"Democrats in Disarray" has the sound of a handy media meme, somewhat akin to "Republicans in Retreat," and perhaps just as reliable. Mainstream media outlets used the latter quite a bit in 2009 and 2010, just before Republicans scored their biggest midterm win in a century and reset state-level legislatures for a generation. Beware the meme, dudes.

In this case, though, the Wall Street Journal could be on more solid ground with the former. Today, the WSJ argues that not only are Democrats clearly not connecting with voters, they aren't even connecting much with each other. Failure in this case has a thousand fathers, contra to conventional wisdom, and all of them apparently clueless:

Still reeling from its loss in November, the party has found little consensus on a message or direction. Frustrations abound with Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, as Trump tries to winnow federal agencies, attempts to freeze congressionally appropriated funding and floats plans to occupy foreign territory, over objections from Democrats.

The first weeks of the Trump administration have brought the reality of Democrats’ situation into a harsh light, according to conversations with more than 20 operatives and elected officials. Party members and officials fall broadly into two camps, said those familiar with such discussions. One camp has wanted to take a cautious approach, and the other has wanted to be more aggressive. But both are vexed.

About 10 days ago, Schumer was on a private call with governors, who urged him to unify senators in fighting back against Trump’s nominees. The fact that some of Trump’s cabinet nominees received Democratic votes angered many in the party.

If this is the status of their internal deliberations -- whether a Senate Democrat should have voted for Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum -- then they're worse off than we imagined. All they recognize at the moment is their impotence and have not yet even begun to recognize its source. 

In one sense, that's understandable -- to a point. Democrats face a political environment unlike any they have seen in decades at least, and their credibility with voters has absolutely cratered in the wake of the Joe Biden Senility Cover-Up Scandal. The most recent Quinnipiac poll puts their favorability at 31/57, an all-time low, while Republicans score a more respectable 43/45. Why?

• "A majority of voters (60 percent) approve of sending U.S. troops to the southern border with Mexico to enforce border security, while 36 percent disapprove."
• On deportations, 44% support deporting all illegal aliens, and another 39% support deporting those convicted of crimes. Only six percent — six percent — oppose deportations.
• Sixty percent support sending the military to the southern border to secure it. Among independents, it’s 57/40, and even 29% of Democrats support that move.

Issue sets like immigration and foreign policy are one reason for the disarray. Democrats allowed themselves to get on the fringe on all of them, content in the knowledge that the progressive-elite clique that runs the media, Academia, and the bureaucracy had their back. What Democrats still have failed to recognize is that voters have lost trust not just in Democrats but in all of these institutions, to the point of existential crisis for all of them, not just the Democrats.

And that is because people finally got fed up with all of these institutions lying to and betraying them. That became most acute during the Joe Biden Regency, when anyone with eyes and ears understood that Biden was not in charge of anything, including his stage directions. He spent 40% of his presidency snoring on Rehoboth Beach while the bureaucracies and the Protection Racket Media insisted that Biden was "Sharp As A Tack!®" and "His Best Version" and not at all under orders from the Easter Bunny to get off the rope line. The media regurgitated the bureaucratic cabal's lies about "cheap fakes" making Biden look bad, rather than Biden clearly being incompetent in a way that anyone with an aging relative immediately grasped. 

And when that blew up in their face on June 27, the same cabal of Democrats, bureaucrats, and Academiacrats insisted that Kamala Harris was simply brilliant and Oh So Ready for the mantle of leadership, despite what everyone's eyes and ears recognized as another form of incompetence. 

It's not just the lying, either. Dems are in disarray because they have become and stubbornly remain the Party Of The Bureaucratic State that everyone else hates. They refuse to peek out of their own bubble long enough to grasp just how deeply American voters despise these corrupt institutions, and how popular Trump's efforts to rip away their secrecy and dismantle them has been and will continue to be. 

Let's put this in literary terms. Democrats have sunk all of their power into the unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy in a way that parallels the One Ring in Tolkien's masterpiece LOTR trilogy. Now that the bureaucratic state has begun approaching Mount Doom, Democrats seem to have lost all sense of purpose and cohesion, because that is their only point of cohesion and purpose. 

Disarray may put this mildly. Right now, there is some level of cohesion in launching bizarre legal challenges that argue to allow civil servants the right to reject the agenda of a duly elected president and his confirmed appointees in the executive branch, which makes their name a bitter irony and won't make them any more popular with voters. Nor will it work in the long run, when courts reject the idea that unelected bureaucrats' agendas and policies trump those of a duly elected Trump and his team.

 When that falls apart and Democrats end up trying to explain why some schlub at the Department of Education can essentially can an Education Secretary rather than the other way around, they will face an even more bitter reckoning in the midterms. Especially if Trump can maintain this discipline and focus on the issues that matter most. And right now, the biggest issue is to force accountability on a bureaucratic state that has long been protected from it by deceitful Democrats.

Also, the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today's show features:

•  The first Trump Bowl may have been a bust on the field, but it was a boon for Donald Trump and conservatives. 
• Andrew Malcolm and I discuss the retreat of wokery, Trump's enthusiastic reception, and a little bit about the game too. 
• We also discuss Trump's newfound popularity as a leader, and why he's starting off with a huge boost in job approval.  

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!