Tipsheet

CNN Host Had a Surprisingly Accurate Take on What's Killing Dems Right Now

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  November 20, 2024 6:30 AM

Her show might get chaotic, especially when Scott Jennings is invited onto the panel to slap down liberal narratives with ease. Former guest Ryan Girdusky was another top assassin of liberal narratives on Abby Phillip’s show before being banned for telling Medhi Hassan, a known terrorist sympathizer, that he hoped his beeper didn’t go off—a funny reference to Israel’s operation that planted explosives in the pagers of Hezbollah operatives. Hassan had insinuated that Girdusky was a neo-Nazi before, but it was Girdusky who got the Themistocles treatment. 

Yet, despite Phillip’s obvious political leanings, she knows what’s eating away at Democrats. She made these points known during an event for Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics on November 19. It’s not some secret—it’s the party becoming too cloistered in their ivory towers, clinging to their higher education degrees while wallowing in a sea of confirmation bias and overall condescension. The activist class has engulfed the party. It has led to a regime of groupthink, where challenging its ethos is met with swift vengeance: 

I have observed that elites increasingly talk only to each other and come to believe that because there is consensus among them that that consensus is shared broadly and there are not enough voices that are confident enough to disagree and to present alternatives. We as a society need to find better ways to uplift divergent voices. 

Otherwise, we will be victims of groupthink. And there is a there…there is an activist class. And this is particularly acute in the Democratic Party right now. There is an activist class in the Democratic Party that is multiracial, multiethnic. It is diverse, but it's an activist class. And so because of that, they don't they're not able to see outside of that. 

Phillip noted that Republicans were trapped in this whirlpool pre-Trump. The president-elect broke that system, allowing for the GOP to become the party of the working class. The 2024 election showed that Trumpism was here to stay and that Republicans were now a multi-racial, working-class party. I disagree vociferously that the activist class of the Democrats is diverse—it’s overly white, overeducated, wealthy, and insufferable. Only the white American progressive thinks this country is akin to Nazi Germany or Apartheid South Africa; nonwhite liberals, generally, don’t think like this. 

While Republicans were able to make the shift, it was only possible because Trump wrested power from the party elites. Democrats don’t have that person yet, and reactions to their 2024 loss show that none are interested in self-reflection. Today’s liberal is too snobby and self-righteous to course correct, at least for now.