Disastrous ideas

Democrats chose foolish policies and suffered the consequences

Donald Trump has never failed to make news. Even as president-elect, his statements and personnel picks are making headlines in America and around the world.

But it wasn’t his talent for dominating news cycles that gave Trump an electoral victory over Kamala Harris — or, at least, it wasn’t just his media savvy. Harris was a colossally bad candidate at the head of a party that had done its best to alienate swing voters.

Freedom Conservatives have been pointing this out for months. While criticizing Republicans when they tout ideas taken from the nationalist-populist Right, we also criticized Democrats for adopting far-left policies and ignoring the real-world consequences of their actions.

Among those consequences was a bad election cycle for Democrats this year. Today, we feature FreeCon analysis of the party’s past mistakes and future prospects.

Money woes

Alexander William Salter is the Georgie G. Snyder Associate Professor of Economics in the Jerry S. Rawls College of Business Administration at Texas Tech University and a FreeCon signatory.

In a piece for The Hill co-authored with the Independent Institute’s Phillip W. Magness, Salter addressed how modern monetary theory employed by the Biden-Harris administration damaged its prospects for reelection.

“Exit polls conclusively demonstrated voters are fed up with the high cost of living,” they wrote. “The economy topped their list of concerns; three-quarters of the electorate attributed some degree of hardship to inflation.”

Salter and Magness identified specific policies used by the Biden-Harris administration that led to massive inflation.

“The Biden-Harris administration began its term assuming it could ‘run the economy hot’ while also avoiding inflation. They added another multi-trillion-dollar stimulus to Trump-era COVID relief spending, believing they could escape the repercussions of its price tag. Then inflation spiraled out of control.

“As election day exit polling revealed, the electorate repudiated the modern monetary theory narrative. Americans are fed up with over-credentialed experts inventing new reasons to ignore basic economics.”

Culture clubbed

Quin Hillyer is deputy commentary editor and columnist for the Washington Examiner. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

In an article for the Examiner, Hillyer analyzed polling data on the Democrats’ cultural positions. From defund-the-police campaigns and allowing biological men into women’s sports to gender-neutral pronouns, these policies are deeply unpopular with the American people.

“Democratic analysts who say extreme wokeness is killing their party are right, but issue positions aren’t the whole problem,” Hillyer wrote. “What’s worse is the use of government power to force everyone else to accept left-wing cultural ideals.

“The Left hasn’t been content to push for societal acceptance of its desired changes in cultural norms. Instead, it has insisted that government and powerful institutions compel the rest of us to come to heel.”

Hillyer concluded by offering some advice. “Liberal Democrats would do better in elections if they focused on their attractive-sounding economic message, their environmental warnings, or whatever their justifications are for regulations to ensure health and safety.

“All those positions are misguided, but they do not seem tyrannical.”

Flight to failure

A senior writer at National Review, Noah Rothman is the author of The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back against Progressives’ War on Fun (2022) and Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America (2019). He is also a FreeCon signatory.

In a recent post for NR Plus, he wrote about the sudden decline in engagement and consumption of conventional news outlets.

MSNBC and CNN have “shed hundreds of thousands of viewers while Fox News viewership has skyrocketed after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election,” he wrote. The New York Times had 33 million visits on Nov. 6, 2024, down from 61 million visits on the day after the 2020 election.

Rothman connected these declines to a migration toward unconventional media sources such as BlueSky, the consciously left-wing platform meant to compete with X.

“Usage of the Bluesky app in the U.S. grew by 519% in the weeks after the election, compared to the first 10 months of the year,” Rothman wrote.

Progressive audiences are “fleeing to venues that cater to their desire to be protected from exposure to the world around them. Democrats who decline to succumb to that temptation and learn to communicate with voters outside their tribe are most likely to begin reconstituting the constituency that Democrats alienated during the Biden years.”

Blinkered Blinken

Michael Rubin is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he specializes in Iran, Turkey, and the broader Middle East. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

In the Washington Examiner, he argued that Secretary of State Antony Blinken exhibited an anti-Christian bias. Rubin urged the incoming administration to reverse the Biden administration’s disastrous foreign policies.

“Blinken’s betrayal of Christians was both gratuitous and repeated,” he wrote. “At best, cynicism blinkered Blinken. At worst, outright hostility toward Christianity did.”

Rubin offered examples: removing Nigeria from the religious freedom watch list, resulting in increased anti-Christian pogroms; a lack of action in response to ethnic cleansing in Azerbaijan; lifting sanctions on the Houthis; and providing funding for the Palestinian Authority.

“Sen. Marco Rubio, whose confirmation as secretary of state is almost assured, should do the opposite,” he exhorted. “If Rubio ends waivers for religious freedom violators, speaks unapologetically about the plight of besieged Christians, and wears his own religion proudly, he may find that not only Christians will benefit but religious minorities everywhere will find freedom.”

In the mix

• In City Journal, University of Alabama professor George Hawley presented a different analysis of the 2024 election results: one focused on the religious affiliation and practice of voters.

“While the rate of religious disaffiliation among young people may be declining, the percentage of the country that identifies as Christian will almost certainly continue to shrink as the Baby Boom generation passes from the scene,” wrote Hawley, a FreeCon signatory.

“In the absence of a major religious revival, Republicans will need to make improvements among non-religious Americans to maintain their long-term ability to win electoral majorities.”

• In The Washington Times, FreeCon signatory Gabriel Scheinmann wrote that Qatar’s reported deliberations over expelling Hamas leaders mark a pivotal moment in Hamas’ war of aggression against Israel.

“The October 2023 massacre was a crime of unimaginable horror, and the world owes its victims more than words of condemnation,” wrote Scheinmann, executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society.

“Hamas leaders should not be permitted to melt into the shadows, free to plot further atrocities. Qatar can turn this moment into a milestone in the fight against terrorism, but only if it chooses to act decisively. Exile is not enough. Justice demands more.”