Famed Democratic strategist James Carville is offering a dose of reality for those on the left clinging to the belief that a savior is coming for them to stop the Trump agenda. On a recent episode of the Politics War Room podcast, Carville cautioned against the false hope that many apparently hold. He even mocked "the people who go on TV on a panel after the election and say, ‘Don't worry, everything's going to be fine,’ and 'We can work with him.’"
Carville ridiculed the notion that a "responsible conservative Republican is going to save us from this," firmly stating, "they didn't come, they're not there." If anyone is still waiting for a rogue Republican faction to emerge from the shadows and rescue our democracy, Carville urges them to reconsider. He makes it painfully clear: "Let’s just get over it, the cavalry is not coming, the courts are not coming, nothing."
Carville most certainly has a point. The only Republican to vote against all three of Trump’s “controversial” nominees was Mitch McConnell — a tell-tale sign that the Republican Party is the MAGA party now.
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Setting a path forward, Carville suggests that the Democratic Party must cultivate a unifying theme that resonates with the American public — wow, how original — however, he warns that "any such theme has to be true" in order to gain any real traction and support.
“So when that happens I hope we can, like, pick a unifying theme that the public will find to be credible, the Democrats will find to be really credible and excite them and it has to be true,” he said.
Again, decent point. But does anyone really believe that the Democratic Party is capable of abandoning its obsession with identity, its woke policies, and its radical views on gender? The Biden years made it clear to average Americans that the Democratic Party isn’t looking out for the average working-class American and the issues that concern them. But he undermined his own message by saying that the Trump administration “is a government by billionaires for billionaires of billionaires and that's all it is.”
That’s the same kind of rhetoric we’re hearing from the Democrats today. Carville accused Elon Musk of just wanting to make money and wants to set himself up as “an even huger defense contractor.” That’s almost as ridiculous as Democrats claiming that Musk was going to steal people's Social Security checks.
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Carville had a few nuggets of truth, but in the end, he’s not much less out of touch with reality than the average Democrat. For all his experience and expertise, and, of course, his reputation, he not only predicted that Kamala Harris was going to win the 2024 election, he was sure of it.
“While I am not one to take part in the political prediction industry — recently ballooned by mysterious crypto investments gambling on a Donald Trump victory — today I am pulling my stool up to the political poker table to throw my chips all in: America, it will all be OK,” he wrote in the New York Times before the election. “Ms. Harris will be elected the next president of the United States. Of this, I am certain.”
There may be smart Democrats out there, and Carville might, in fact, be one. However, all the brains in the world won’t help if you’re too blinded by partisanship to objectively assess reality.
Still, the best thing about this exchange is that Carville is panicking about the Democrats’ outlook for the near future. And, for a guy who has been wrong a lot lately, he’s definitely right to be panicked.
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