It’s no secret that the Democrats are deeply unpopular with the American people. Not only were they decisively defeated in the 2024 general election, recent surveys show that more than two-thirds of voters describe them as “out of touch.” If anyone wonders why, Monday’s remarks by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren at the National Press Club will clear up the mystery.
Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, Warren denied that Democrats have lurched too far to the left and pitched a plan to win back the voters with a “populist” message. But while promising something new, Warren’s plan is just stale liberal talking points about tax increases and other shopworn Democrat policies.
Before she got into the details, however, Warren felt compelled to recite the obligatory canards about President Trump. She claimed the President’s tariffs are responsible for the affordability crisis produced by Joe Biden’s inflationary spending and denounced Trump’s immigration policy for creating the chaos that obviously resulted from Democrats’ open border disaster. Warren accused Trump of being a “wannabe dictator” for criticizing the incompetence of Fed Chair Jerome Powell and insisted that he had invaded Venezuela to boost the profits of oil companies. Then she finally gets to her real target:
None of this would be happening if Democrats hadn’t been wiped out in 2024. According to some self-described experts, Democrats lost power because we were too progressive. For a lot of powerful people—wealthy people from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington—“too progressive” is code used to undermine any economic agenda that favors working people. They put it more politely, but those movers and shakers want the Democratic Party to respond to the 2024 losses by watering down our economic agenda and sucking up to the rich and powerful.
This is a strange claim to make on behalf of a political party that spent $1.5 billion in donor contributions—primarily from rich people—to lose the 2024 presidential election.
Warren says these evil rich people use their influence to slow-walk popular economic policies. (It’s worth noting here that Warren herself was worth at least $12 million back in 2019 – and that figure has surely increased.) She outlined some of their nefarious methods as follows: “Rich people can fund super PACs to prop up political campaigns for their chosen candidates. They can fund their own lobbying efforts. They can build or simply buy whole media empires in order to bend the news to their liking.” None of these things are illegal, so what exactly does Warren want?
Here’s a hint: During the course of her National Press Club speech, Warren repeated the words “tax” 14 times and “rich” 15 times. It is no coincidence that an important component of her “populist” economic agenda involves raising taxes on corporations as well as the “tycoons” who own them.
Indeed, much of the language Warren used in her speech when discussing the economy is more or less cut-and-pasted from the 2024 Democrat platform that cost her party the election. She devotes a lot of time to denouncing the “rigged” system, and then provides an all-too-familiar list of goals the Democrats should pursue:
- Boosting pay and making life more affordable for working people.
- Building more affordable homes and cracking down on corporate landlords.
- Increasing the size of Social Security checks.
- Providing universal child care.
- Passing price gouging laws with real teeth.
- Guaranteeing the right to repair your own cars, machines, and business equipment.
- Strengthening unions.
- Building universal health care.
- Taxing the wealthy and giant corporations.
- Increasing the minimum wage.
This combination of bromides and bad ideas has been part of the Democrat agenda for decades. So, why is Warren wasting our time with it? Apparently, she wants to counter the “Abundance Agenda” that has gained traction among Democrats.
As W.J. Lee explained here for AMAC Newsline last April, this agenda is little more than an attempt to rebrand big government. But that’s not what Warren dislikes about it. As she said in her speech, “Abundance has become a rallying cry … for wealthy donors and other corporate-aligned Democrats who are putting big-time muscle behind making Democrats more favorable to big businesses.”
Warren, on the other hand, wants the Democrats to continue down the path toward socialism. During her speech, for example, she heaped praise on New York City’s socialist mayor: “Zohran Mamdani came from nowhere and took down a political dynasty. How? He ran a campaign tightly focused on the cost of living with an easy-to-understand platform—free buses, freeze the rent, and deliver no-cost childcare.”
Never mind that Mamdani is already running into legal obstacles to his agenda. Fox News reports that a federal judge prevented him from interfering in the sale of thousands of rent-stabilized rental properties.
It turns out that Americans still have private property rights, as much as Warren and Mamdani may not like it. And it also turns out that nothing is really “free,” despite whatever delusional Marxist fantasies progressives subscribe to.
For far left Democrats like Warren, however, it isn’t results or reality that matters. That Mamdani will never be able to deliver the “free” stuff he promised the voters is irrelevant. What counts is that his “populist” pitch got him elected.
Nor does it matter if Democrat programs are passed and prove to be huge failures. During Warren’s Press Club speech, she actually listed the ironically named “Affordable Care Act” as one of her party’s great successes. In fact, it has doubled the cost of health care while reducing access and quality. She sees it as a success because it increased the government’s ability to exercise power over American lives.
In the end, that’s what Senator Warren’s “populism” is about. She isn’t merely out of touch with the voters; she has no real interest in what they want or need. She’s just repackaging the same old tax-and-spend policies under a new label. The voters will regret it if they fall for this scam and deliver the Democrats a House and Senate majority this November.
David Catron is a Senior Editor at the American Spectator. His writing has also appeared in PJ Media, the American Thinker, the Providence Journal, the Catholic Exchange and a variety of other publications.