Why Democrats lose.

The 5,000th thing you'll read about Joe Biden's age today.

My grandfather once told me, “I survived the Communists and the gulag and the prisons. But I won’t survive old age.”

I was like 25 or something and said something equally weighty like, “Huh,” in response.

Almost everyone in my family had kids as teenagers and also stubbornly lived forever, so growing up I knew multiple sets of grand-parents and great-grandparents and great-aunts and great uncles. I literally remember my great, great grandfather, a wiry man who’d distinguished himself fighting the Ottomans. He was born at a time they didn’t have birth certificates, so for all we know he died at 90 or 110.

Very lucky for me. But, that means I have seen a lot of people get old. This is my (step, long-story) grandfather in his 50s, taken shortly after his 4th and successful escape from Communist Bulgaria in 1966.

This is him at 87, after a broken hip, multiple blood infections, and a failing heart.

I’ve been thinking about that picture ever since Joe Biden’s disaster. The gaping mouth. Especially in contrast to the steely, set jaw of relative youth in the first picture—you imagine him thinking about the most brutal prison guards and saying, “I won bitch, you couldn’t break me,” which is what he was usually more or less thinking at all times.

But here, by this point in the early aughts: he’d sit quietly at the table, enjoying the food and I hope our company. He’s an old man.

***

There’s a rich tapestry of reasons why Democrats lose. But, chief among them, is that with the exception of psychotically good manipulators like Bill Clinton, they don’t take voter emotion into account.

“What’s the matter with Kansas!?” we’ve been bellowing in one form or another, ever since the titular book came out, and also way before. It’s delusional, presuming that we, coastal libs, act as rational political agents, voting in our self-interest, while the heaving masses are brainwashed by fascists.