“Joe Biden clearly just was not capable of delivering the message we needed to deliver in 2024,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said. “Why did it take so long? Why was it so hard to recognize that and make the change? So I guess to some degree it is helpful to have that conversation.”

I’m with Adam. The Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson book, Original Sin, about the tragic and infuriating deterioration of Joe Biden, should be another opportunity for a larger conversation. Biden’s diminution was a metaphor for what happened to the Democrats over the past few decades. The ideas, the leadership, the consultants had all gone stale. The truth is that neither Biden nor Kamala Harris—I’m not sure any Democrat—could have beaten Donald Trump, a historically terrible former President, even under the best of circumstances. They had lost track of the American people. I’ll discuss why that’s true below, but first let’s clear away some of the underbrush about the Tapper/Thompson book:

1. The initial squeals that Tapper and Thompson somehow violated journalistic integrity is a silly argument, the first refuge of jealous scribblers. Did T/T save the Biden scoops for their personal profit? I don’t think so. This was a near-impossible story to get at while Biden was still President. Thompson was certainly trying, as were a squad of other journalists. It stands to reason that the key Biden players wouldn’t have had much to say until the administration was over—which was a political scandal, but not Thompson’s or Tapper’s. Tapper says the 200 interviews done to produce the book took place after Trump won. He is more than a reputable journalist—he’s an excellent one—so I’ll take his word for it.

2. I’d add a minor caveat, though. The book is going to get plenty of attention. Tapper should refrain from promoting it on his own show (I watched an awkward segment with Wall Street Journal reporters the other day). Jake’s role now is as an author: he should be interviewed about the book; he should not be interviewing others at this stage, especially those who agree with him.

3. There’s still a gigantic piece of this story missing: What was the diagnosis? After the infamous June 27 debate, in which Biden seemed sadly fogbound, the rumors flew through Washington…Parkinson’s? Dementia? Alzheimer’s? Something else? We still don’t know. At the time, I had several conversations with friends and sources who had knowledge of the situation, who had been in small rooms with Biden, who insisted he was still sharp. And I had several calls from doctors who were certain it was Parkinson’s, but had no direct knowledge of the case. I assume Tapper heard many of the same things, and also many anecdotes about Biden’s debility. Should he have probed more deeply? The Biden circle was hermitically sealed. Of course, if there was a diagnosis and it was withheld from the public, that is a major scandal—there should be no place for the Biden staffers in any serious political business ever again.

4. Actually, the diagnosis didn’t matter. Biden gave every appearance of being doddering. I’ve known the guy for a long time, and like him a lot, but I always worried that he’d keel over on his South Lawn walk to the helicopter. (T/T’s reporting that the staff considered a second term wheelchair confirms my fears). The point is, it was apparent to 80% of the public that he was too old to continue in office.

5. The most important fact was subliminal: Biden’s frailty and his indecisiveness on issues like the Southern border confirmed a larger public sense about the Democrats: that they were the party of weakness. I’d like to concentrate on that below.

The 2024 election was not just a contest between populists and elitists, not even primarily a contest between left and right. The crucial dynamic was strength versus weakness. Trump gave the appearance of strength. Biden—and yes, Harris, too—gave the appearance of weakness. This had to do with Biden’s age; it was mostly about the sclerosis of his party.

There is a body of thought that we’re entering a post-progressive era. A few months ago, I reviewed a brilliant book on the subject, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism by the British philosopher John Gray. A few days ago, in the Wall Street Journal, Eric Kaufmann of Buckingham University offered a partial Cliff Note version of the argument when he wrote:

The decline of woke isn’t merely a “vibe shift.” It marks the end of the 60-year rise of left-liberalism in American culture. We are entering a post-progressive era.

Woke refers to an ideology of equal outcomes and emotional-harm protection for minorities…It energized a suite of policies known as diversity, equity and inclusion, whose roots lie in older racial-sensitivity training and affirmative-action programs. It is now in retreat. [Emphasis mine.]

It is obviously more complicated than that. There were other Democratic tendencies in addition to identity politics that propelled the secular slouch toward weakness. There were also the rise of feminism (and concomitant dissing of men), and arrant litigiousness. These were subtle tendencies, until they weren’t…until they became the battle cry of the 2024 campaign: “Kamala is for They/them. President Trump is for you.”

Decades ago, Chris Matthews identified the Republicans and Democrats as the “Daddy” party and “Mommy” parties. It was eerily accurate then and now, and it’s probably not going to change. Democrats can’t, and shouldn’t, remake the basic DNA of their party. There is too much right about the basic humanity of it. There does need to be a rebalancing, though. The aggrandizement of women, minorities and lawyers has to be modified and rethought. The excesses are going to have to be excised.

Kaufmann notes, accurately, that the 60-year effort to create equal rights—for blacks, for women, for homosexuals, for immigrants of every hue—produced some brilliant social improvements. In fact, it was a smashing moral success…and then, the Democrats took it too far, fr from equality of opportunity to equity of results. Read through any Biden Administration document and you will see the word “equity” used—consciously, foolishly—where previous Democratic Presidents would have used “equality.” Words matter; the Biden staffers were tilting away from freedom toward a slushy socialism by fiat.

Ruy Teixeira, who has been an invaluable part of this discussion, was absolutely right when he wrote this week that the Dems haven’t yet dealt with the unpopularity of their positions on some of the most basic issues: illegal immigration, crime—that is, support for the police—identity politics and environmental extremism.

But there is another way to think about this. It has to do with the public’s perception of strength—and the Democrats’ cultural allergy to it. Weakness—in the form of overweening sensitivity—has become doctrine in the party. Granted, the foolishness of American machismo over the past 60-years—the thoughtless disasters of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan—gave the use of force a bad name. It painted the Democrats, foolishly, against the military, against the police, against the flag. But true strength is different than force. At its best—as it was practiced by George H.W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker—strength is not braggadocio and bluster. It is quiet, but deadly serious. It is demonstrated by a clear sense of intent and values and disciplined purpose. You don’t overthrow Saddam Hussein after you’ve crushed his army. You don’t “rub the Russians’ noses” in the end of their empire. American strength was once Gary Cooper on Main Street, protecting the townsfolk from villains in “High Noon.” Now it’s an asinine Hulk Hogan WWE clown show. Now it is Trump’s cruel version of the Hunger Games.

To succeed, the Democrats are going to have present an alternate, plausible vision of what it means to be strong. That will not be easy, especially given the trough they’ve slipped into. It will have to be by example. There will have to be candidates—men and, yes, women—you want to have patrolling Main Street, protecting our national interests from thugs, foreign and domestic. In an angry, anarchic world, the maintenance of order is the first priority of a democracy. That means support for the military—and the police—that is more than either parades or lip service.

A few years ago, Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry and Minyon Moore wrote a book called For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics. These were four strong and talented black women, who had made successful careers toiling in the boiler rooms of campaigns and causes. More than a few prominent Democrats believed the “colored girls” were the heart and soul of the party. They certainly dominated the party’s sensibility. They were not extremists. Operating through South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn, they gave us the presidency of Joe Biden. They realized, in a field of candidates deluded by the Silly-Bernie left (including Kamala Harris), Biden was the most plausible president in 2020. Two years later, Biden’s democrats did surprisingly well in the Congressional elections. It was easy to surmise success in 2024, especially given the likely candidacy of Donald Trump.

But the culture of the Democratic Party was rotting from within. It came with “trigger warnings” and pronoun choices. It became too sensitive for this world. Most male Democrats I know are feminists now—and that’s a good thing, when it’s not taken to extremes. But it has moved them away from decisivenes toward self-censorship and legal obscurantism, from strength toward tribulation. To be a Democrat, or a member of the mainstream media, is to walk on eggshells. A potential rhetorical landmine lurks in every sentence, which promotes undue caution. You couldn’t call gay people homosexuals, only LGBTQ+ would do. Latinos and Asians had to be lumped in with blacks as People of Color, even if they didn’t want to be. If you were in the wrong crowd—like a Democratic National Committee meeting—it became dicey to call women with child pregnant mothers. And heaven forfend if trans-activists were not sufficiently “represented.” This became a form of madness.

The rhetoric and body language of the Democratic Party tilts toward nurturance, a virtue associated—accurately—with women. This can be an advantage, but it must be tempered. Bill Clinton mixed sensitivity with randiness for a cross-gender appeal; Barack Obama made no secret of who ruled his household—Michelle did—but he led with masculine cool and common sense, and withering intelligence. Joe Biden was too old to promulgate any sort of gender vibe; his Corvettes stayed in the garage; his Ray-Bans were camouflage. Only his dogs were threatening.

A proper balance between strength and sensitivity is key for Democrats. But in the woke era, sensitivity begat hyper-sensitivity. Any criticism of a woman or a black was assumed sexist or racist. If you criticized Ta-Nehisi Coates and argued that reparations for slavery was a foolish, impractical, needlessly divisive idea, you were a racist. Every single man accused of a MeToo# moment was presumed guilty. Normal people, including some women, figured there was something off in that calculation—even if the reckoning for pushy, handsy guys was long overdue. The notion of toxic masculinity was embraced by too many liberals.

As was the notion of “structural” racism. Obviously, slavery—and its Jim Crow descendants—are the overwhelming American crimes. But “structural” racism—racism codified in law and social practices like redlining—has been successfully attacked and nearly eradicated in our lifetimes. Democrats, under guilt pressure from their black base—much of it imagined—can’t admit that “structural racism” is a vaporous canard. They can’t admit to any racial progress at all. And worse, they have a witless bias toward patronizing blacks who are consciously trying to offend them, especially those “activists” who peddle obnoxious ideas that alienate Americans of every hue —White racism is immutable! The Oscars are racist! Black criminals are victims, not to be blamed! Any attempt to “act white” is capitulation!

This is another public, embarrassing demonstration of intellectual weakness by the liberal establishment—and, I believe, an insidious form of racial condescension. The Democrats’ problem is exacerbated by their lack of courage when it comes to stating the obvious. Like: there are serious sociological problems in the black underclass. Like: two parents are better than one. Like: we need a fully funded and rigorously trained police force. In a cultural cul-de-sac that believes, without quibble, that Black Lives Matter, it is also assumed Black Men Don’t Have to Matter—they are structurally crippled victims of racism. Any display of black strength is assumed dangerous. Tell that to Colin Powell. What a slur on the millions of black fathers who walk the walk. What a slur on the thousands of black kids who “act white” by studying hard in school. (I may be wrong, but Obama established his utter sanity so forcefully, that he could have gotten away with being an “angry black man” when it was appropriate.

Race has never been handled honestly by either party. The Trumpist implication of perpetual ne’er-do-wells from shithole countries is infuriating and obnoxious, but the Democrats’ unwillingness to ask tough questions about the inherited problems still shackling the black community is not only a terrible injustice, it is another obvious sign of weakness in the party. White liberals simply can’t ask blacks: what are we going to do about family disintegration? White liberals are not allowed to question blacks in any way. When was the last time you saw a white liberal go front-up with a black demagogue like Ta-Nehisis Coates or Ibram X. Kendi? Or even a polite disagreement with the egregious members of The Squad? Would Gavin Newsom or J.B. Pritzker have the stones to disagree with Wes Moore about… anything? Until those sorts of conversations—honest ones—start happening on a regular basis, the Democratic Party will be perceived as weak.

The third obvious problem for Democrats is the primacy of lawyers. I’m going to have more to say about this soon, when I review several of the new books about “Abundance” liberalism, but it seems clear that if government can’t get stuff done—can’t build power lines, or nuclear plants, or high-speed rail—it is, by definition, weak. And it is the primacy of the litigious (especially environmental extremists or those who use the environment for nefarious ends) that has crippled our ability to produce crucial infrastructure—and worse, limited society’s ability to deal with a range of other issues, like homelessness. The default position in the Democratic Party is that we must understand the violently ill, rather than protect ourselves from them.

And so, yes, the circle that tried to hide Joe Biden from us were guilty of something worse than incompetence. And Biden himself, showing the irascibility and unreason that is often a sign of declining mental acuity, should be blamed, too. But that is not why the Democrats lost in 2024.

The Democrats are the party of government, a government that is perceived as too weak to build a bridge. They may win some elections by default, they may win back the House in 2026—courtesy of the boorish obtuseness of the Trumpers—but they will never regain real credibility until the cultural issues that plague the party are confronted directly. There are other conversations to be had, about the future of education, the future of manufacturing, the future of organized labor. But welfare-state liberals will never again dominate American politics, as they once did, until they project strength and moderation—not in a loutish way, not even in an exclusively masculine way, but in a manner that convinces Americans that they’re no longer a party of patsies, too lame to stand up to every grievance-monger who wants to be protected against the vagaries of real life.

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