Bill Maher noted how Democrats are in danger of going the way of other “ghost brands” like Sears and Playboy.
“A ghost brand, that’s a company or a store that like Sears still exists, but only as a pathetic shell of its former self.”
“I fear the Democratic party is at risk of becoming a ghost brand too. Like Sears, it used to be mighty and ascendant and popular. Sears once accounted for 1% of the entire American economy and 41% of the appliance market and built the country’s tallest tower. Democrats once controlled Congress and the Supreme Court, or were at least competitive.”
“The Democrats have their lowest rating in 35 years. 63% unfavorable. What happened? I don’t know.” This is a lie. Maher knows that social justice is killing the Democrat Party, he just doesn’t want to say it.
“What happened to Sears? It used to be synonymous with the American Dream because it kept faith with what the customer wanted.” This is a reductio ad absurdum, as the American Dreams mean a whole lot more than the ability to buy decent material goods.
“Did we love Sears? No. But that was besides the point. You just went. It was like an Avatar movie that sold tools. It used to be where your family bought everything from school clothes to appliances to your family Christmas portrait.”
“Sears used to have 3,500 stores and now it has five.”
“Same thing happened to Playboy, except in silk pajamas and a captain’s hat.”
“For for 66 years, Playboy magazine was also a fact of American life. Sears sold your father a mattress and Playboy was what he hid under it.”
“Plus real journalism. You could read an interview with Carter while enjoying photos of bush.”
“But but then it started messing around with the formula. Like the Democratic Party, Playboy decided they didn’t need straight men anymore. They put transgender women and gay men on the cover and predictably sales, like their subscribers penises, collapsed.”
“The staff began using terms like intersectionality, sex positivity, and privileging. And in response, Playboy readers use terms like, ‘No thanks, get the fuck out of here, and buy-bye.'”
Cracker Barrel analogy snipped.
“It reminded me of when Chuck Schumer said in 2016 that for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we’re going to pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philly, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Yeah, how’d that work out?”
“But at least Cracker Barrel had the sense to immediately say, ‘Oh sorry.’ and put the sling blades back on the wall. Democrats don’t seem to be doing that. They still seem to want to be that upscale store that impresses celebrities.”
Description of how Barney’s went from a solid discount clothing store to a wannabe upscale failure snipped.
“And I’m not making this up just because it’s Halloween, but after Barney’s closed for good in 2020, it became, yes, a Spirit Halloween.”
“I’m just saying Democrats need to get their shit together, because America needs two political parties, not one party and one Halloween store.”
What’s doing in the Democrats is what did in Playboy: Intersectionality, transgenderism, supporting illegal aliens over American citizens, and the entire post-modern social justice woke-mind-virus zoo. They went from seeing blue collar workers as the backbone of the party to seeing them as icky carriers of hetronormative toxic masculinity, patriarchy and white privilege. Donald Trump, alone of all the 2016 Republican presidential candidates, saw those same voters as a key ingredient into making Republicans into America’s natural majority party.
But unlike Sears or Playboy, there’s a limit to how much the free market can correct a self-destructive ideology. The woke are absolutely sure of their unshakable virtue, and seizing and maintaining control of the Democrat Party is far more important to them than pleasing mere voters. Social Justice Democrats believe they’re on “the right side of history,” and like Tareyton smokers, they’d rather fight than switch. Or, as poor Charlie Kirk found out, they’d rather kill the “Nazis” that oppose their policies than consider the possibility that they’re wrong.
Texas Democrats went through a similar struggle in the 1960s through 1990s. Liberals knew that if they were ever to take control of the party, they would have to drive conservatives out of the Party, so they convinced conservatives they had to leave the Democrats and vote in Republican primaries, as documented in Wayne Thorburn’s Red State. This they accomplished, but somehow seemed to think Texans would just continue voting Democrats in year after year.
And that’s why Democrats haven’t elected anyone statewide in Texas in over 30 years.
Come Tuesday, New York City Democrats will quite likely elect a Jew-hating communist rather than consider the possibility that their ideas are not just wrong, but evil. And thus the party will take yet another lurch toward electoral ghost brand irrelevance.
And they’re a whole lot less popular and innovative than Spirit Halloween…
I’ve always wondered why when twice as many people self-ID as hard right than do as hard left, the Dems run everything. Now I’ve come to understand it’s due racial gerrymandering, non-citizens voting and counting toward congressional apportionment, and all of the $ billions of tax payer dollars they get through all their NGO pass-throughs. UFB. Still, I don’t think the Dems are going away. They have the fervor of true believers, no morals, and the will to do whatever it takes to get power, up to and especially including, mass violence.
Sears did not die because it lost touch with the pulsing commercial heart of ‘merucca – it died because it went full bricks-and-mortar instead of embracing its mail-order heritage.
Sears was Amazon before Jeff Bezos was the merest glimmer. They had the logistics and the distribution and the order management all in place.
You used to be able to order anything up to houses from the Sears Roebuck catalog, said houses delivered in prebuilt modular format via railroad, which is where most of those Victorians came from all across the western US.
But instead of keeping that mail-order crown and then jumping onto the internet bandwagon once it was invented, they decided to try and be Macy’s or Montgomery Ward. Since other brick-and-mortar stores did it better, Sears failed and faded into that ghost status.
Trying to be something you are not, say, just picking hypotheticals at random, like a working class political party trying to instead be a party of the far left and ultra rich, is a path to ultimate failure and ghostiness.
Maher is sooooo close. He just can’t bring himself to take the last step to admitting the Democrats haven’t lost their way but have committed a form of ritual sacrifice, like the ancient Aztecs; and they’re as doomed as those cities they’re finding in the Central and South American jungles.
Marx held that labor was both the source of value and the mainspring of progress in the unending struggle against the overpass. New Deal Democrats embraced this doctrine with enthusiasm and bestowed special privileges on.labor unions.
In return, industrial labor unions promoted the Democrat’s Social Justice agenda. Everything was sweetness and light. From 1945-1995, UAW wages rose 3x and its ranks swelled to 1.5 million members in 1979.
Alas, the party could not last. The ruinous inflation of the Carter years made US automobiles increasingly unaffordable and brought Democrat economic policies into disrepute.te. Reagan’s ascendance led to free market reforms and a surge in foreign auto sales. Datsun, Mitsubishi, Honda and Toyota were not hampered by UAW work rules and prospered accordingly.
Thirty years later, the UAW was reduced to about 355,000 members. Marx’s God was dead.
So the Left had to cast about for a new savior. The socialist Utopia pampered labor failed to bring about could be realized by submarginal labor: “guest” workers, underemployed college graduates and EBT loafers. Losers of the world unite; you have nothing left to lose…period!
The Democrat party seems to be in its last, desperate hours. Don’t relax, though. The mortally wounded beast struggles most fiercely just as it is about to die.
I’ve always wondered why when twice as many people self-ID as hard right than do as hard left, the Dems run everything. Now I’ve come to understand it’s due racial gerrymandering, non-citizens voting and counting toward congressional apportionment, and all of the $ billions of tax payer dollars they get through all their NGO pass-throughs. UFB. Still, I don’t think the Dems are going away. They have the fervor of true believers, no morals, and the will to do whatever it takes to get power, up to and especially including, mass violence.
Sears did not die because it lost touch with the pulsing commercial heart of ‘merucca – it died because it went full bricks-and-mortar instead of embracing its mail-order heritage.
Sears was Amazon before Jeff Bezos was the merest glimmer. They had the logistics and the distribution and the order management all in place.
You used to be able to order anything up to houses from the Sears Roebuck catalog, said houses delivered in prebuilt modular format via railroad, which is where most of those Victorians came from all across the western US.
But instead of keeping that mail-order crown and then jumping onto the internet bandwagon once it was invented, they decided to try and be Macy’s or Montgomery Ward. Since other brick-and-mortar stores did it better, Sears failed and faded into that ghost status.
Trying to be something you are not, say, just picking hypotheticals at random, like a working class political party trying to instead be a party of the far left and ultra rich, is a path to ultimate failure and ghostiness.
Maher is sooooo close. He just can’t bring himself to take the last step to admitting the Democrats haven’t lost their way but have committed a form of ritual sacrifice, like the ancient Aztecs; and they’re as doomed as those cities they’re finding in the Central and South American jungles.
Marx held that labor was both the source of value and the mainspring of progress in the unending struggle against the overpass. New Deal Democrats embraced this doctrine with enthusiasm and bestowed special privileges on.labor unions.
In return, industrial labor unions promoted the Democrat’s Social Justice agenda. Everything was sweetness and light. From 1945-1995, UAW wages rose 3x and its ranks swelled to 1.5 million members in 1979.
Alas, the party could not last. The ruinous inflation of the Carter years made US automobiles increasingly unaffordable and brought Democrat economic policies into disrepute.te. Reagan’s ascendance led to free market reforms and a surge in foreign auto sales. Datsun, Mitsubishi, Honda and Toyota were not hampered by UAW work rules and prospered accordingly.
Thirty years later, the UAW was reduced to about 355,000 members. Marx’s God was dead.
So the Left had to cast about for a new savior. The socialist Utopia pampered labor failed to bring about could be realized by submarginal labor: “guest” workers, underemployed college graduates and EBT loafers. Losers of the world unite; you have nothing left to lose…period!
The Democrat party seems to be in its last, desperate hours. Don’t relax, though. The mortally wounded beast struggles most fiercely just as it is about to die.
*overclass* Don’t you just HATE autocorrect?
Man has opinion about monster he helped create. News after weather, then sports.