Democrats Go Full Thelma and Louise

We’re entering a new phase of the Great Orange Delegitimization project, a scorched earth leftist assault on the possibility of normal policy disagreement or societal balance. Two pieces here, and I’ll save the big one for last.

In the New York Times, former Clinton advisor James Carville calls for a pivot toward an angrier narrative: “It is time for Democrats to embrace a sweeping, aggressive, unvarnished, unapologetic and altogether unmistakable platform of pure economic rage.” You’ve probably been thinking that Democrats are being held back by their calm and measured performance, right, and that it would be a huge change for them to act like they’re angry, but that’s his big idea.

A political consigliere famous for serving a relatively centrist Democratic president now argues that the national Democratic Party should turn entirely to the Mamdani map, promising endless baskets of free everything:

In the richest country in the history of our planet, we should not fear raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour, which had a 74 percent approval rating in 2023. We should not fear an America with free public college tuition, which 63 percent of U.S. adults favored in a 2021 poll. When 62 percent of Americans say their electricity or gas bills have increased in the past year and 80 percent feel powerless to control their utility costs, we should not fear the idea of expanding rural broadband as a public utility. Or when 70 percent of Americans say raising children is too expensive, we should not fear making universal child care a public good.

Like Democrats endlessly warning during the shutdown that Obamacare had led to “the Republican healthcare crisis,” Carville describes the current cost of living problem as a result of excessively conservative government policy: “Mr. Trump and decades of corrupt and morally bankrupt Republican economic agendas have splintered the very heart of the American economy.”

It’s…wow. Federal spending exploded during the pandemic, starting with the Trump stimmies and continuing during the Biden years, and the ocean of free money caused the entirely predictable inflation that an ocean of free money always causes. The root of the “groceries cost too much” problem is too much free government money. So Democrats, confronting a cost-of-living crisis, propose…a massive new flood of free government money. They propose to fix the flood damage with more water.

And you’ll notice that Carville’s “decades of corrupt and morally bankrupt Republican economic agendas” are referenced but not described. He doesn’t offer examples of this mean right-wing economic agenda at work, because he can’t. We have 41 million people who buy groceries with their EBT card, with $38 trillion in federal debt that now grows by at least $2 trillion a year. The idea that we have too much right-wing austerity or restraint or conservative safety-net cutting is insane, and Carville knows that it’s insane. To the extent that there’s a morally bankrupt Republican economic agenda, it’s an agenda of playing along, like the promise of $2,000 “tariff dividend checks.”

A country addicted to free government money, and somehow completely unable to figure out the effects of that endless free cash, gets to choose between the party that offers somewhat more free cash and the party that offers a Caligula-plus orgy of free cash. We desperately need to turn off the free money machine, but the political strategy-making now openly and loudly plots ways to expand the giveaway. Thelma and Louise: maybe we can fix this problem by mashing down on the gas pedal and driving off that cliff.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s increasingly open attack on President Trump’s constitutional authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces is becoming a piece of centrifugal Jacobin madness. The Seditious Six say they don’t mean anything by it, they’re just reminding everyone of the law, and they have nothing particular in mind (screenshot, click this link to play the video):

Meanwhile, the Network Formerly Known as MSNBC just hosted a discussion with a former JAG officer and federal prosecutor — with a history of appalling idiocy, by the way — who warned about the possibility that current servicemembers will face mass prosecution, like the Nuremberg trials, for obeying orders from Trump:

No, but seriously: obeying Trump is just like obeying Hitler, and Private Snuffy will be tried just like Hermann Goering. Screenshot:

You communicate that message — stop obeying the President of the United States or we’ll put you in prison — to break the armed forces, driving servicemembers toward open insubordination. The refusal to provide a clear answer about exactly what orders you argue are illegal is a quite-thinly-veiled attempt to totalize by implication: all your orders are illegal, refuse them all, the administration is illegitimate, rise against your chain of command. It’s a calculated attack on civilian control of the military, and an attempt to sever the military from the elected commander-in-chief so it can be reattached as a party apparatus that serves in political opposition. On social media, veterans are increasingly discussing both the idea of a Color Revolution and also the SORO pyramid, the Cold War-era description from US Army researchers of the ways that guerilla movements topple governments:

Democrats are deliberately embarking on an accelerationist course. They’re speeding up the crisis, pushing limits and trying to break systems. I thought for a moment that the backlash to the insane congressional “don’t give up the ship” video would be strong enough to get them to change course, but instead they’re escalating.

1. We should be angrier and more confrontational, and promise a much larger menu of free government giveaways to buy support, and

2. We’re going to hold Nuremberg Trials after Trump leaves office

That’s it. They hit the brakes or they go off the cliff.