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Democrats Are the Populist Party Now

It has always struck me as ridiculous that the Republican Party under the Felon has tried to depict itself as a populist party looking out for the interests of working  and lower middle class Americans.  Never mind that the GOP agenda since Reagan has been one of a reverse Robin Hood where benefits are taken from regular, everyday Americans and transferred to the ultra-wealthy to build a new Gilded Age.  Through the use of culture war issues and sound bites about god, guns and gays GOP candidates have succeeded in duping voters to vote against their own economic best interests.  Much of Southwest Virginia is a case in point where voters swayed by culture war issues have voted Republican even as the party's policies harm the region and its residents. The absurdly named "big beautiful bill" will inflict grave harm on rural areas and could usher in rural hospital closings and the corresponding loss of both health care access and jobs in the local communities.  Belatedly, faced with soaring gas, grocery, and health care costs and unbelievable levels of corruption and grifting by the Felon and his minions and cronies, some of these voters seem to be waking up to the reality that the GOP and the Felon in particular are responsibly for their misfortunes. A column in the New York Times looks at the situation and how Democrats may be able to capitalize on it. Here are excerpts:  

In the waning days of the midterm election campaign, Republicans have finally stumbled on a closing message: defending the honor of the Cheesecake Factory.

Last week, Barack Obama made a viral crack about Donald Trump’s renovations: “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Conservatives feigned outrage on behalf of the humble American volk for whom the Cheesecake Factory is the height of sophistication.

The Wall Street Journal suggested that Democrats had shot themselves in the foot in their quest to win back “the working man in Middle America.” The White House posted a list of Trump’s “accomplishments” in the style of a Cheesecake Factory menu.

Republicans have been trying to brand Democrats as the party of out-of-touch elitists since at least the 1960s, but this time, it felt particularly forced and desperate. After all, it’s become screamingly obvious which party represents billionaires and unchecked plutocratic power.

On the stump this week, an increasingly disinhibited Trump scoffed at the idea of “suffering at the pump” while boasting that high oil prices have been a windfall for the energy industry. Elon Musk, the richest person on earth, is almost single-handedly funding the Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton’s campaign. Susan Collins ran a closing ad in which a retired broadcaster seemed to mock her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, for being a logger, saying, “We’re not talking about buying a cord of wood here; we’re sending someone to the U.S. Senate.”

Meanwhile, Democrats all over the country are running against the ultrarich. “The biggest divide in this country is not left versus right,” the Texas Senate candidate James Talarico says on the campaign trail. “It’s top versus bottom.” In the Michigan Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed is a political protégé of Bernie Sanders who accuses his opponent, Mike Rogers, of being bought by corporations. Former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, defeated with the help of crypto dollars two years ago, may regain his seat thanks in part to widespread fury at data centers and the tech billionaires behind them.

If Democrats win big on Tuesday after running such populist campaigns, it will be more than a victory over Trump. It will be an opportunity for them to once again develop an image as the champion of working people against predatory elites. That, in turn, could realign American politics. But it will happen only if Democrats can resist the entreaties of the tech donors and lobbyists who, having realized that going all in on MAGA was a bad bet, will now spend big to rebuild bridges to the center left.

For decades now, American politics has been shaped by two very different conceptions of class. Liberals tend to view class as a primarily economic distinction: a millionaire car dealer in the Midwest has a class advantage over a Brooklyn adjunct professor on food stamps. Conservatives, by contrast, are more likely to understand class as a matter of taste, culture and education.

If anything, as the two parties sorted by education, they became a kind of cultural common sense. Obama, who was still paying off student debt in his 40s, was tagged as an elitist, while Trump, who loves to brag about his wealth, was not.

The 2024 election was a triumph for the right’s conception of class politics, with Trump making gains with low-income voters while Kamala Harris won those earning over $200,000 a year. In surveys and focus groups, voters described Democrats as elitist and condescending. . . . 56 percent of respondents said the party didn’t look out for working people, and a majority said Democrats didn’t share their values. The road to winning back working-class voters looked difficult and uncertain.

Trump, by abandoning all restraint in his kleptocratic smash-and-grab, has made it easier. In a September poll from The New York Times and Siena University, voters identified Republicans as the “elitist” party by 10 points. The Times quoted a 40-year-old who’d voted for Trump two years earlier: “The people that are ‘in with him,’ who look or act a certain way, are the ones that are going to be given an opportunity.”

Few things have laid bare the president’s essential elitism like his alliance with America’s tech oligarchs. Trump ran against Big Tech in 2020, when he saw it as an ally of Democrats, but he was less interested in curbing the industry’s power than co-opting it. Now that he’s done that, tying Silicon Valley’s fortunes to his own, he can’t countenance criticism of it.

Silicon Valley was once seen as a bastion of liberalism, but a recent Politico poll found that voters across the political spectrum now associate it with the Republican Party. At the same time, Big Tech — and particularly A.I. and data centers — has rarely been more reviled. This summer, a leaked memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee called data centers “a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle” and warned that public fury about them could cost the Republican Jon Husted his Senate seat in Ohio.

In Pennsylvania’s Eighth District, held by a Republican, Rob Bresnahan, 51 percent of respondents feel strongly unfavorably toward data centers. Only 5 percent feel strongly favorably. Voters see A.I., Flaherty told me, as “these guys sitting in a room somewhere cooking up technology that’s going to make your life worse, making you pay for it, and buying off the government to do it.”

Now that Democrats seem likely to retake at least one house of Congress, tech companies are rushing to hire Democratic lobbyists. Given the enormous resources Silicon Valley kingpins wield, some Democrats might be tempted to seek a rapprochement with the industry. . . . The opportunity before Democrats is about more than being on the right side of a winning issue. Democrats have a unique chance, after decades of culture wars, to wrest the mantle of populism from Republicans and thus change the terrain on which American elections are fought.

“They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in 1936 about monopolists, speculators and war profiteers. Democrats should remember his words when they retake power. A good enemy is a terrible thing to waste.

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The Issues MAGA "Christian" Voters Are Neglecting

If one is a true Christian one must pay attention to Christ's social gospel and the call to aid the poor, the sick, the hungry and the homeless.  As noted often on this blog right, wing "Christians" and members of the MAGA base totally ignore Christ's gospel message and instead typically cherry pick selective Old Testament passages to malign and dehumanize those they dislike or deem as "others" - typically, gays, women, blacks, Hispanics and non-Christians. Equally disturbing is the allegiance of these self-congratulatory "Christians" to the Felon, a man who embodies the seven deadly sins and remains a key figure in the Epstein files. Rather than base their political actions on Christ's message, these "Christians" are focused on maintaining white privilege, disparaging non-whites, and opposing anything and anyone who challenges their often archaic beliefs that emphasize blind certainty with no room to learn from others.  As noted in prior posts, these right wing/MAGA "Christians" view empathy towards other as a dangerous weakness. Indeed, their hypocrisy - that would make a biblical Pharisee blush - and cruelty has done much to drive the rise of the "Nones", i.e., the religiously nonaffiliated, who have walked away from organized religion, particularly Christianity, entirely. A long piece at The Atlantic looks at the misplaced priorities of these false Christians.  Here are highlights:

Earlier this month the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Willy Rice, called on pastors to “step up” their political activism as the midterm elections draw near. His argument is that many political issues are, at their heart, moral and theological issues that “strike at the very center of what we believe to be true and what we believe people need to know in order to flourish personally and as a culture.”

Rice named four specific issues: abortion, the redefinition of marriage, transgender identity, and illegal immigration. These are the topics that fundamentalists and evangelicals most often invoke as nonnegotiable biblical imperatives, and they are treated as tests of faithfulness.

The question worth asking is not why Rice and so many other Christians focus on these issues . . . . but why they focus on them to the exclusion of others. The answer might tell us something important about what presently stirs fundamentalists and evangelicals to political action and what leaves them unmoved.

Rice insists that the issues he prioritizes have to do with human flourishing. He believes that Christians have an obligation to speak out about political and cultural matters that intersect with scriptural truth, morality, and a biblical ethic. . . . . there are others on which Rice and many of those who share his worldview have been silent. Why, for example, have pastors and other Christian leaders who insist that they care about human life and flourishing not spoken out against the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, carried out by DOGE, and the disruption of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief?

According to modeling estimates by Boston University’s Brooke Nichols, in the first year alone these cuts had resulted in more than three-quarters of a million deaths, more than 500,000 of them children. A study in The Lancet projected that if the USAID cuts are not reversed, they could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including some 4.5 million children under age 5. Might not those who claim to be shaped by a Jesus ethic want to speak out and make global development a first-order concern rather than an afterthought?

Bono, the lead singer of U2 and himself a Christian, cited the Lancet study in a recent interview with The New York Times. “Let’s say they’re half wrong,” he said. “What Christian household, what Catholic household, what Jewish household, anyone of faith, in fact anyone of conscience, would allow the hemorrhaging of human life that is going to happen as a result of these DOGE cuts? It’s unconscionable.”

The answer to Bono’s haunting question—Who would allow the hemorrhaging of human life that is going to happen?—is Christians all across America.  Why the silence?

One could ask the same question about other issues. For example, since 1980, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has offered a home to people fleeing war and persecution, many of them Christians. On the first day of his second term, President Trump suspended the program. He then set the refugee ceiling for fiscal year 2026 at a record-low of 7,500, later raising it to 17,500 under an emergency determination but reserving nearly all of those slots for white South Africans, whose claims of persecution are disputed by many independent observers. Meanwhile, Christians facing some of the world’s most severe persecution, in countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, and Burma, are largely shut out.

The president of World Relief, an evangelical humanitarian organization, called the policy “heartbreaking.” He warned that the U.S. has “effectively abandoned” those fleeing horrific religious persecution. Yet very few Christians have said anything about this.

Silence has also been the reaction to the assault on medical research. According to Grant Witness, which tracks the federal government’s cancellations and reinstatements of research grants at agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, more than 5,700 NIH grants, with a total value of $15 billion, have been disrupted since April 2025. This includes scores of grants for research on cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, which touch countless families in congregations all across America.

Why don’t these three issues—saving the lives of the world’s poorest children, offering refuge to those fleeing war and persecution, and advancing the research that brings healing to the sick—occupy more attention of politically active Christians? After all, these are not peripheral concerns; they go to the essence of what mattered to Jesus. He told his followers that whatever they did for “the least of these,” they did for him. He counted welcoming the stranger among such acts, and he spent much of his ministry healing the sick and relieving suffering. . . . . measured by the lives that could be saved, sheltered, and healed, I do think there is a strong case that they belong near the top of any list shaped by the life and teachings of Jesus.

That they so rarely make the list at all shows how deeply the grooves of decades of political activism have been worn. Some issues command instant attention, but others barely register. If Christians were willing to step out of those grooves, even for a moment, they would see how much good could be achieved. Lives could be saved through global health programs, families could find refuge and a new beginning, and cures could come for diseases that inflict suffering on countless people.

So what explains this selectivity in deciding which political issues have a claim on the Christian conscience? The answer involves a complex mix of factors. One is the vivifying effect of being part of a culture war. Many Christians feel that they are engaged in a righteous struggle against a secular culture that they believe holds them in contempt. Some of their concerns are real and held in good faith: about religious liberty, the protection of unborn life, and the health of families. But the culture wars also offer a black-and-white, us-versus-them moral framework that is especially appealing to people who feel culturally displaced. Saving children in sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t carry the same drama; there is no progressive enemy to defeat. . . . Distance plays its own role too. Many people dying from preventable diseases live thousands of miles away. Global health lacks the emotional urgency of social issues that play out close to home.

Partisanship also plays a huge part. Political scientists such as Ryan Burge and Michele Margolis argue that, for many white evangelicals, party identity now drives which issues feel religiously urgent. “Politics has become the master identity,” according to Burge. “Everything else lines up behind partisanship.” Even the teachings of Jesus.

The problem runs deeper than issue selection, though. It extends to how scripture itself is interpreted. Many Christians read the Bible through a set of political and cultural assumptions and then present the results as authoritatively “biblical.” The Bible is used to ratify views held for reasons that have little to do with faith.

The same passage speaks differently to a person in the fourth century or the 14th century than it does to someone in the 21st century, and it speaks differently to every person in the same pew. In Galileo’s day, Christians read Psalm 93:1—“the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved”—as a literal statement that the Earth does not move, and the verse was invoked against the idea that it orbits the sun.

The same is true of slavery. For most of Christian history, the institution itself went largely unchallenged. Christians criticized particular abuses and particular forms of enslavement, but rarely slavery per se. The most remarkable exception, a fourth-century sermon on Ecclesiastes by Gregory of Nyssa condemning slaveholding outright, had little lasting influence. The first denomination to formally condemn slaveholding was the Quakers, in 1776, more than 1,700 years after Jesus taught his followers to do unto others as they would have others do unto them. The Southern Baptist Convention itself was founded in 1845 in part to defend slaveholding, which its founders insisted that the Bible plainly permitted. The SBC took 150 years to formally repent that history. . . . The problem, then, comes not from our reading being shaped by our time and place, which is unavoidable, but from failing to acknowledge it.

None of what I’m arguing here means that all readings of the Bible are equally valid, or that some interpretive approaches don’t bring readers closer to the Bible’s truths than others. The German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood what Jesus asked of his followers far better than did Ludwig Müller, the leader of the state-controlled Protestant Reich Church in Nazi Germany. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s views on slavery were much closer to the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount than were those of James Henley Thornwell, the South Carolina Presbyterian theologian who argued that slavery was part of God’s divinely ordained social order.

A lot has gone wrong in Christian history, and a lot has gone wrong in the here and now. Christianity can be a faith of serrated edges. So many people have been wounded in the name of Jesus. And yet there remains, for those of the Christian faith, the true Jesus—himself a God of wounds, a person of incomprehensible moral beauty who came not to judge the world but to save it. If Christians are going to be active in public life, we would all do well to choose for our master identity Jesus over the gods of this world, who sanctify our political views and the hatreds that fuel them.

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Trump Is Oblivious To Issues Important to Voters

A blogger friend when not referring to Donald Trump as "the Felon" as I do also refers to him as "Dementia Don", a moniker that seems more and more appropriate as the Felon visits numerous red states in an attempt to bolster Republican candidates facing unexpectedly tight races. Indeed, some of the Felon's behavior and statements are downright bizarre such as his current apparent fixation on men's asses even as he says affordability is a "hoax."  He rambles on about his vanity projects, boats that a hamburger cost $5,000 at Mar A Lago, obsesses about transgender individuals, makes up insulting names for Democrat candidates and seemingly wants to talk about anything other than the Iran war that he launched and soaring gas and diesel prices (Brent crude is $114/barrel this morning).  Whether due to dementia or the reality that the Felon lives in a bubble surrounded by billionaires and the ultra-wealthy, the Felon's messaging is not only strange but it totally ignores the economic and financial strains so many Americans are experiencing.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the Felon's bizarre closing arguments for Republican candidates, some of whom want nothing to do with him in the final days before the mid-term election on November 3, 2026. Here are excerpts:

Modern political history offers few examples of closing arguments that appear more out of touch, self-defeating, or downright bizarre than what Donald Trump has offered his fellow Republicans ahead of next week’s midterm elections. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan told voters to consider Jimmy Carter’s presidency and ask themselves, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?,” it helped turn a tight race into a Reagan landslide. But many stretch-run messages prove deeply ineffective and are quickly forgotten. Ahead of the 1998 midterms, Republicans went all in on investigations that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton only to be rebuked by voters. . . . And during the 2018 midterms, Trump and his fellow Republicans tried to stoke fears about an alleged caravan of migrants headed toward the United States, only to have skeptical voters hand the House of Representatives to Democrats. . . . .

This time around, Trump’s primary rationale for why voters should support the GOP, as best I can tell, is that the affordability crisis is a “hoax,” Bill Maher is a “loser,” and Senator Jon Husted of Ohio has a nice physique. That easy-to-mock message has been accompanied by a staggering number of missteps. Just for starters, he’s belittled the impact of his stalled war with Iran, sided with Russia as it continues to pummel Ukrainian cities, defended an attack ad from the GOP candidate for Ohio governor that repulsed other top Republicans, downplayed high energy prices while boasting that U.S. oil and gas companies are “making a freaking fortune,” embraced AI as the nation turns against it, obsessed over White House construction projects, and spent a lot of time talking about handsome men, Husted being just one.

Many Republicans, and even some in Trump’s orbit, don’t quite get it. What has happened, they ask, to the instincts of the man who authored two of the most improbable victories in American political history? . . . . Many Republicans privately tell me that he’s lost that feel. Trump now lives, they think, in a gilded bubble, palling around with billionaires, oblivious to—and, even worse, uncaring about—the problems facing so many voters. His approval rating has slipped to the low 30s. He’s become so toxic that some Republicans in tight races don’t want him anywhere near their state or congressional district, believing his rallies will harm more than help.

Strategists in both parties expect Democrats to take control of the House, while the Senate is a true toss-up—a stunning reversal from the beginning of the year, when the upper chamber’s map looked so favorable for Republicans, and Trump cut a dominant figure. Suddenly, Republicans find themselves fighting to keep Senate seats in deep-red states: Kansas. Alaska. South Carolina. Ohio. Iowa. Mississippi. Texas.

Trump is campaigning across the country, imploring his supporters to turn out for him one last time. But he’s given Republicans next to nothing to run on, and polls show that voters believe his economic policies are failing, his deportation program has gone too far, and his war is misguided. He instead has leaned hard on the political battles of the past, reheating fears about transgender surgeries (from his 2024 campaign), Muslim terrorists (all the way back to 2016), and even communism. . . . One Republican up for reelection who would speak with me only on the condition of anonymity, so as not to alienate the president, put it succinctly: “We may have lost the plot here.”

Many Republicans tell me that their party’s biggest problem just days from the election is that voters feel like Trump hasn’t kept his core promises.

End foreign wars? Nope, there’s a new one in Iran that’s sent gas prices up and depleted the U.S. munitions supply. Plus, Trump has appeared to side with Russia over Ukraine in a conflict he once promised to end in 24 hours.

Bring prices down? Well, the war in the Middle East has made that impossible, as have Trump’s haphazard trade wars, including tariffs on once-friendly trading partners such as Canada and the European Union. And while many Americans are struggling, Trump and his family are growing exponentially wealthier.

Deport the worst of the worst? Trump’s massive roundups are targeting not just violent criminals or gang members, but also longtime community members, neighbors, parishioners, teammates, and friends with no criminal records. Many Americans have been horrified by the violence unleashed by masked federal agents, especially the killing of two U.S. citizens in the streets of Minneapolis.

That Trump wants to focus on anything other than these broken promises while out on the campaign trail is perhaps unsurprising. At his Monday rally in Corinth, Mississippi, he spent seven minutes—nearly 10 percent of his entire speech—discussing his efforts to redecorate the White House.

The day before—when Trump traveled to a rally in Port Huron, Michigan—the president’s talking points included faulting President Biden for the war in Ukraine; falsely claiming that more oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz than before the war; deeming Norway a “shithouse country”; calling Abdul El-Sayed, the state’s Democratic nominee for Senate, a jihadist

Trump has also found himself on the wrong side of the day’s top issues. He misses few chances to mock the affordability crisis. Republicans and Democrats alike have swiftly turned on artificial intelligence, blasting the industry’s data centers as loud and expensive, and warning voters that the rapidly developing technology could take away their jobs or even their lives. Yet Trump has refused to regulate AI, knowing that the industry is propping up the stock market. His only nod toward change is trying to rename it “Super Intelligence.”

Last week, Trump loudly supported a controversial ad from the campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for Ohio governor. . . . The backlash was fierce and bipartisan; the state’s current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, denounced the ad and demanded that it be pulled. Trump not only supported it but also urged Ramaswamy to “say thank you, God, very much” for such political good fortune. Divine intervention or not, several GOP strategists believe the ad could doom Ramaswamy.

The most eyebrow-raising October surprise has been Trump’s unfiltered and rather randy assessments of the male form. . . . . it began when Trump, while rallying for Husted two weeks ago, was first told that the senator had played college football in the late ’80s. Trump was impressed and began publicly ruminating over the next few days about Husted’s physique, including declaring that the senator’s “ass is like a pile of muscle.”

What is more surprising to many around Trump is just how freely he is expressing those thoughts. Any filter appears to be long gone. Then again, there may be simpler explanations: Once the Husted comments went viral, Trump’s rally crowds have come to expect the lines and have begun to laugh along, reinforcing the president’s sense that the material is working. And Trump would rather discuss almost anything besides the price of gas—even Husted’s posterior.

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