“It’s the economy, stupid.” That 1992 catchphrase by Bill Clinton advisor James Carville is being repeated in the aftermath of the Republican debacle last week. And it’s true that the economy can never be ignored. But “it’s the culture, stupid,” is a more apt refrain.
People, especially the young, voted nearly 10 socialists into the U.S. Congress, and socialists will now lead four of our largest and most important cities: New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and our nation’s capital.
How did that happen in the Land of the Free, a country that used to have an in-built immunity to Marxism? Students for two or more generations have been acculturated to believe that Marxism is good and America is bad.
Professors at these universities had to work assiduously. Americans’ resistance to Marxism used to be so strong that, according to urban legend, Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin was first to coin the term “American exceptionalism” as he decried American imperviousness to the siren song of communism.
In June 1929, Jay Lovestone, leader of the Communist Party USA, visited Moscow to meet Stalin, and told him that the American worker was not interested in revolution. America’s lack of a feudal past as well as other national character traits made Americans inherently resistant. Stalin shot back that he was tired of this “heresy of American exceptionalism.”
That account, coming from Stalin’s biographers and popularized by the Atlantic, has been disputed, and Alexis de Tocqueville had already described the United States as “exceptional” in Democracy in America in 1835. But the story is illustrates an important point. America is exceptional in many important ways — like its unique adherence to Natural Right — but no longer when it comes to being immune to socialism.
Voters last week elected six new members of the Democratic Socialists of America to the U.S. House of Representatives: Darializa Avila Chevalier (NY-13); Claire Valdez (NY-7); Melat Kiros (CO-1); Donavan McKinney (MI-13); Chris Rabb (PA-3); and Angela Gonzales-Torres (CA-34).
This freshman class joins Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) and Rashida Tlaib (MI-12), both first elected in 2018, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), who describes himself as a Democratic Socialist but is technically an Independent.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., speaks as she introduces Randy Villegas, Democratic candidate for congress in California’s 22nd District, during a campaign rally Friday, Oct. 23, 2026, in Bakersfield, Calif. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., speaks as she introduces Randy Villegas, Democratic candidate for congress in California’s 22nd District, during a campaign rally Friday, Oct. 23, 2026, in Bakersfield, Calif. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., speaks as she introduces Randy Villegas, Democratic candidate for congress in California’s 22nd District, during a campaign rally Friday, Oct. 23, 2026, in Bakersfield, Calif. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
And of course, there is the new Mayor of Washington, DC, Janeese Lewis George, who won 84% of the vote on election day, and Nithya Raman, the new mayor of Los Angeles, both proud socialists.
The economy was the number-one reason voters gave for voting the way they did. Four in 10 voters named the economy, and 90% said the cost of living was a crucial factor, according to The World Data.
Color me skeptical. I agree more with economist Steve Moore, who said on Fox News last Friday after a stellar jobs report that beat expectations by a factor of 10,
Indeed, GDP is growing at an annualized rate of 3.4 percent in the last quarter; private domestic demand is even stronger, rising almost 5 percent, the fastest in five years; the unemployment rate sits at 4.1 percent; and layoffs remain low.
So why are the voters so upset? It is true that young white males (a key Trump constituency in 2024) are having a tougher time, with the economy churning out more jobs that are geared to women, and because of discrimination against them due to DEI targets, which continue despite Trump’s best efforts. These voters are facing real pressure points: housing, student debt, gas, groceries, etc.
The Democrats were also disciplined in their messaging, and had a great media ground game. The activist Van Jones explained on CNN that Democrat operatives had a coordinated social media campaign that involved tens of thousands of people acting through the “American Accountability Network,” a lefty consortium of content creators.
“The Republicans never figured out what we were doing,” said Jones, who according to the writer Eitan Fischberger claimed that this campaign generated 32.5 million daily hits on Instagram, 88.8 million on X and 185 million on Facebook “driving the kitchen table affordability message and tying that to Democrats on a positive and Republicans on a negative.”
That voters then chose candidates with a socialist economic agenda that won’t address existing problem and has failed everywhere it’s been tried lies squarely on the capture by Marxists of the cultural institutions. Why do 60% of Democrats have a favorable view of socialism? They have been indoctrinated by the universities, the schools, the museums, the media, etc.
Just ask conductor Andris Nelsons, who the Boston Symphony Orchestra fired as part of its ill-advised search for “relevance.” Nelsons brought increased ticket sales, but he was not aligned with the more “inclusive” direction the BSO misguidedly is taking.
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As Heather Mac Donald wrote on City Journal, “The main point of contention between the board and Nelsons … seems to have been the conductor’s allegedly inadequate enthusiasm for the race- and gender-based programming and hiring that became so dominant in the classical music world after the George Floyd riots.”
Any conservative who ignores all this, takes Carville to heart, looks at the elections results and concludes that all the attention must be trained on the economy, to the exclusion of the oft-derided “culture wars,” will be making a big mistake.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
