nypost.com How Don changed Democrats
Post Editorial Board
Donald Trump speaks before boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on January 20, 2021. ALEX EDELMAN/AFP via Getty Images
Polling whiz: How Don Changed Democrats Democrats spent the last four years agonizing over how they lost to Donald Trump and how to rejigger their appeal to win again, notes FiveThirtyEight’s Perry Bacon, Jr. “We now have a pretty detailed picture of where the Democratic Party landed”: Post-Trump, “a multiracial group of Obama-style Democrats are in charge.” These Dems are solidly left of center, but “mostly from the ideological middle of the party”; they’re establishment types who generally “haven’t rocked the boat” much. Yet their aim now is to “enact more leftward-leaning policies — compared to the Obama administration, in particular — on both economic and racial issues.” Its establishment pedigree notwithstanding, this party is thus “perhaps the most left-leaning since the days of President Lyndon Johnson.”
Media watch: The Right’s Porn Problem At National Review, Kevin Williamson observes that the Internet changed pornography and political journalism in “almost exactly” the same way: “Content became largely free,” and “revenue crashed.” And though “the quality of the product may have declined,” it became “more outlandish and outrageous, which is what matters most.” Like the smut biz, political journalism sells “titillation” — usually not the sexual kind, “but people get an emotional charge” in seeing rivals criticized or insulted, and readers “seek out more extreme, more outrageous” material. Now conservative talk-radio networks are trying to “reinvent themselves” to compete with the “QAnon-dominated post-Trump market” in a “race to the bottom.” Similarly, the Republican Party is trying to figure out how to “include both QAnon kooks” and moderates. Alas, “this house cannot long endure half-kook and half-conservative.” |
