President Eisenhower reportedly once said, "Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the cornfield." My Dad, who farmed much of his life, would have agreed with that. A lot of things look easier from a distance. Democrats, today, seem to be maintaining a great distance between their party platform and, well, reality. Recent polling shows that the Democratic Party has the same approval ratings as head lice. Their leadership is so old that when they cough, they cough up dust. And what passes for their young up-and-comers, on the political scale, makes Che Guevara look like a flaming right-winger.

But wait! There's more! Now they've lost "The Nation," as left-wing a rag as you'll find. Author Jeet Heer took to that publication to bemoan the problems Democrats face.

In theory, the Democratic Party is a political organization aimed at gaining power and implementing an agenda. In practice, the Democrats more closely resemble a hospice, if not a funeral home. An inordinately large number of party leaders are so old and infirm they are at death’s door. This is most notoriously true of the party’s most recent standard-bearer, former president Joe Biden. A recent media controversy over a new book alleging that Biden’s inner circle had covered up his infirmity was overshadowed on Sunday by revelations that he suffers from an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

That's the age issue, and it prompts a reply: Mr. Heer, if you'd asked me, I coulda told you. But there's more to it than that; Jeet Heer, a creature of the left himself, points out some other problems:

Their devotion to seniority makes clear that gerontocracy is merely a symptom of a deeper issue: The Democrats have no guiding ideology or principles holding them together. The party is a heterogenous coalition of centrists and progressives that has failed to define a core goal. Even anti-Trumpism, which served as an effective glue for holding the faction-ridden party together from 2016 to 2024, is no longer effective. Trump’s victory over Biden has demoralized the party, and some leading figures in purple states are all too eager to stay on the good side of MAGA.

It’s increasingly difficult to know what Democrats, as a collectivity, believe. This explains why the party continues to be unpopular even though Trump himself is also losing popularity.

It's not that difficult. We know what they collectively believe. It's just that it's wrong.

See Related: Democrats and the Perils of the Age Crisis

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The Democrats, of course, are united by one belief that they hold above all others: Control. They are collectivists, and whenever collectivism has been tried, it's ended up in subjugation, serfdom, and slavery. There are no old collectivist nations. The largest attempt, the Soviet Union, collapsed under the weight of its own insane, centrally controlled economic policies. China has survived this long mostly by allowing some (no more than they can help) free-market capitalism to take root.

Look at the nations that are economic success stories: The United States, for example. Every economy has its ups and downs, and ours is no exception. But we still have a pretty good standard of living, and as long as we're free to make our own choices, we'll keep it. We want to make our own decisions, not only in economic matters, but in our kids' upbringings, in the vehicles we drive, where we live, and what we do for fun. That's what the Democrats don't understand. That's why they're losing.

One of my literary heroes, Robert Heinlein, wrote:

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

He was, of course, correct. All politicians, of course, want to control us to some extent; that's what government does. But we know the sort Heinlein was writing about. So does Jeet Heer, whether he admits it out loud or not. And I know which sort I prefer to have as neighbors. But another Heinlein saying may apply even more to today's left:

Some people insist that ‘mediocre’ is better than ‘best.’ They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can’t fly. They despise brains because they have none.

Just look at videos posted by leftists on X, Facebook, or anywhere. You'll see that Mr. Heinlein was correct in that assessment.

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