Democrats’ Biggest Problem Right Now Is That They Are Uncool

I am a middle-aged dad, and to quote Abe Simpson, a minor character from a show that was popular 30 years ago, “I used to be with ‘it,’ but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it,’ and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me. It’ll happen to you!”

Obviously, I am no longer an arbiter of what’s cool, if I ever was one. If anything, my superpower is that I am old enough to be emotionally, socially, and financially secure, such that I get to care about things on the merits and am otherwise immune to feeling like I should approve of something because of its cultural cache.

Which brings me to the Democrat party. I have a decades-long written record of disagreeing with their policies on the merits, and they’ve become so uncool I actually feel bad for them. I can’t watch them right now without experiencing second-hand embarrassment. Now I’m sure there are many fine folks on the former bird app who are willing to angrily disabuse me of the notion I should feel bad for Democrats, and fair enough. But great Odin’s raven, what are Democrats doing to themselves? (If you’re keeping score, that reference is 21 years old.)

On Tuesday night, Rep. Al Green, a 77-year-old congressman from Houston, was ejected from Trump’s speech to Congress for repeatedly interrupting Trump by yelling and waving his cane at the president. Suffice to say, this image made Green temporarily the face of his party, and that face looked an awful lot like a doddering old fool. In fact, I wasn’t the only one thinking about Abe Simpson after Trump’s speech:

And it’s not just that Green is some ill-tempered, senile outlier. Coming into the speech, senate Democrats all released videos to social media repeating the exact same message, and they were swearing, so you know they’re serious:

As Western Lensman went on to note, “Coordinated messaging strategy is expected. Ham fisted execution of cringe repetition like this is telling. There is so much wrong here.” This time I’ll reach back 46 years for the appropriate cultural reference:

But while most of us remember the cultural dominance of the Obama White House, that’s really an aberration. We can’t expect lawmakers to be “cool” or necessarily do a good job with messaging. Fortunately, Democrats have always been aligned with Hollywood.

In a speech where Democrats collectively chose not to applaud or stand when Trump made a dream come true by making a black kid with brain cancer an honorary Secret Service agent; announced we had caught the terrorist responsible for killing 13 Marines during the withdrawal from Afghanistan; told a teenager who’s father recently died that he’d gotten an appointment to go to West Point, making him the fourth generation of his family to serve; honored the families of two young women killed by illegal immigrants; honored the wife of a cop killed in the line of duty, etc., here’s the joke that celebrity talk show host Jimmy Kimmel went with about the speech: “You can go back to Mar-a-Lago and shove your head down that gold toilet for a few months, we’d like that. Maybe you’ll find those secret documents you flushed.”

According to HuffPost, Kimmel “brought down the house.” I’ll have to take their word for it, but based on his ratings, there’s no shortage of us who don’t think he’s funny. And elsewhere in leftist corporate media, MSNBC host Nicole Wallace said she hopes the 13-year-old honorary Secret Service kid doesn’t kill himself after defending the U.S. Capitol against Trump supporters. Maybe J6 is fair game for the left’s commentariat, but dragging the kid into it? Given the almost unprecedented approval ratings of Trump’s speech, I think I speak for America when I ask, what the hell is wrong with these people? The problem is ultimately not just that Democrats are uncool, it’s that they’re also being just plain awful.

Somehow we reached a point where Democrats don’t know how to do anything other than act out in increasingly absurd and performative ways. (Yes, Trump is also absurd and performative but he’s very uniquely good at it.) At one point as Trump was walking into the House chamber to give his speech, New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stansbury stood by the president holding a sign that read “This is not normal.” She was right, but only insofar as Trump was the one who went on to make Democrats look like malcontent weirdos.

Trump stood up there in front of the American people and said, “I look at the Democrats in front of me, and I realize there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy or to make them stand or smile or applaud, nothing I can do.” Democrats heard him say this and refused to stand and applaud kids with cancer and the parents of murder victims.

The one Democrat who did seem somewhat normal was Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who had the thankless task of issuing the official Democrat response. She made the most of it, which wasn’t much. But weirdly, to the extent her speech was effective, it was because the former CIA agent — so consider any attempt by Slotkin to be “normal” a psyop, I guess — presented herself as a Liz Cheney Republican. Her criticism of Trump on Ukraine and foreign policy was from the right, for instance.

“As a Cold War kid, I’m thankful it was Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s. Trump would have lost us the Cold War,” she said. Of course, that line is utterly incoherent if you’re a Biden supporter, who was around and would likely have lost the Cold War if given the chance — just to start, he was a prominent mouthpiece for Jimmy Carter’s ill-advised rapprochement plans with the Soviets that ended in the invasion of Afghanistan. And let’s not get into the fact she caucuses in the Senate with a guy who honeymooned in Moscow in 1988.

Praising a beloved and long-deceased Republican president might have been a step toward appealing to moderates, but she woke up to various attacks from leftists over that line. The lesson here is that a Democrat who wants to seem normal has to find creative ways of disowning the party’s identity without alienating its left flank. Good luck squaring that circle, Elissa.

The crazy thing is how many examples of this stuff are out there right now. It’s counterproductive Democrat theatrics all the way down. Even reliable Democrat turnspits, aka Politico columnists, are saying things such as, “If Democrats think standing up and walking out is their best path back to power, rather than adopting a more strategic approach to their Trump resistance, it could be a long four years — and possibly beyond.”

It’s safe to assume the pendulum will swing back sooner than overconfident Trump supporters would like, but at an event a day after publicly humilating themselves in front of the whole country, incredibly, Democrat leaders took no questions from the usually obsequious press.

But speaking as someone who’s been writing professionally about politics since The Matrix was in theaters (that’s 26 years), for the first time, I don’t know how the Democrat Party is going to become relevant again. And it sure looks like they have no idea what to do, either.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator