I didn’t vote for Harris or Trump and have no regrets about that decision. Even as the Republican train goes off the rails driven by an increasingly insane engineer my former party the Democratic Party sinks even deeper. The Democrats lost in 2024 and will continue to lose in the future (notwithstanding their recent wins in blue states) because of one reason. They have lost the support of the American working class. The historic Democratic icons FDR, and JFK would laugh at what passes for policy in their beloved party. Although they were upper class they understood that victory for their party depended on appealing to working class voters. Current party leaders distain the “deplorable” and “racist” members of the working class. Working class Americans hate the following four policies foisted on them by Democrats.
Working class people have had their wages depressed by illegal immigrants who will work for next to nothing just to be here. Their rents rise because we don’t have enough housing for our own citizens let alone millions of interlopers. The Democrats opened our borders to all with no vetting and now complain when the worst among those who entered illegally are sent home. The age of mass migration is over. People have to stay home and fix their own country. A major reason Trump won was that he understood this reality.
Democrats believe that a man can become a woman (he can’t) and should be allowed to play women’s sports and enter women’s private spaces including, unbelievably, those where they are naked and vulnerable, and that children, many of whom would grow up to be gay, should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible. The vast majority of Americans and especially working class men want to protect women and children.
Democrats continue to discriminate on the basis of race and sex today because in the past there was discrimination on the basis of race and sex. That’s unconstitutional and a violation of the Civil Rights Act the Democrats passed in 1964 and the working class knows it.
Democrats allow the homeless, largely drug addicted and/or mentally ill individuals to degrade the quality of life of productive citizens because no one will say no: "no, you can't camp anywhere you want", "no, you can't shoot up and leave your used needles lying around", "no, you can't shit in our streets", no, you can't panhandle aggressively". We did a huge disservice to the homeless themselves when we closed rather than reform our state mental health hospitals. We need them back to provide custodial care for those who can’t survive in today’s world unassisted.
They also need to admit that crime in big cities continues to be a major problem and to quit allowing Trump to take control of this issue. Make fighting criminals a major priority of the Democratic Party and especially Democratic mayors. Why are they always on their back foot on this issue? There is no political logic to being seen as soft on crime when most of the victims of crime are the very minorities that Democrats are supposed to champion. The single most important thing Democrats could do to save the lives of young black men would be to reinstitute the police policy of “stop and frisk” in black neighborhoods to stop the carrying of illegal guns. This would stem the tide of murders of blacks that fill the nightly news in every major city in America. These kids would quickly get the message and quit carrying illegally. Young black men (15-34) are just 2% of the population and yet commit about half of the nation’s homicides. A rate an astounding 50 times higher than the average American. They are also the primary victims of these murders. We need to save their lives in spite of all the ACLU bullshit niceties.
It’s simply incredible to me that the Trump administration led by someone who I have no respect for is actually taking meaningful steps to address these problems while the Democrats either do nothing or actively resist needed change. Working class people (white and black) understand that this is happening and will never again give full support to the Democratic Party.
The Democrats are burdened by many of their own powerful benefactors. Here's just two:
Building housing will require that the environmentalists like the Sierra Club be neutered, but that's not going to happen. Also, is the Trial Lawyers Association going to support revised environmental laws that reduce lawsuits? Not likely.
The unions will defend unpopular woke schools and bloated bureaucracies. The race activists oppose crime crackdowns, which are popular. The gay groups insist on their highly unpopular new gender rules. The socialists want more socialism, and without showing any proof it would work. When the goals of the major party factions are unpopular with voters, and often overwhelmingly so, a party fracture seems inevitable.
Well the name says a lot. I'm very familiar with the type of people who live in rural Nevada. I might not have always agreed with Harry Reid but I did always respect the man. I sure hope Adam and his org are doing an intensive search for a candidate or ten. A reformed D party would get my vote.
I met Reid when he was alive and agree with your assessment. Anyone familiar with his hardscrabble bio would have to acknowledge his accomplishments. The dude had grit. And I also disagree with many (actually most) of his policy positions, but he made small population Nevada a force to be reckoned with during his tenure. Being a swing state doesn’t hurt either.
Frankly I don’t understand the gripe of this article. The democrats are out of touch with working people, but there’s something wrong with a group trying to change that? The fact that some people in Searchlight are not working class themselves doesn’t seem relevant. It’s not exactly like Trump was a plumber before running for office. The republicans made a massive policy shift between the Bush and Trump administrations and if the democrats do the same thing more power to them.
Yeah, its complete BS. Oren Cass isn't working class either. He's an upper class Harvard graduate who has lived his entire life in elite privilege. Yet he now fancies himself (and his newsletter Commonplace) as some kind of "working class whisperer" while critiquing organizations like Searchlight for not being sufficiently blue-collar. I seriously doubt anybody working for Commonplace has changed the tire on a car in the last 2 years, let alone spent any time doing menial labor. They don't really want anything to do with being working class. They just like cosplaying.
Just to clarify, Oren didn’t write the article. And personally I think Oren’s doing yeoman’s work on reorienting the Republican Party agenda. My point is that I don’t care about the background of people on the left or the right who are establishing policies that help ordinary people.
Fair enough, but Oren has been an apologist for the Trump admin, which is doing absolutely zero to help ordinary people - in fact, its making their lives worse.
I will give Oren credit when he comes out and admits that Trump is a moron and his brand of "populism" is doing more to discredit the very policies that Commonplace supposedly supports than any other politician.
Ok I appreciate your good faith dialogue. However we’ll have to agree to disagree on your assessment of this administration. Especially compared to the prior disastrous administration. Thanks.
Harry Reid was born in Searchlight hence the name. I am betting that the Institute is somewhere in metro DC and that is the problem. Similar to traditional Republican media like National Review being in NYC. It will take someone like Trump to move the Democrats off the dime. It would actually make conservatives safer to have a same Democrat Party but I am not counting on that.
It's hard to argue with criticisms of the feckless D party, I agree with most of them. Yet, D's remain largely irrelevant, mired in the minority with virtually no power. This is a status they earned. Meanwhile, MAGA and the "new" right remain the establishment, dominating public policy levers with their unified control of all three branches of the federal government. They own the economy in particular.
MAGA establishment elites, like D's, have a reckoning ahead, once Don's cult of personality is gone. Will they remain true to Don's catechism if it's wielded by a President Newsom? Imagine a Gavin stablecoin, with Chinese crypto criminals shoveling money directly into his pocket in search of a presidential pardon. Or, Gavin threatening Fox's broadcast license when they say something mean to him. Or Gavin getting to decide which of our neighbors get deported under the guise of ridding us of criminals. Or Gavin forcing through signature legislation that screws the workin stiffs for the benefit of his fellow plutocrats dining at the French Laundry...
There’s much insight here, but it underestimates the problem Democrats have in trying to pivot.
Trump was politically smart to draw a red line on hot-button issues such as two sexes and getting the LGBT stuff out of grade schools. It wouldn’t be nearly enough for Democrats to have “less fixation on pronouns and racial dynamics.” That’s just evasion and everyone knows it. Men in women’s sports and bathrooms and prisons, or not? Racial quotas that discriminate against whites, men, and Asians for so-called “social justice,” or not? Mass immigration, or not? Deporting criminals, or not?
On economics, modern Democrat/progressive solutions always involve the government spending even vaster sums that it doesn’t have, with the assumption that the money will solve a problem. We all know it rarely does, that we’re wasting money and going into debt. Trump is on the common sense side, with DOGE and deregulation.
Trump has got common sense and average people on his side on all those issues. What can Democrats offer that’s different? More spending, taxes, regulations, unions? Some new progressive plan cooked up by Ivy League leftists? Can Democrats point to any test program that proved successful and that they want to scale up? Any policy successes in *any* area that’s been under firm Democrat control for generations?
Democrats seem thoroughly cooked. If they go full Mamdani their base cheers but they lose centrists, Christians, and more to MAGA. On the other hand, any tacking to the center would mean jettisoning their woke and socialist wing, costing them donors and activists in the attempt to be MAGA Lite. Either outcome is a Trump win. Funny how that keeps happening.
There is no bigger "tell" that the moron-in-chief and his drooling, foaming band of courtiers and sycophants are failing than essays like this. The democrats aren't in power. Trump is. The only thing the democrats need to do is sit back and watch as Trump continues to betray his idiot followers yet again. When MAGA has brought this once-great country to its nadir (an effort that is proceeding way ahead of schedule), the democrats don't need to do anything other than point to the Trump supporting elites (like Oren Cass, JD Vance, the Heritage Foundation, crypto bros, etc) and remind the rage-addled MAGA base who has been running the country for the last several years. Nobody is going to give two shits about any of the "woke" crap when they are paying 90+% of their take home pay on housing, health insurance, and food. The solution to Trumpism has always been to just give the public a big enough dose so they can see just how fraudulent and dumb its always been.
Want to make housing more affordable? Get the hedge funds out. Blackrock and others are buying hundreds of thousands of homes to turn us into a nation of renters, stock market profits being harder to come by these days with such inflated P/E ratios. Easy to eject them: after every N homes (say ten or even twenty) that an entity legally or beneficially owns, a large federal property tax is imposed on N+1 and above.
Thanks for an always-interesting perspective from Commonplace, but who scaled back or contested all the great family-oriented legislation such as Infrastructure and Build Back Better? I can only assume it was Republicans in Congress, because if you needed Joe Manchin to do anything, it was because all Reps were voting no.
I think it's great that both parties are finally thinking about ways to help working families and underwaged Americans. Trump is a symptom of how long these problems have been ignored, and insisting now on "my side, no MY side" is counterproductive.
I didn’t vote for Harris or Trump and have no regrets about that decision. Even as the Republican train goes off the rails driven by an increasingly insane engineer my former party the Democratic Party sinks even deeper. The Democrats lost in 2024 and will continue to lose in the future (notwithstanding their recent wins in blue states) because of one reason. They have lost the support of the American working class. The historic Democratic icons FDR, and JFK would laugh at what passes for policy in their beloved party. Although they were upper class they understood that victory for their party depended on appealing to working class voters. Current party leaders distain the “deplorable” and “racist” members of the working class. Working class Americans hate the following four policies foisted on them by Democrats.
Working class people have had their wages depressed by illegal immigrants who will work for next to nothing just to be here. Their rents rise because we don’t have enough housing for our own citizens let alone millions of interlopers. The Democrats opened our borders to all with no vetting and now complain when the worst among those who entered illegally are sent home. The age of mass migration is over. People have to stay home and fix their own country. A major reason Trump won was that he understood this reality.
Democrats believe that a man can become a woman (he can’t) and should be allowed to play women’s sports and enter women’s private spaces including, unbelievably, those where they are naked and vulnerable, and that children, many of whom would grow up to be gay, should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible. The vast majority of Americans and especially working class men want to protect women and children.
Democrats continue to discriminate on the basis of race and sex today because in the past there was discrimination on the basis of race and sex. That’s unconstitutional and a violation of the Civil Rights Act the Democrats passed in 1964 and the working class knows it.
Democrats allow the homeless, largely drug addicted and/or mentally ill individuals to degrade the quality of life of productive citizens because no one will say no: "no, you can't camp anywhere you want", "no, you can't shoot up and leave your used needles lying around", "no, you can't shit in our streets", no, you can't panhandle aggressively". We did a huge disservice to the homeless themselves when we closed rather than reform our state mental health hospitals. We need them back to provide custodial care for those who can’t survive in today’s world unassisted.
They also need to admit that crime in big cities continues to be a major problem and to quit allowing Trump to take control of this issue. Make fighting criminals a major priority of the Democratic Party and especially Democratic mayors. Why are they always on their back foot on this issue? There is no political logic to being seen as soft on crime when most of the victims of crime are the very minorities that Democrats are supposed to champion. The single most important thing Democrats could do to save the lives of young black men would be to reinstitute the police policy of “stop and frisk” in black neighborhoods to stop the carrying of illegal guns. This would stem the tide of murders of blacks that fill the nightly news in every major city in America. These kids would quickly get the message and quit carrying illegally. Young black men (15-34) are just 2% of the population and yet commit about half of the nation’s homicides. A rate an astounding 50 times higher than the average American. They are also the primary victims of these murders. We need to save their lives in spite of all the ACLU bullshit niceties.
It’s simply incredible to me that the Trump administration led by someone who I have no respect for is actually taking meaningful steps to address these problems while the Democrats either do nothing or actively resist needed change. Working class people (white and black) understand that this is happening and will never again give full support to the Democratic Party.
The Democrats are burdened by many of their own powerful benefactors. Here's just two:
Building housing will require that the environmentalists like the Sierra Club be neutered, but that's not going to happen. Also, is the Trial Lawyers Association going to support revised environmental laws that reduce lawsuits? Not likely.
The unions will defend unpopular woke schools and bloated bureaucracies. The race activists oppose crime crackdowns, which are popular. The gay groups insist on their highly unpopular new gender rules. The socialists want more socialism, and without showing any proof it would work. When the goals of the major party factions are unpopular with voters, and often overwhelmingly so, a party fracture seems inevitable.
Well the name says a lot. I'm very familiar with the type of people who live in rural Nevada. I might not have always agreed with Harry Reid but I did always respect the man. I sure hope Adam and his org are doing an intensive search for a candidate or ten. A reformed D party would get my vote.
I met Reid when he was alive and agree with your assessment. Anyone familiar with his hardscrabble bio would have to acknowledge his accomplishments. The dude had grit. And I also disagree with many (actually most) of his policy positions, but he made small population Nevada a force to be reckoned with during his tenure. Being a swing state doesn’t hurt either.
Frankly I don’t understand the gripe of this article. The democrats are out of touch with working people, but there’s something wrong with a group trying to change that? The fact that some people in Searchlight are not working class themselves doesn’t seem relevant. It’s not exactly like Trump was a plumber before running for office. The republicans made a massive policy shift between the Bush and Trump administrations and if the democrats do the same thing more power to them.
Yeah, its complete BS. Oren Cass isn't working class either. He's an upper class Harvard graduate who has lived his entire life in elite privilege. Yet he now fancies himself (and his newsletter Commonplace) as some kind of "working class whisperer" while critiquing organizations like Searchlight for not being sufficiently blue-collar. I seriously doubt anybody working for Commonplace has changed the tire on a car in the last 2 years, let alone spent any time doing menial labor. They don't really want anything to do with being working class. They just like cosplaying.
Just to clarify, Oren didn’t write the article. And personally I think Oren’s doing yeoman’s work on reorienting the Republican Party agenda. My point is that I don’t care about the background of people on the left or the right who are establishing policies that help ordinary people.
Fair enough, but Oren has been an apologist for the Trump admin, which is doing absolutely zero to help ordinary people - in fact, its making their lives worse.
I will give Oren credit when he comes out and admits that Trump is a moron and his brand of "populism" is doing more to discredit the very policies that Commonplace supposedly supports than any other politician.
There isn't a policy package that will help "ordinary people".
Ok I appreciate your good faith dialogue. However we’ll have to agree to disagree on your assessment of this administration. Especially compared to the prior disastrous administration. Thanks.
Harry Reid was born in Searchlight hence the name. I am betting that the Institute is somewhere in metro DC and that is the problem. Similar to traditional Republican media like National Review being in NYC. It will take someone like Trump to move the Democrats off the dime. It would actually make conservatives safer to have a same Democrat Party but I am not counting on that.
It's hard to argue with criticisms of the feckless D party, I agree with most of them. Yet, D's remain largely irrelevant, mired in the minority with virtually no power. This is a status they earned. Meanwhile, MAGA and the "new" right remain the establishment, dominating public policy levers with their unified control of all three branches of the federal government. They own the economy in particular.
MAGA establishment elites, like D's, have a reckoning ahead, once Don's cult of personality is gone. Will they remain true to Don's catechism if it's wielded by a President Newsom? Imagine a Gavin stablecoin, with Chinese crypto criminals shoveling money directly into his pocket in search of a presidential pardon. Or, Gavin threatening Fox's broadcast license when they say something mean to him. Or Gavin getting to decide which of our neighbors get deported under the guise of ridding us of criminals. Or Gavin forcing through signature legislation that screws the workin stiffs for the benefit of his fellow plutocrats dining at the French Laundry...
I'm stockin up on popcorn. And pretzels...
There’s much insight here, but it underestimates the problem Democrats have in trying to pivot.
Trump was politically smart to draw a red line on hot-button issues such as two sexes and getting the LGBT stuff out of grade schools. It wouldn’t be nearly enough for Democrats to have “less fixation on pronouns and racial dynamics.” That’s just evasion and everyone knows it. Men in women’s sports and bathrooms and prisons, or not? Racial quotas that discriminate against whites, men, and Asians for so-called “social justice,” or not? Mass immigration, or not? Deporting criminals, or not?
On economics, modern Democrat/progressive solutions always involve the government spending even vaster sums that it doesn’t have, with the assumption that the money will solve a problem. We all know it rarely does, that we’re wasting money and going into debt. Trump is on the common sense side, with DOGE and deregulation.
Trump has got common sense and average people on his side on all those issues. What can Democrats offer that’s different? More spending, taxes, regulations, unions? Some new progressive plan cooked up by Ivy League leftists? Can Democrats point to any test program that proved successful and that they want to scale up? Any policy successes in *any* area that’s been under firm Democrat control for generations?
Democrats seem thoroughly cooked. If they go full Mamdani their base cheers but they lose centrists, Christians, and more to MAGA. On the other hand, any tacking to the center would mean jettisoning their woke and socialist wing, costing them donors and activists in the attempt to be MAGA Lite. Either outcome is a Trump win. Funny how that keeps happening.
Sorry, Charley. Neo Liberalism is dying with the planet.
There is no bigger "tell" that the moron-in-chief and his drooling, foaming band of courtiers and sycophants are failing than essays like this. The democrats aren't in power. Trump is. The only thing the democrats need to do is sit back and watch as Trump continues to betray his idiot followers yet again. When MAGA has brought this once-great country to its nadir (an effort that is proceeding way ahead of schedule), the democrats don't need to do anything other than point to the Trump supporting elites (like Oren Cass, JD Vance, the Heritage Foundation, crypto bros, etc) and remind the rage-addled MAGA base who has been running the country for the last several years. Nobody is going to give two shits about any of the "woke" crap when they are paying 90+% of their take home pay on housing, health insurance, and food. The solution to Trumpism has always been to just give the public a big enough dose so they can see just how fraudulent and dumb its always been.
Want to make housing more affordable? Get the hedge funds out. Blackrock and others are buying hundreds of thousands of homes to turn us into a nation of renters, stock market profits being harder to come by these days with such inflated P/E ratios. Easy to eject them: after every N homes (say ten or even twenty) that an entity legally or beneficially owns, a large federal property tax is imposed on N+1 and above.
Thanks for an always-interesting perspective from Commonplace, but who scaled back or contested all the great family-oriented legislation such as Infrastructure and Build Back Better? I can only assume it was Republicans in Congress, because if you needed Joe Manchin to do anything, it was because all Reps were voting no.
I think it's great that both parties are finally thinking about ways to help working families and underwaged Americans. Trump is a symptom of how long these problems have been ignored, and insisting now on "my side, no MY side" is counterproductive.
Suggest searching the name “Jerry Litton” and “Missouri” - and then imagine Democrat presidents in a row.