Democrats Are Deceiving Themselves

All people are afflicted with the unfortunate ability to deceive themselves about the nature of Reality, both physical and social. However, progressive Democrats excel in misleading themselves. When one makes assertions about what is real and what is not, the only defense anyone has against self-deception is to back up their assertions with large amounts of empirical evidence. More than that, that evidence must not only back their assertions, but also be consistent with everything else they know. Progressive Democrats, however, appear to depend more on their emotional desires of what they would like to be.

We are fast approaching the 2024 general elections. In order to cast an informed vote, one would do well to understand just how Democrats are deceiving themselves. In this post I will try to convince you that Democrats’ hold on Reality is very tenuous, indeed.

The Capabilities of Government

The most fundamental of all Democratic Party self-deceptions is about how capable government is in solving or ameliorating social and economic problems. Democrats would assert that not only is government both competent and capable to attack problems, but it also has the moral requirement to address all of them.

However, empirical data tells us a very different story. First, what kind of data do we need and where do we find it? Well, we certainly need economic data from as many nations as we can find. Every country on Earth possesses an economy that is at least slightly and sometimes greatly different from every other country. Each one is a different experiment in economic organization. What can we learn from them about what makes economies run well?

We can find such data from the World Bank. In turn, the World Bank gathered most of it from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Some data came from the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Federal Reserve Economic Database (FRED). In those databases, we can find such statistics as per capita GDP, the Gini index, and a number of others. In addition, we need an index that tells us how much each country’s government controls its economy. Such indices increase with individual’s freedom to make their own economic decisions, and decrease as government’s ability to control its economy increases. One can show that our personal human freedoms are highly correlated with our economic freedoms. This is shown in the scatter plot below, one dot for every country on Earth for which data is available. In this plot, a country dot is plotted with its Heritage House Index of Economic Freedom vs. its Cato/Fraser Human Freedom Index in 2018.

This scatter plot already shows us that if we wish to maximize our personal freedoms, we must minimize, as much possible, government’s power over the economy. But how well does an economy grow with increasing personal economic freedom? Would it do better with a robust government industrial policy? The chart below of countries’ per capita GDP vs their index of economic freedom in 2022 says the answer is a resounding “no.” For pure economic growth, the least government control is the best.

The red curve in this plot is the best fit of an exponential to the scattered data. The fact there are more dots above the fitted curve with IEF greater than 60 demonstrates the growth of per capita GDP with increasing IEF is actually superexponential. This plot is unequivocal in showing that if you want a higher per capita GDP, you want to increase economic freedom and reduce the government’s control of the economy.

It is good to have a large per capita GDP. However, if a large GDP serves a country’s people well, it should be evenly distributed across the population as much as possible. How evenly it is spread is measured by the Gini Index. If the Gini Index were zero, then the GDP would be totaly evenly spread across the population. If it were 100, then only one person in the entire country would possess the entire GDP. The smaller a country’s Gini Index is, the more widely spread the GDP is distributed. Below is a scatter plot of every country’s Gini Index in 2022 versus its Index of Economic Freedom.

Clearly, as economic freedom increases and the government’s control over the economy diminishes, GDP tends to be more evenly distributed. Why should this be? Why isn’t the economy’s output taken mostly by the rich in accordance with the so-called “Iron Law of Wages?”The answer seems to be that the labor of skilled workers from the low and middle classes is a scarce economic commodity. Companies will bid up wages to attract skilled labor away from other companies. This same factor creates a limit to income inequality arising from profits from capital investment. In addition, most modern industrialized countries have gone through the demographic transition from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates. Such societies no longer need large numbers of children to provide a kind of “social security” in old age. An income increase does not translate automatically into an increase of procreation and a larger supply of labor.

One further thing should be mentioned about this empirical data. There is a reasonably simple theoretical explanation for the fact the least possible government is the best. It has to do with the fact that all human social systems are chaotic systems. This explanation can be found in the post How is the Weather Like a Country’s Economy?

The political left would deny all the truths displayed by these graphs. Yet the data required to construct them is easily available over the internet. One can only conclude progressive Democrats delude themselves. They believe large government programs requiring greater government control over the economy is required for the betterment of society. Yet the very opposite is the truth. Social reality is far too complicated for them to competently control.

The Competence of Either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris to Be President

Ever since the debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in Atlanta, Democrats’ self-delusion about Joe Biden’s mental ability has been effectively destroyed. Yet prior to that debate, for more than three years, Democrats deluded themselves into believing Biden was not suffering from a growing dementia. Videos showing a doddering Biden were called AI created “cheap fakes” or “deepfakes.” Joe Biden — it was said — was fit as a fiddle and at the top of his game. It was a Big Lie that became insupportable after the debate with Donald Trump. Of course, some within Biden’s administration must have known the truth, but the majority of Democrats and the leftist media seem to have completely accepted the delusion.

As soon as Biden’s growing dementia became common knowledge, Democratic Party leaders began to pressure him to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. As of late July, 31 House Democrats and four Democratic Senators called for Biden’s exit. By all accounts, Biden was feeling extremely bitter and betrayed by top Democratic leaders. He did not leave voluntarily. DNC delegates then settled on Harris as the presidential candidate. Since she had no primary victories for President, many Republicans called her coronation an undemocratic “coup” against Biden. She becomes the candidate without a single primary vote for her or for whoever her running mate might be.

Even as Democrats abandoned their delusions about Joe Biden, they have adopted all new ones for Kamala Harris. After the first few months of the Biden-Harris administration, Harris consistently had more voters viewing her unfavorably than favorably, as shown in the scatter plot below.

As of April 2024, 39% of registered voters had a favorable opinion of Harris, while 55% had an unfavorable opinion. Yet, in the euphoria of getting rid of Joe Biden, Democrats have convinced themselves they have a real chance against Donald Trump. In fact, right now, Harris and Trump are running neck to neck of each other despite the electorate’s unfavorable view of Harris. Undoubtably, this is due to a delusional view of Donald Trump’s nature as a human being, a delusion shared by most of the legacy media supporting the Democratic Party. For more on this, see the next section below.

Yet, will the Democratic Party’s euphoria last? In order to lengthen her honeymoon with the voters, she has found it necessary to flip-flop on many of her most strongly-held past positions. As a junior U.S. Senator from California in 2017, she had a voting record that made her the most progressive Senator. Then, during the primaries of 2019, Democratic candidates were fiercely competing to see who would be more to the left. Harris followed the Democratic crowd. She supported banning private health insurance. She also wanted to ban fracking and offshore drilling as part of her support for the “Green New Deal.” She wanted to ban AR-15s and confiscate them through “mandatory buybacks.” Along with other Democrats, she said illegal immigrants should not be expelled from the country and wanted to ban ICE.

These leftist positions are now serious political liabilities and Harris is trying to persuade everyone she no longer holds them. Or that she never held them. She now claims she is in favor of fracking and that she was never the “border czar” in charge of stopping illegal immigration. She now claims that she is tough on crime, although her record as a San Francisco District Attorney does not support that.

Can Democrats possibly be so deluded that they really think most Americans will buy all this hypocrisy? The fact that Kamala’s flip-flops are indeed hypocrisy is shown by her choice of a vice-presidential running-mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. His record as Minnesota’s governor betrays him as belonging to the far left. Could he be compatible with a moderate president?

The Nature of Donald Trump

Possibly the most obsessive self-deception of all Democrats, be they politicians or registered voters, concerns the nature of Donald Trump. To them, our 45th president is barely human. Their hatred of Trump is so universally prevalent among them and so virulent that it has earned the label of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

This mental disease began almost immediately after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton for the Presidency in November 2016. During the campaign leading up to the election, Clinton had opined that half of Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables.” These “deplarables” were portrayed as people with hateful views that were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.”

To cover their embarrassment at being defeated by Donald Trump, the Clinton campaign concocted a scheme to create a collection of doctored materials alleging a Trump-Russian collusion to influence the election. A special counsel, John Durham, was appointed to investigate the allegations. His final report not only exonerated Trump, but was damning of the FBI and the intelligence Services that sought to bolster the charges.

One Democratic self-deception that is very revealing is their assertion that Trump is a fascist. Indeed, they compare him to Adolf Hitler. What this displays is a profound misunderstanding about the meaning of the word “fascism.” Fascism is one of the two major forms of socialism. The other form of socialism, communism, differs only cosmetically. (So-called “democratic socialism” is a self-contradictory label.) This conclusion depends on a redefinition of socialism due to the 20th-century Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. The traditional definition is that socialism is where government owns the means of production. Hayek argued that it makes more sense to define socialism as government control of the means of production. It matters not if private individuals or companies putatively own the means of production if the government completely controls them.

So, which political party is more fascist? Which one advocates more government control over the economy and society? It certainly is not the Republican Party! And could Trump be a fascist if he reduced government regulations over private companies? These observations make one think Democrats’ accusations of Trump’s fascism are an exercise of self-projection of their own attitudes. They are certainly deceiving themselves if they think Trump is anything like progressive Democrats. Perhaps by “fascism” they merely mean “autocratic.” Yet, anyone like Trump who seeks less government control over society is anything but autocratic.

Occasionally, Trump gives Democrats ammunition by making injudicious antagonistic statements, which Democrats take out of context. For example, in December 2023 he declared he would be a dictator for only his first day back in office. During that first day, he said “I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.” Democrats took this as evidence of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. On another occasion, he asserted that if he is not elected in 2024, there will be a “bloodbath” in the country. Many Democrats took this to mean there would be political violence against his adversaries if he did not win. In point of fact, what he really meant was there would be a bloodbath of the American auto industry. What progressives seem not to realize is that Trump delights in baiting them with comments like these.

There are times I am not sure if Democrats are deceiving themselves or simply trying to deceive others. The professional politicians especially must realize they are distorting the truth. However, after constant repetition of their falsehoods by most of the media, even they must be hoodwinking themselves. Nothing good will come from significant falsehoods represented as truth.

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