The president of the United States, equal parts senescent and feckless, garners record-shattering low approval ratings seemingly each week.
This week, a new Quinnipiac University survey found that a paltry 31 percent of Americans approve of the way Joe Biden is handling his job. Among political independents, that number is, somehow, considerably lower: 23 percent approval, compared to 67 percent disapproval. Overall, nearly three-quarters of Americans hope that Biden does not seek a second term in office.
It is not difficult to figure out why. The republic is not in good shape. Unforced foreign policy blunders, such as the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, embarrass America on the world stage. Our homeland territorial integrity has never been more undermined, as a wide-open southern border permits an unprecedented flow of smugglers, traffickers and other miscreants.
Homicide and other violent crime, which skyrocketed during the 2020 “summer of love” riots, continue to spike; the New York City subway is unsafe, and Chicago is a veritable war zone. Mobocracy runs amok; a sitting Supreme Court justice just faced a near-assassination attempt. Inflation, now over 9 percent and smacking those low on the economic ladder, is at a four-decade high; the national average for gasoline is well over $4 per gallon.
Yet, amidst these remarkable challenges confronting the American people, the Biden administration and Democratic Party elites would rather focus on the overarching imperatives of climate change hysteria, abortion up until birth and a faraway war in Eastern Europe that has become utterly disconnected from the American national interest.
Trending:
This raises the obvious but nonetheless crucial question: How, exactly, did modern Democrats become this out of touch with the American people?
Energy policy is perhaps the best example. Most low- and middle-income Americans drive cars or trucks as part of their daily commutes; they cannot resort to urban rail, let alone the “work from home” model that has become a post-COVID hallmark of the professional-managerial laptop class. Bank account-busting gasoline prices directly cut into stagnant wages, affecting blue-collar families’ very ability to put food on the table.
But Biden, as recently as this month, still continues to deny new drilling permits in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. He failed on his recent Middle East trip to secure a durable commitment from Saudi Arabia, or OPEC more generally, to boost production.
Worse, he openly flirts with declaring a national emergency on climate change, the ultimate upper-income limousine liberal hobbyhorse, notwithstanding the fact the U.S. only contributes about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and the obvious reality that draconian unilateral reductions to fossil fuel extraction and usage would destroy already battered consumers.
Is the Democratic Party out of touch with the American people?
In a bit of loose-lipped candor, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, testifying this week before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, let slip his belief that the more pain Americans feel at the pump, “the more benefit” there is for electric vehicle owners.
If such astounding disdain and haughtiness from a Cabinet official were to come under a Republican administration, it would make headline-grabbing fodder for weeks. It would dominate the late-night shows as Jimmy Kimmel poked fun at those nasty robber baron Republicans.
Democrats fail to appreciate that America is truly blessed to sit atop such an abundant wellspring of hydrocarbons. To not only ignore and fail to take advantage of that blessing, but to actively thwart it and instead celebrate Americans’ pain by focusing on the alleged virtue of electric vehicle ownership, is downright evil. (Incidentally, the average electric car costs 82 percent of the median American household income.)
But energy policy, though a particularly acute example, is in this respect hardly unique. Democratic priorities have never been so far removed from the sensibilities of the median American citizen.
As the contentious issue of abortion returns to the states following the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, congressional Democrats rush to codify nationwide abortion access right up until birth. George Soros-funded progressive prosecutors, such as George Gascon in Los Angeles and Alvin Bragg in Manhattan, continue to fan the flames of unrest and anarchy, undeterred by last month’s stunning recall of like-minded San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
The fight for Ukraine, a deeply corrupt country whose security establishment just endured Stalin-esque “treason purges,” is held up as the defining struggle for Western liberal democracy. Rewriting Title IX to encompass transgenderism — by executive fiat, no less — may destroy women’s sports, but is foisted upon us by the liberal establishment as “progress,” tout court.
The priorities of the modern Democratic Party are comically out of touch with those of the American people, who simply want safe communities, stable prices, secure borders and to be left alone by the COVID-era biomedical security state. Democrats don’t talk about any of that, at best — and they outright impede those prerogatives, at worst.
The transformation of the Democratic Party from the working man’s labor party into today’s identity politics-driven woke monstrosity did not transpire overnight, but that transformation is now complete. And the result is unseemly.
© 2022 CREATORS.COM
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
