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U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, usually cited by the nation’s left-leaning media as the new voice of the new-model neo-progressive Democrat Party, submitted to an interview by National Public Radio’s (NPR) Steve Inskeep following catastrophic party losses in the recently concluded national presidential election. Former President, now President-Elect Donald Trump won the popular vote, the Electoral College vote, and Republicans seized the U.S. Senate and maintained control of the U.S. House of Representatives – an unquestionable rout.
Inskeep was better at asking follow-up questions than were the few media interrogators privileged to interview Vice President Kamala Harris.
NPR noted that “Democrats,” Murphy among them, “are undergoing some introspection.” Democrats, Murphy advised, “need to listen to working Americans.”
Asked, “What do you think is wrong with your party?” Murphy replied, “Right now, people are feeling out of control of their lives. In particular, poor people are feeling like they have no agency over their lives. And so, you know, we look at Republicans' focus on immigration and the border and we say, well, you know, they're playing to people's xenophobic, racist instincts. Now, that's true to an extent, but it's really about control. President Trump was saying, 'I'm going to put us back in control of our borders. I am not going to subject you to these extraterritorial forces.' So I just think we have to do a better job of listening to the folks that we claim to represent.”
In point of fact, polls show that “people who are feeling out of control of their lives” are mostly worried about inflation, hardly a focus of the 2024 presidential campaign among Democrats. And even Hispanic Americans, presumably not racist, were worried about a suppurating open border that, during the Biden-Harris administration, was illegally crossed by immigrants from an assortment of countries. Democrats across the board were shocked and dismayed to learn that young people, among other dependable Democrat voting groups, gave an unexpected boost to Trump’s presidential win.
Murphy said he is concerned principally with “a struggle for power,” the root of all politics, if not all evil.
“I think,” Murphy told Inskeep, “…during the first four years of Donald Trump, we were a resistance party. And we didn't actually articulate a view of how we would control the border, how we would speak to a very legitimate issue that people have this question of how you become an American citizen, how you become a member of this multicultural club. I also think that people are in a mood to fight. You know, people know that power has become concentrated in a handful of elites, and they want a real explanation of how that power gets moved to them.”
Trump and the MAGA people are essentially engaged, Murphy said, in an anarchistic subversive activity in which they plan to “blow everything up” so that they might achieve power. “These people want to blow up the status quo, and everything that Trump does telegraphs that he is willing to defy conventional wisdom. We should be proud of the child tax credit and bulk negotiation of prescription drug prices. But to most people, those are small ball solutions. You know, we scoffed at the fact that Trump was talking about this sort of massive set of tariffs on Chinese goods. It was and is bad policy. It will raise prices for a lot of Americans, but it is a way to fundamentally blow up the global economy.”
Well now… If Inskeep had been a Milton Friedman conservative – God forefend! – he might here have put some additional follow-up questions to Murphy. It is true that tariffs, essentially a political tax on imported goods and services, boost costs. So, for that matter, does inflation, which through excessive spending lowers the purchasing power of the dollar. The classic definition of inflation is: Too many dollars, either printed or borrowed by the federal government, chasing too few goods. Inflation is an insidious tax on goods and service – insidious because it is politically caused and operates under a cloak of invisibility.
The classic remedy for inflation is to reduce spending, thereby leaving more money – and economic decision-making power -- in the pockets of “we the people,” who are always better at determining the real cost of goods and services in what used to be called a “free market” than would be the case if politicians in Washington D.C. or Connecticut were to “fix prices” through, say, destructive price controls or unduly burdensome regulation.
Perhaps Murphy should refocus before his next campaign. Most political campaigns on the part of incumbents are political advertisements of a proffered policy product. Clearly, a majority of voters in 2024 were not buying the Democrat Party product. As clearly, Harris was unwilling to offer the general public a change in product, even though the bulk of her campaign was centered on beneficial change.
The doubling-down of the Democrat Party on a political product that has not sold is a clear indication that Democrats, led by defenders of the status quo such as Murphy, intend in the future to offer the general public a political product that they have recently, stunningly rejected. The voting public has come of age and fancies it can see political fraud raising its horned head above the horizon. Doubling down on exploded political strategies won’t do. We have all learned an old lesson: Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice, shame on you.
