Underperformance
No There There
Credit: New York Post
A common word to describe a good deal of the Democrats’ behavior these days would be “performative.”
In other words, there is undue emphasis on show at the expense of substance. And if closed captioning accompanied these performances the words would read, “Look at me, look at me.”
The godfather of the Narcissus Movement in politics would be Barack Obama, but the figure credited with its modern day upgrade would be Sandy the Barista. AOC, as she was deftly branded from the get go, is not an especially intelligent person, but her theatrical skills more than cover for gaps in the headspace.
Call her a first mover in the Influencer Era, the Queen of Tik Tok.
What AOC created via her personna was, in effect, a performance hub for her emotively inclined kindred spirits. That birthed a group dubbed the Squad, which went on to mainstream shrieking and garment rending as its preferred method of political engagement.
The Squad’s bravado (a), in turn, emboldened, not only its peers and budding starlets like Jasmine Crocket, but an older generation of Hillary wanna be’s, eager to make up for lost time by amping up the self righteous, mannish anger. (Viz. Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, and Mazie Hirono.)
Do the Numbers Lie?
The current makeup of Congress includes these numbers…
127 women in the House, 93 Democrats, 34 Republicans.
24 women in the Senate, 16 Democrat, 8 Republican.
In the last three presidential elections the Democrats have run two women and a mental eunuch inhabiting a man’s body.
Glancing at the above figures, one might infer that women in politics is more of a Democrat than a Republican thing, that the party has more of a female or feminine cast to it, and thus might display more feminine virtues or characteristics. These would relate to collaboration, caring, compassion, and nurturance, to suggest a few possible traits or inclinations.
But the Democrats instead seem bent on proclaiming - protesting - that “You know, we’ve got just as much testosterone you do,” (That would include the party's male-ish figures as well: Jamie Raskin, Chris Murphy, Adam Schiff, and Dan Goldman, to name a few.)
Watching grown women swear like sailors is cringe inducing, not to mention the mock outrage and hyperbole. Those, at least, are the optics. What about the substance? Surely the Dems are here to free the fairer sex from their patriarchal chains…
Far Side of the Moon
Choose your hot button issue of these contentious times, and consider where the Democrats stand on them...
– They must favor barring biological males from competing in sports against their daughters, not to mention sharing their locker rooms with them?
– Their concern for the victims of crimes committed by illegal aliens must outstrip their desire to provide sanctuary to the latter.
– They must recoil at the notion of small children being exposed to sexually explicit reading materials in school.
– They must find equally abhorrent the mutilation of children’s bodies under the genuinely Orwellian rubric of “gender affirming care,”
– They must be horrified by the notion of some 300,000 unaccompanied - and now unaccounted for - minors being dumped into the U.S. during the Biden years, leaving those children prey to exploitation.
It is evident that the Democrats are on the far side of these issues relative to the Republicans. It is equally evident that Donald Trump - and his fascist regime - are striving to deal with and rectify these issues.
So what exactly gives?
Enter Narcissus
AOC may be a great influencer and political operator, but her real claim to fame is that she is a poster child for a pathology that stalks the Democratic party, unifies its faithful, and corrodes the culture: Narcissism.
The narcissist displays a propensity, conscious or otherwise, to use others for one’s advantage and advancement; to drain and exhaust them; to exploit and demonize them, if need be.
Aside from exhibiting extreme self-interest, the narcissist is aggressive, often abusive. Such tactics are necessary in order to defend what is within…which is not very much.
With the narcissist the shell is not only thin, but empty.
And so that inner void must be defended. And the only way the narcissist can do that is via persistent attack in order to deflect all perceived and potential threats. Survival is really the sole priority. All else falls away by comparison.
Given their fragility, narcissists cannot do two things:
– Admit error. Doing so leaves them feeling exposed and more vulnerable than they already are.
– Change their behavior. Doing so requires painful shadow work which only dredges up that deep sense of lack from the muck of the subconscious.
Ergo, narcissism is all but incurable. It is the grain in the wood. The narcissist keeps going - boring ahead - because he must stay on top at all costs.
The Democrats can keep going because they are 1.) blinkered to their beliefs and actions, and 2.) have allies and enablers. They have fellow conscripts in their performative retinue: activist judges, compliant media, and pop up rent a mobs ready for the next astroturfed protest.
These resources provide sufficient cover for the party to play the long game: Game elections, continue judge shopping, and fiddle with the demographics. The last thing Democrats want to do is send “migrants,” criminal or otherwise, back home. They want/ need the bodies, which can be transmuted into drivers’ licenses and Social Security numbers, which, soon enough, will materialize as registered voters. In this context, “due process” is code for “We’ll drag this out one case at a time.”
Out the Back Jack
Which brings us to Hannah Dugan, the Democrats’ It Girl of the moment. She is a heroine in the eyes of the diehard, and perhaps in her own mind - as she stands up to the powers that be, even though, given her status, she is a power that already is. Unto herself.
A fundamental trademark of the narcissist is grandiosity, an exaggerated sense of one’s importance, and, therefore, license to set one’s own limits - and violate them whenever convenient.
In the real world of adulthood, actions speak louder than words. And our modern day Joan of Arc revealed her true base self by what she made possible - escape out the back door, in a cowardly effort to cover her tracks. She didn’t use her authority to stand up before the court and announce her action. She produced, instead, a cockroaches-in-the-kitchen-at-midnight moment.
This was a craven performance expressing nothing so much as nothingness, but also throwing a harsh light on the Democrats’ fundamental pathology. They are all about the will to power. As for the will of the people, to hell with that.