'Democrats are looking at empathy and reasoned discourse in the rearview mirror,' says Neil Oliver

Remember back in 2016 when Hillary Clinton coined her line about Trump supporters being a basket of deplorables? Basket of deplorables is arguably a more polished, erudite line.

It may be the product of some thought in advance, which probably makes it even worse than the garbage adlib, but the sentiment is the same. For years now, the Democratic Party of the US, once upon a time the party of the people, has made it abundantly clear what it thinks of those who have the temerity to not vote Democrat.

The deplorable garbage. They've recently been calling Donald Trump Adolf Hitler, saying he's a would be tyrant. They've been defaming his supporters as Nazis.

No matter how they spin it, these sentiments are not pretty. They are, however, revealing of the fat elite. Democrats are looking at empathy and reasoned discourse in the rearview mirror. All else in their repertoire has failed so they have hit the buffers of plain old playground name calling.

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The Democrat Party, the party of John F Kennedy, who said many things, including "when power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses."

The party that once hallowed that richness and diversity of humankind, or at least appeared to, now blatantly seize alternative points of view and those who might hold them as deplorable garbage. Now that's quite the evolution. That's quite the fall from grace.

It's easy to laugh at cheap jibes but it matters to notice where they come from. They come from a place where the spoiled, indulged, rich and powerful have so persuaded themselves of their own rightness, their own entitlement to power.

That anyone and everyone who sees the world differently must have something wrong with them, must be by nature, inferior. Must be an infestation of something unwanted in need of eradication. I mean, what do you do with garbage except bury or burn it?

Dropping the mask and seeing out loud that those opposed to your point of view are stupid and deficient, is only the end point of a long process of holding other people in contempt.

The Democratic Party was the party of slavery. The Democrat Party fought the Civil War to maintain slavery. There is a case to be made that in cosying up to civil rights in the 20th century, the Democrats swapped the idea of owning black Americans for persuading black Americans. They should see themselves as dependent, always and only on the Democratic Party.

So instead of owner and property, the relationship was manipulated and metamorphosed into one of parent and child, helpless child. Both positions come from a place of seeing others as less. You saw it clearly enough in 2020, when Joe Biden told Black American listeners to a radio show that he was taking part in. Well, the following.

"Do you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump then you ain't black?"

I can't get over those words. The assumption of ownership of the right to tell others what to do.

The US political elite are not stupid people. In the frustration with a perceived threat to their presumed right to rule, they've opted for stupid statements and sentiments. The problem is as old as time in that power corrupts. It has corrupted those elites who have persuaded themselves of their innate superiority.

This is what happens when you take stupidity and cook it low and slow for generations. You end up with what we see a thick stock of stupid in its most concentrated form. The New York Times this week just passed, saw fit to try and bully YouTube into suppressing Conservative voices like Tucker Carlson, like Ben Shapiro.

Then when Jeff Bezos of Amazon said raters on his newspaper title, The Washington Post couldn't openly endorse Kamala Harris within his pages writers, including former columnist and editor at large Robert Kagan, spit their dummies out and stomped off in a huff.

Some of the stupid in politics, not just in the US but everywhere, is Marxism. One of the stupidest ideas of all time, if you ask me. Karl Marx was no economist. He was a would be theologian hoping to cook up a new religion. He filched and scrounged off family and friends his whole life.

For all that he wrote about it he never made any capital. If you spent other people's capital on fine food and cigars. He knocked up the help behind his wife's back and abandoned the boy.

Marxism is the gift that keeps on taking. The worst of what has become of us left liberal politics is that it's utterly blind to the value of the variety of humanity. Rather than see potential in that variety, it sees only difference the unwanted, intolerable. Other.

A.J. Liebling was a US writer who wrote about all sorts of politics, boxing, food, time spent in Paris in the 1930s. I think it taught him something profound. He saw that the best of food was the product of seeing the potential in the most humble of ingredients, given the chance to give all they had to give.

And he wrote "a man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante." This is not because all millionaires are stupid, but because they are not impelled to experiment. The hereditary political elites in the US, but also in Britain, in Europe, are not just dilettantes, they are spoiled brats.

Liebling wrote that they suffer the crippling affliction of affluence, and so they look at those who disagree with them, who simply do not care for them and see deplorable garbage, and dismiss black Americans who don't vote Democrat as nothing more or less than plain stupid, not even properly black

I honestly don't know how Democrats, including white Democrats, can hear themselves saying these things and not just cuddle up and blow away in the wind in utter shame. Everywhere we see parties that once claimed to champion the people, the little guy, instead going out of the way to crush those people's souls instead.

Here in Britain, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivered her first budget. Well, as far as I can see, it's dismissed working aspirational people as well, only for dulling their pain with slightly cheaper beer while having what little remains of their hard won income robbed away and sent for laundering through the charnel house of Ukraine forever.

The US political elite, like ours here in Britain, are often hard to listen to now. Excruciatingly so. Name calling and spite. Corruption laid bare if not displayed with pride. Here's the thing. Recall, if you will, how it used to be when a politician like Abraham Lincoln could and would quote the Bible and remained his fellow citizens, that "a house divided against itself cannot stand" how quickly they forget what you said. Those were the days.