Why The Democrats Lost(?)

Of course they're flipping their shit right now, as losing parties generally do. This seems worse than usual, probably because:

(a) They have become a generally insane and hysterical faction.

and

(b) One aspect of this is that they think that Trump and everyone who voted for him is a Nazi fascist white supremacist sexist misogynist homophobic transphobic toxic masculinist evilwhiteracist...

   The more you demonize the other party, the harder it is to understand and come to terms with losing to them.

   And of course there's their industrialized echo chamber. We all have our own echo chambers...but we don't all have multiple, professional, national media organizations that are basically finely-tuned propaganda wings of our faction(s). I used to be locked up in that thing. It's not that easy to see your way out.

   Social media is helping to fuel the freakout, and lefties crying hysterically into their phones is a hot genre right now. Of course they've carefully set up the phones, adjusted the lighting etc. before their histrionics begin. Then they edit the video and upload it to TikTok or wherever. The meltdowns are carefully planned.

   And they've leaped head-first into the election was stolen mode--if anything, even more whole-heartedly than the right did. Which, antecedently, I might have thought impossible.

   Which, again, makes sense if you think that your opponent is a Nazi etc. Stolen election may well be a more reasonable explanation than half the country voted for a Nazi.

   Of course they also think that they're the good guys, apparently having no conception of how unhinged they have become, nor of how utterly demented many of their policies and guiding ideas have become.

   And they fell in love with Kamala on command, of course. And it's hard to understand why the most incredible and lovable and beautiful and ideal candidate there has ever been lost to a Nazi.

   Explanations abound on both sides. Everybody has their favorites--usually something they've been saying all along...

   Me too.

   Trump is Trump--the (in some ways very) good and the (in some ways very) bad.

   And the left is the left. They basically did what they do. That is, what they've been doing for the last ten years. They shrieked their wacko ideology at us--men are women and all the rest--called us racists and bigots and all the -ists and -phobes, said we were stupid and evil for refusing to agree with their deranged fantasies.

   And so guess what?

   If you're overtly irrational and terrible, people are less likely to vote for you.

   Even when the other guy is...well, let's say suboptimal.

   Of course: part of Trump's appeal is that he stands up to the shrieking left and doesn't flinch and doesn't apologize and refuses to be cowed when they call him all the things...that they call us, too.

   Like the meme says: they're not really coming for him, they're coming for us. He's just in the way.

   So there's not really much to explain here, IMO.

   Despite an insultingly superficial attempt to cast Harris as a centrist, the left was who the left is. And that's: a faction that seems to become more cultish, Orwellian, totalitarian and unhinged by the week or the day. Their vanguard, anyway; though undoubtedly many of them were as reluctant to vote for heir candidates as many of us were to vote for ours. There's no telling what new madness they will insist we must believe and bend the knee to tomorrow. The elite and activist vanguard of the left is even worse than Trump--and his primary virtue is that he will fight them.

   I said before the election that I was, to a significant extent, happy to trust this decision to the American people, whose collective judgment on such matters I trust more than my own. A narrow victory would have been a somewhat different matter. But this massive repudiation is epistemically significant: most of our (normal, basically reasonable) countrymen basically saw what we saw--and decisively rejected it.

   Again: despite the Trumpiness and flaws of the other side.

   In short, there just doesn't seem--to me, anyway--to be all that much to explain here. It's pretty much all on the surface. It basically is what it seems to be.