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| Murphy -- Anna Moneymaker, Getty Images |
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 in
two years. 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.
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