I spent part of my time in Palm Beach, where the whole story broke and the Palm Beach Police were great. National media did not cover it… We were thinking maybe it was like a concierge operation where he runs the sex shop for for rich guys like the private clubs, but that doesn’t make any sense. He would have done it free. I mean, I’m trying to answer the question of where he got his money. He was getting a lot of money. Coincidentally, all the ones he was getting money from are gigantic Israel supporters. All of them. Some foreign country has to be behind it. So you basically get down to, “Is it Saudi Arabia, or is it Israel?”

    Are tariffs good for the US?

    FG: Are you pro-tariffs?

    AC: Totally pro-tariffs. I’m with Trump on it. It needs to be fair, and we have been giving it away. That’s one thing, just for years and years and years, and I’m sick of the free-traders. We’ve been trying your way for 50 years. Manufacturing has been wiped out. We used to have, like, 20 million people working in manufacturing. I think when I wrote Adios America, or maybe it was in Trump We Trust, I don’t know, we were down to like 11 million. The working class and the middle class has been suffering enormously. And I noticed Wall Street is doing quite well. So how about let’s try not having this – what is called free trade. And I think Trump is right. It’s unfair trade.