Here’s the latest opinion/comedy bit from Friday’s Real Time show with Bill Maher, with the episode called “Let’s be frank.” Maher starts out by citing the recent Democratic Party Autopsy (here) about why the party lost the Presidency and Congress in 2024. But he then faults both parties for having politicians in office who won’t be honest (surprise!).
Honesty, he avers, can be found only in books politicians write after they have left office. Maher gives several examples, including Republicans who admit, after they leave office, that Trump is paying off the January 6 insurrectionists with a “slush fund.” And don’t forget, he adds, Eisenhower’s warning about the “military industrial complex,” issued just three days before he left office.
The key diagnosis, Maher says, was made by the late Barney Frank when he was in hospice. It’s cited in the Times of Israel:
“The key to liberal democracy being able to come back is to get rid of the perception that we have allowed to grow, that the entire Democratic Party is committed to a series of very drastic social reconstructions that go beyond the politically acceptable,
Maher says, “And there, in one sentence, is the autopsy the Democrats have been so desperately searching for.” True! And of course this explains the capitalized “Frank” in the title.
The theme, then, is that Democrats say the truth about the party only when they have nothing to lose for speaking up.
Finally, Maher notes that some red states are better than his own “progressive” state—California—in education and in green energy. The last bit: “Democrats: these are your issues: education, race, the environment. And I say this with love: you’re losing to the Waffle House car-on-the-lawn states.” Well, we’ll see how the Democrats do in this fall’s midterms, though the most crucial election is in 2028.
The guests for this episode were astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, MS Now news correspondent Katy Tur, and former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. Tyson is not shown in this segment.
Kamala Harris is a capable, intelligent, and thoughtful individual, and she has a fine track record of public service. We can quibble about certain policy ideas that seem (or seemed) too “radical,” but all told, she’s a decent human being.
Donald Trump is a vile specimen of our species and has been so since his start in real estate in the 1970s. Some “greatest hits”: He stiffed contractors and drove one person to suicide. He scammed students with a fake university. He misused funds for his own charity. He was found guilty of sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. He was found guilty of election interference and he tried to overthrow the government.
So what happened? A majority of voters said, “I’m going to vote for the criminal.” People looked at two résumés and decided that worrying about this or that issue being too “woke” (I despise the conservative rebranding of that word) was of a greater concern than the actions and history of a man who is a convicted grifter and con artist.
All told, the ongoing problem in this country has nothing to do with Donald Trump. The problem has to do with Idiocracy-inspired voters deciding that a convicted criminal would be better at “tak[ing] care that the laws be faithfully executed.” In a sane country, Kamala Harris—or ANY Democrat—would have won in a landslide in 2024.
You appear to have overlooked the quote from Barney Frank: “…the entire Democratic Party is committed to a series of very drastic social reconstructions that go beyond the politically acceptable.” Kamala joined in the fun. And she lost.
Quid pro and then… quo.
Sorry to leave a long response (may Jerry will cut me some slack this one time), but I sent what I wrote to a friend. His response:
After reading your note I went to Coyne’s website to get his take. And like you, I couldn’t be bothered watching Maher because his self-deluded “iconoclasm” isn’t worth my time.
That said though I think you let Maher off too easy. Blaming all this on the idiots who voted for Trump leaves out the agents who made Trump and Trumpism inevitable: the media that have covered his every wiggle slavishly for 40 years and the business leaders who could well have afforded to do what should be done every time this ape uses the DOJ as his personal attorney.
Trump didn’t emerge from a vacuum. He was gestated in our celebrity-drunk media, and coddled by a political establishment that bows to the highest donors. Maybe a critique of categories that is broad is work-too-hard for Maher, but it should be part of any real critique of his general line of canned bullsh*t. All those “New Rules” segments are written to display Maher’s signature brand as cynical-outsider, even as he’s one of the very products of the cultural cesspool that he pretends to be above.
When the zone is flooded with sht, a person covered in it doesn’t appear unusual. Harris was squeeky clean by comparison, and despite the baggage she inherited from Biden (who bears a lot of the blame for her problems because he refused to give up the presidency he’d longed for all his adult life), she had no chance against Trump, who had the media in his sht-encrusted pocket.
I don’t know why that last paragraph was almost entirely italicized. Angelo wasn’t making any extra emphasis there. It was just the way the text was rendered.
(The absence of the “i” in “shit” suggests he simultaneously hit ctrl in error, hence the italics)
Sounds like you need to re-establish an aristocracy as the only antidote to democratic kakistocracy. If the people aren’t allowed to vote for whomever they want, because sometimes they vote for criminals, how do you pick your leader of the Executive state? The Legislature might not matter much except to pass a budget but you do need one person you can trust as the boss of all the civil servants with their monopoly on violence. Maybe the Presidents of all the country’s universities could meet as a Congress of the Elect (not the “elected”) and appoint by consensus one of their own to be President to hold office at the pleasure of the CotE.
That’s what the Electoral College was for. The voters couldn’t be trusted to vote for the President at large for precisely the reasons you adduce. So they vote for a slate of “Electors” in each State who would do a better job at picking the President than the voters would, sucked in by siren call of MAGA demagoguery. Maybe a return to restricting the franchise to male property owners would help, although the Founding Fathers were worried enough that even they would listen to demagogues that they still ruled out direct election of the President.
But I think it’s clear you need some way somehow to disenfranchise voters you don’t like.
Of course people should be allowed to vote for whomever they want. All I’m saying is that in a healthy democracy a person who’s a convicted criminal should be immediately disqualifying for any presumably educated voter. “What? One of the candidates is a thief and a rapist? No way I would vote for that person.”
And yet millions did.
But again, my larger point is this: THAT such a vile person could rise through the political ranks just goes to show how politically sick our country is (and has been for a long while).
Sorry but please try to adhere to the commenting rules. And I don’t think it’s helpful to characterize everyone who voted for Trump as an “idiot”. Some may have been one-issue voters, for example worried about immigration.
You call them idiots because voting for Trump is your very definition of “idiot”. I know several people who voted for Trump that you would not characterize as “idiots” if you knew them without their political persuasions. But the minute they tick that box, they bnecome “idiots”. That is patronizing, obtruse, and arrogant. It may be your friend who has this take, or both of you, but if I want to read about people like Maher or Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins called “products of the cultural cesspool,” I’ll go to Pharyngula.
I didn’t vote for Trump, but I disagree with you that Kamala Harris is capable or would be a good President. She may well be a “decent human being,” but surely you think that this is not enough to allow someone to run America. Her record of running anything is uninspiring. (Remember she was supposed to run the immigration program for Biden.)
And yet here we are. I can’t imagine President Harris invading Iran or giving pardons to all the insurrectionists—and then trying to give them money! Wow.
It’s too obvious to say that no candidate is perfect and no candidate acts alone (as Trump wants to at every turn, it seems). Would we be bemoaning some missteps and some ill-thought-out policies right now if Harris were president? Maybe. But there is no way that a Harris administration would be a horror show (and a buffoonish one) on the scale of what’s happening right now.
Barry I strongly disagree with what you said, and I agree 100% with the late Barney Frank and with commenter Leslie MacMillan here.
The tenor of what you have said here is this:
1. The losses of the Democrats are other people’s faults (“Idiocracy-inspired voters”, the media, business leaders, etc.). Kamala Harris and the Dems did not lose because of the policies they offered to voters.
2. Voters should not vote for Trump because he is a bad human being. (I actually agree that Trump is a bad human being.)
You are 93% wrong here on point 1 and, regarding point 2, voters vote for the candidate they dislike least. You strongly dislike Trump. Well, other people dislike him less than you do. And that is their right. And for that, calling them idiots or a basket of deplorables, etc. – well, you don’t like democracy much, do you? You will extoll it when its results are to your liking. But when voters dare to see things differently than you, then you reach for the thesaurus for some cleverly worded insults. That’s your right! But it will not improve the electoral prospects of your party!!!
Barry, if you want to understand American politics better, allow me to make some reading recommendations:
Paul Embery: Despised: why the modern left loathes the working class. Polity Press, 2021
Musa al-Gharbi: Class Conflict and the Democratic Party. Dec 4, 2023
Professionals are now Democrats’ core constituency. It’s a problem.
(freely available from the website The Liberal Patriot)
Ruy Teixeira: Seven Principles for a 21st Century Left. Jan 29, 2026
Their mission, should they choose to accept it.
(freely available from the website The Liberal Patriot)
Matthew Yglesias: Conspiracy Theories Are Not a Partisan Phenomenon. Bloomberg News, Oct 30, 2022
Some voters may have some crazy beliefs, but all voters have some legitimate concerns — and those are what politicians should be addressing.
New York Times Editorial Board: A Road Map for Defeating Trumpism. New York Times, April 14, 2026
Thomas Edsall: Why Are So Many Democratic Politicians So Far Out of Touch? New York Times, March 24, 2026
Matthew Yglesias: What Democrats Should Relearn From Obama. New York Times, March 16, 2026
Ruy Teixeira & John B. Judis: Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Henry Holt & Co., New York, 2023
Brody Mullins: How Democrats Became the Party of the Well-to-Do. New York Times, Oct 10, 2025
David N. Gibbs: How the Left Helped Trump Win. Compact Magazine, January 17, 2025
Keith E. Stanovich: Were Trump Voters Irrational? Quillette, Sept 28, 2017
Keith E. Stanovich: The irrational attempt to impute irrationality to one’s political opponents. in: Michael Hannon & Jeroen de Ridder (eds.): The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology. 2021, 274-284
Keith E. Stanovich: The Bias that Divides Us. Quillette, Sept 36, 2020
What our society is really suffering from is myside bias: People evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior beliefs, opinions, and attitudes.
Peter H. Ditto, Jared B. Celniker, Shiri Spitz Siddiqi, Mertcan Güngör and Daniel P. Relihan: Partisan Bias in Political Judgment. Annual Review of Political Science, 2025, Vol. 76:717-740
Ruy Teixeira & Yuval Levin: Politics Without Winners – Can Either Party Build a Majority Coalition? American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, Oct 2024, 55 pages (freely available on the web)
Musa al-Gharbi: A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives. Nov 11, 2024
(freely available on the author’s Substack)
Clive Crook: Where the American Left Went Wrong. Bloomberg News, May 13, 2023
The work of Fred Siegel [1945-2023], who died last week, shows how modern liberals came to disdain the working class and oppose democracy.
Ezra Klein: This Is the Way You Beat Trump — and Trumpism. New York Times, Nov. 2, 2025
Clive Crook: Resistance Isn’t a Real Strategy for the Democrats. Bloomberg News, Aug 18, 2025
Resisting the Trump administration doesn’t relieve the party of its need to acknowledge its mistakes and advance a coherent policy program.
Laurenz Guenther: Political Representation Gaps and Populism. May 2024 (Last revised: 10 Oct 2025)
(freely available on the web)
David Goodhart: Legitimate populism and liberal overreach.
in: Majorities, Minorities, and the Future of Nationhood. Edited by Liav Orgad & Ruud Koopmans, Cambridge UP, 2022
Laurenz Guenther: Strategies of Non-Populist Parties. Nov 08, 2025
Why most of them are wrong and how they can do better
(freely available on the author’s Substack)
Matt Grossmann & David A. Hopkins: Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. Cambridge UP, 2024
Musa al-Gharbi: We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Princeton UP, October 2024
Musa al-Gharbi: There’s No Reason to Be Smug About the Partisan “Diploma Divide.” Aug 27, 2019
(freely available on the author’s Substack)
Musa al-Gharbi: Book announcement: Those People, Princeton UP, forthcoming in late 2026. June 16, 2025
(the announcement, with some preview of its content, is freely available on the author’s Substack)
Herbert P. Kitschelt & Philipp Rehm: Polarity Reversal: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of Partisan Support in Knowledge Societies. Politics & Society, Dec. 2023, 51(4), pp. 520–566
Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano & Thomas Piketty: How politics became a contest dominated by two kinds of elite. The Guardian, Aug 5, 2021
Studying hundreds of elections, we found that political parties increasingly cater to only the well educated and the rich
Andrew Sullivan: We All Live on Campus Now. New York Magazine, Feb 9, 2018
Ilana Redstone & John Villasenor: Unassailable ideas: How unwritten rules and social media shape discourse in American higher education. Oxford UP, 2020
Yascha Mounk: The identity trap: a story of ideas and power in our time. Penguin, 2023
Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” was not a great moment for her.
But here we are, on May 30, 2026. Vile is not too strong a word to describe Trump, and yet at least 30 percent of voters are still standing by their man. What is wrong with these people? Lots, actually.
But one answer is that they suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I won’t post the link here, but if you want to read about the true meaning of that term, go look for my Medium piece called “Trump Derangement Syndrome – The true meaning of the expression.” Some of my Medium pieces are behind a paywall, but this Trump piece is free for all to read. (and while you’re there, you may want to rea
Thanks for the reading list. Now, permit me to recommend some books:
“The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump” (second edition) by Corey Robin
“Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber” by Andy Borowitz (revised, paperback edition)
“The Cruelty is the Point: Why Trump’s America Endures” by Adam Serwer (revised, paperback edition)
For broader political takes, there’s “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” by Ruth Ben-Ghiat and “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them” by Jason Stanley.
And then there’s Timothy Snyder’s breezy
“I can’t imagine President Harris invading Iran…”
Me neither. That’s why I voted for Trump.
A very WEIT moshpit above, complete with the boss’ weigh-ins. 🙂
Goodness, as a twitter/X crackhead I spend too much time on that but the commentary here is orders of magnitude better than 90% of twitter.
Esteemed WEITers, Leslie, Barry, Doug and the Boss: do you think that the realignment of parties is the central issue here?
The smartest people I know, read, follow and follow me seem to have some common ground in that the Dem party (which MANY of us voted for, always) has become unhinged and extreme?
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Well, David you have a choice: you can trust your lying eyes (figuratively speaking – literally, I mean study survey and focus group data, etc.) or believe, like commenter Barry Lyon here, or political journalist Chris Hayes from MS Now, Kamala Harris, the women from The View, etc., believe that the Dems don’t have to change (save maybe their next candidate should go on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the Dems get on TikTok, the Dems raise more money than Kamala did, recruit more celebrities who will then berate ordinary folks for their misinformed policy views, for clinging to their guns and bibles, etc.).
I think the second group of people is in denial about what ails the Dems and how they can re-establish a strong electoral position in a durable manner. Right now, the Dems count on taking advantage of the standard thermostatic reaction of voters to the party in power (and in favor of the party in the minority) and of Trump’s blunders.
Unfortunately, as a prediction of what’s happening, I think senior political analyst Ruy Teixeira has it right:
The mindset that has been ruling the Democratic Party for the last 10 years satirized:
Saturday Night Live – The Bubble (“A planned community of like-minded freethinkers, and no one else.” “It’s Brooklyn (in New York City), with a bubble on it.”). 2016, 2:20 mins
The Onion – Trump Voter Feels Betrayed By President After Reading 800 Pages Of Queer Feminist Theory. 2017, 2 mins
[an older white male voter, from a small steel-town in Pennsylvania, reflects on the 2016 US presidential election won by Donald Trump]
The Onion – White Woman Explains Why As An Anti-Racist Ally She Refuses To Say Any Word That Starts With ‘N’. 2023, 3 mins
Pretty good! A few clunker jokes (that didn’t get laughs), but the message got through.
Apparently the way to get Democrats elected is simply to call everyone who voted for Trump an idiot, and to idolize the last loser as someone who brought JOY to the world. That is not going to work. Do you think I just fell out of a coconut tree?
Why will that not work? (sarcasm alert)
But I do see that Jerry probably agrees with one of the smartest minds in Canada, namely University of Toronto philosophy professor Joseph Heath (Ph.D. from Northwestern, in Illinios, just outside of Chicago, I take it), who recently wrote:
Come to think of it: Heath sounds like Louisiana’s James Carville (the well-known 81-year old political strategist of the Democratic Party).
Or will the Dems be saved by AOC and Zohran Mamdani – I mean they do have good looks. That should count for something. (We’ll have the answer after 3 more limited commercial interruptions.)
Okay, everybody is ignoring the posting rules. One more comment below this one by somebody who has posted too many times will lead to moderation.
Thank you.
Peter, please read the posting rules.
Or to call all Trump voters racists and White supremacists. That’s what they do on Reddit. Even the non-white ones. Because even People of Color can absorb racist messaging and become White supremacists according to Redditors. Such is the extreme power of White Supremacism.
Barry’s diatribe has but one theme: Trump is a bad man. OK, fair enough. But many voters vote on the basis of policies. And that was the theme of Frank’s comment. Policies such as allowing millions of unvetted illegals into the country, men in women’s sports and locker rooms, race-based discrimination and DEI, denial of biological reality, attempts to manipulate the language, guilt-tripping over the country’s past, and others were extremely unpopular among the voters. Hence Trump despite his obvious flaws was chosen over the disliked status quo advocated by Kamala, who said she would not change any Biden policy.
As for “idiocracy” the best example of that is how so many young people in the West are so easily manipulated by barbarian Islamist propaganda, but that is a topic for another day.
I have two Jewish friends who voted for Trump because he is pro-Israel and for no other reason. He could have been Satan himself but they still would have voted for him because the Dems are turning antisemitic.
“The key to liberal democracy being able to come back is to get rid of the perception that we have allowed to grow, that the entire Democratic Party is committed to a series of very drastic social reconstructions that go beyond the politically acceptable.”
Unfortunately, it is more than a perception. One drastic social reconstruction after another. A tribalism that views any praise of Trump as an embrace of the whole man and his agenda. Add a dash each of insufferable elitism, moral certitude, and “we’re the smart people” arrogance, and you get the current Democratic Party. It really doesn’t matter whether some of the elected officials don’t privately believe that boys can be girls: they vote as though they do believe it. And then treat you as ignorant or evil if you don’t.
I don’t have a solution to any of this. Many educated Democrats are little different from uneducated MAGA voters in supporting whatever or whomever they think it takes to put up a win for their team. And the my-side bias to which highly-educated people are particularly prone means they will spin all sorts of rationalizations that mask the basic social pressures underlying the tribal dynamics. Politicians aren’t the only ones who hold their finger in the wind. The working-class is less dependent on praise of peers for professional advancement; perhaps that’s why they more easily flee a party that has lost its bearings and is unrecognizable from that of even 30 years ago. I’ll wager you can find far more openly-expressed diversity of thought in the foxhole and the repair shop than in almost any academic department, newsroom, publishing house, NGO, or a host of other professional organizations.
I never thought I would get nostalgic for either Bill Clinton or George H. W. Bush. I would gladly take either over any of our current offerings. And I would unhesitatingly take the rough-and-tumble of our experiment in self-governance over the rule of Barry and his philosopher kings.
In Comment #3, Mike wrote:
Well put.
Idiocracy-wise, I must point out that Trump is building an MMA cage on the south lawn of the White House.
Haha yes I saw that too!
Treading cautiously and (I hope) non-partisanly and only because of David A’s gracious invitation.
About reframing….
I might suggest a reframing not so much of the parties — none of my business — but rather of one’s relationship with the parties. Political parties are private clubs organized by their members for the one purpose of achieving power for their members by getting their members elected to public office. (To keep on with paraphrasing Lincoln, the Legislature is then of their members.) The important point here is that unless you are a member of the club, an insider like an executive in the party’s National Committee, an important donor, or an operative who can deliver votes from key constituencies, you and your own personal political views aren’t important to the club.
I often hear American friends lamenting about how we can help “our” party find its way. That is a framing error. Unless you are an insider, it is no more “your” party than the Chicago Cubs or the Detroit Red Wings are “your” team. They are clubs trying to sell you something, like Amway, or life insurance. It follows that nothing you say to them can change their minds on what they think is the path to success as measured by the power that flows to the insiders. The only thing you can do is not vote for them. Even better is to vote against them because if the turnout is really low, they might still win and interpret that as success, which it would be as measured in politics.
Politics just doesn’t matter very much to most people. If the “wrong” candidate wins, honest to Pete it doesn’t make a hill of beans difference to aught but the club members. But four or eight or twelve years in the political wilderness does focus the mind. That’s all you can do as a voter. The United States of America is fundamentally ungovernable and fundamentally conservative. That’s a good thing. I just think you have to be willing to vote against a party you’ve voted for for a long long time. You’re an outsider, you’re not in their club, they don’t care about you, and it doesn’t hurt if the other side gets in.
Far as I can tell, Trump isn’t going to be on the ballot come 2028. Looks to me like it will be Rubio vs Harris.
As a classic liberal, there are a lot of progressive positions I just can’t stomach – DEI based on CRT, anti-Israel, gender/queer supremacy over women’s rights, etc. I’ll be scrutinizing Rubio’s platform closely. I really hope he will not be endorsing Trump’s energy/environment policy.
The 2028 presidential election may be the first time I vote Republican.
There’s many reasons I loathe Trump, the financial grifting examples are the biggest. Examples being, The Trump Bible, NFTs, Golden Sneakers, Crypto-currencies, etc… However, in the last year, the Dems are losing me more and more. I’m glad the current regime is trying to bury wokeness, which is a scourge on American society. As I witness my neighborhood turn into “Little Mogadishu, Mexico, Guatemala, etc…” I’m thrilled to see ICE making a visible effort. I’m one of those Americans who hopes they deport every single illegal immigrant back to wherever they came from. They are a drain on our society if they can’t work here legally and pay taxes. From my perspective, the biggest problem ICE had was from the blue haired, white, liberal crowd who arrived looking to use their vehicles as weapons in a fight with armed federal agents. Even though it was 46 years late, I’m also glad the Trump presidency did something concrete about Iran. For too long, we’ve tolerated the Iranian government’s official position being “Death to America and Death to Israel” along with their state sponsoring of terrorist proxies. ICE and DHS also need to focus more on the college and mosque agitators. We’re not witnessing freedom of speech or religion but instead an incitement to destroy our democratic institutions and we shouldn’t tolerate them to live here and espouse their hate filled, anti-American views. If they hate America so much, show them the door! Having said all that, I don’t consider myself an “America, love it or leave it” person. Spend some time over at the MEMRI website and you’ll see there really is a large, organized group of radical Islamists taking root in the West. I don’t expect them to love America, just to not actively espouse and plot our downfall. When they use that kind of rhetoric, kick their hineys out.