The bipartisan habit of patronizing the public

Chuck Schumer wore a sense of betrayal on his face when Kristen Welker of NBC News had the temerity to confront him with his own remarks. President Joe Biden was “fine,” the former Senate majority leader had insisted in February 2024. That was Schumer’s conclusion following the release of special counsel Robert Hur’s recommendation that the president be spared prosecution for mishandling classified documents because no jury would convict an “elderly man with a poor memory.” At the time, Schumer said that “all this right-wing propaganda that his mental acuity is declining is wrong.” It was right there on video.

Welker went on the attack. “What do you say to Americans who feel as though you and other top Democrats misled them about President Biden’s mental acuity?” The treachery so grated on Schumer that he didn’t wait for Welker to finish. “Look,” he interjected, “we didn’t!”

But he did. We all witnessed him do it. The Senate Democratic leader might have used the time he spent watching himself lie to the American people to think of a better way to reassure the public of his sincerity than to offer yet another lie. That he could not, or would not, is a testament to the man’s arrogance, sure. But it also reflects an enduring belief among Democrats that they can shape our perception of reality through rhetoric. This confidence may be a by-product of hubris, but it’s also predicated on the Democrats’ assumption that you are pretty easy to manipulate.

Why would Schumer invest his credibility in such an obviously dead stock? Had he learned no lessons from his party’s failure to contrive a consensus around the notion that Biden’s decrepitude was a computer-generated fabrication — “cheap fakes,” in media parlance. Even when Democrats and the press were promulgating that flimsy cover story, more than six out of ten Americans told NBC News pollsters that Biden lacked “the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term.” Does Schumer think we’re just idiots?

“Families are rightly upset that the price of meat has gone through the roof,” Senator Elizabeth Warren declared in December 2021 as inflation rates accelerated. “Who’s to blame?” she asked. “Meatpacking monopolies that are using inflation as cover to raise prices and make record profits.”

This rationale ran counter to the Biden administration’s more reasonable, albeit insufficiently exculpatory, explanation for worsening inflation: lingering pandemic-related supply chain distortions. As industry analyst Arun Sundaram said of the livestock sector, the “imbalance of supply and demand” is “causing prices to skyrocket.” That’s all that inflation is, after all: too much money chasing after too few goods. But the Biden White House latched on to Warren’s enterprising excuse for price instability, seeking to redirect voters’ discontent away from Democrats and toward “the greed of meat conglomerates.”

Those poor credulous souls who bought this line must have struggled to square it with the fact that, at the time, food prices were up across the board. Had there been a sudden outbreak of avarice? That was Warren’s pitch to voters: “Giant grocery store chains force high food prices onto American families while rewarding executives” and “investors with lavish bonuses and stock buybacks.” That’s what happens “when only a handful of giant grocery store chains” dominate the market, Warren later insisted. “We need to strengthen our antitrust laws to break up giant corporations and lower prices.”

There are, in fact, no grocery store monopolies. The firm she singled out for opprobrium, Kroger, controlled about 10 percent of the groceries sector in 2019. Moreover, according to the Food Industry Association, the average grocery store operated on a whopping 1.6 percent profit margin after taxes in 2023, up from just 1 percent in 2019.

Democrats were understandably defensive about inflation given the degree to which their profligacy in the first two years of the Biden administration had contributed to it. But everyone had been warned about the dangers that Democratic spending objectives courted.

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan would have “consequences for the dollar and financial stability,” the economist Larry Summers cautioned. Likewise, the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act would add fuel to the already overheated economy and augment the regulatory burdens, which drive inflation, on hirers and producers. According to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act would “very slightly increase inflation” in the short term. Did Democrats think we wouldn’t notice?

Voters seemed to intuitively grasp the interplay between public sector extravagance and their declining purchasing power. By October of Biden’s first year in office, pollsters Joel Benenson and Neil Newhouse saw the “center” of the electorate slipping away from Democrats. “The conversation in Washington doesn’t match the conversation that’s happening around the country,” Newhouse said. The bipartisan group of pollsters found that a striking 71 percent of the independent voters they surveyed agreed with the statement “People will continue to pay more money on everyday expenses unless the government becomes more fiscally responsible.”

“Holy cow,” University of Michigan professor Justin Wolfers exclaimed in August 2022. “There was ZERO inflation last month.” Joe Biden was quick to take credit, as was Nancy Pelosi. “As you see, inflation was zero for the past month, zero increase,” she declared. While conceding that “the price of some things went up” — little “things” like food — White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre took a victory lap nevertheless.

The inspiration for this celebration was an outlier consumer price index survey, which found that inflation rose at a slower pace in July 2022 than it had in June. But consumers understood that inflation is cumulative, and they still felt in their wallets the overall 8.5 percent year-over-year increase in the cost of goods. Jean-Pierre ill-advisedly highlighted a decline in the notoriously volatile price of gasoline as evidence that the administration’s policies were working and “saving American families with two cars $106 per month on average.” But that decline in gas prices wasn’t a healthy economic indicator. The “summer driving season is a bust,” Bloomberg reported that August, a result of what NPR identified as a “pretty dramatic drop in demand” for fuel amid the nation’s increasingly burdensome economic hardships.

Democrats must have understood the risk they were running by insisting that voters’ sour economic outlook was a product of the public’s wild imagination. We can only guess that Democrats accepted this risk because they concluded that their extraordinary political acumen was rivaled only by our ignorance. But they had no right to that conclusion given how poorly their efforts to manipulate Americans had worked out previously.

Take, for example, the public relations campaign aimed at popularizing the notion that Donald Trump’s 2016 election was attributable to Russian interference. The arguments House Democrats made in support of that contention rested on the assumption that a critical number of American voters were easily persuaded by some of the sloppiest propaganda to ever find its way into the West.

Included among the advertisements and organic content that investigators traced back to Russian-linked accounts were images of Jesus and Satan arm wrestling over the fate of the country. “If I win, Clinton wins!” the Lord of Darkness declared. “Not if I can help it,” Jesus replied. Only if you “press ‘like’” are you on the side of the angels. Senator Bernie Sanders was featured prominently by the Russians, depicted as “Buff Bernie” — a septuagenarian socialist with the sculpted body of Adonis. Who knows how many voters were influenced by the sobriquet applied to the Democratic nominee: “Killery Rotten Clinton.” Democrats even maintained that a photoshopped image of comedian Aziz Ansari, which showed him holding a placard advising social media users to “vote” by posting with a particular hashtag, may have altered the course of American history.

“What we’re talking about is a cataclysmic change,” the late Senator Dianne Feinstein said of this “cyber warfare” campaign. “What we’re talking about is a major foreign power with the sophistication and ability to involve themselves in a presidential election and sow conflict and discontent all over this country.” Former FBI agent Clint Watts confirmed Democratic suspicions. “If you do appropriate target audience analysis,” he said, you can “parse out all their preferences” and influence their behaviors. Tech firms were hauled before Congress and berated for allowing the Kremlin to, in Representative André Carson’s estimation, “abuse flaws in our social media platforms to inject the worst kind of identity politics into the voting decisions of at least 100 million Americans.” The presumption that those 100 million Americans lacked even elementary discretion wasn’t just insulting — it was baseless.

“We found no substantial effects of interacting with Russian IRA [Internet Research Agency] accounts on the affective attitudes of Democrats and Republicans who use Twitter frequently toward each other,” a study conducted by Duke sociology professor Christopher Bail determined. Indeed, it concluded that “Russian trolls might have failed to sow discord because they mostly interacted with those who were already highly polarized.”

It makes sense that the most partisan among us are also the likeliest to conclude that their adversaries — unlike themselves and their enlightened co-partisans — are tragically susceptible to suggestion. It is for that reason that the lack of faith Democrats regularly display in their fellow Americans has become a lamentably bipartisan phenomenon.

“I think in reality that if Donald Trump wanted to start a nuclear war with Russia, Mike Pence would be at the front of the line endorsing him right now,” JD Vance asserted with misplaced confidence during the 2024 presidential race. You’d be hard-pressed to find a critic of Trump’s personal conduct who would be willing to sideline those critiques if the president warmed to the prospect of an existential nuclear conflagration. Vance might not believe what he said, but he probably wants you to. Or, at least, he thinks that you would be willing to subordinate your capacity for reason to tribal solidarity and irrational pique.

This isn’t the only uncharitable outlook toward the American public that Republicans have recently borrowed from the Left. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has long bought into progressive pretensions about how hopelessly impressionable the rest of us are. If we do not have our hands held, Kennedy seems to believe, we will subsist entirely on a diet of Cheez-Its and Cap’n Crunch, heedlessly consume every luxury pharmaceutical that is allowed to advertise on television, and mainline fluoride. In a spasm of psychological projection, Kennedy recently accused the maker of the weight-loss drug Ozempic of “counting on selling it to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs.” For decades, Americans had to suffer through the Democratic Party’s supposition that the Kennedys know us better than we could ever know ourselves. The GOP should have left that baton where Democrats had dropped it.

Those who think they can work you like a marionette are possessed of an abiding belief that they are a better class of operator — smarter, cleverer, and more intellectually nimble than the average American. And they receive reinforcement for this view from their allies on social media, who, for reasons that are entirely elusive, seem to believe that they have sorted themselves into American society’s upper castes.

If you are truly convinced that everyone else is dumber than you, it is you who have succumbed to a delusion. It’s an unfortunate consequence of that misbelief that you’re also likely to be the last one to know it.