New Year's With Thomas Mills, Year of Our Lord 2025

 

"For better or worse, campaigns are no longer restricted to the year of the election and they aren’t made in the context of a media environment. They are about creating the media environment itself."

--Thomas Mills, "The two party mess"

Thomas Mills

PoliticsNC founder Thomas Mills has deep institutional knowledge of the workings of both the national and the North Carolina Democratic parties. Plus he's a wise head, a strategist with foxhole experience, so I tend to pay attention to his misgivings and his proposed remedies.

"Our two party system is struggling. We may have outgrown it as a country, but changing it is more difficult than reforming it. Democrats are operating under control of a political elite that knows how government and governing work, but excludes or alienates too many people from the process. Republicans have become a party of people who either want to plunder the system or burn it down. Their elites have surrendered power to the mob. One of the parties needs to fix itself."

Ouch. If "knowing how government and governing work" equals "educated"-- in that the very fact of education itself puts you in a higher class of society that knows stuff -- and if your experience with "educated elites" has revealed any level of social snobbery, then, yes, Democratic political elites are to blame and maybe the whole Democratic enterprise is doomed. Unless we can visit again our Christian humility.

Without any hesitation or doubt, I can accept that I'm not only a "political elite" but also an educated political elite, and I certainly admit that our local demographic of high educational attainment makes a huge difference in how we run campaigns. Also agreed -- that highly educated people sometimes don't know how to talk to other people, that we've lost touch with roots, that we're grown way too addicted to the same money that corrupts everyone eventually -- dependence on the big-rollers. Going gussied up in the circles where elites go to ingratiate themselves is not a good look for a party that claims allegiance to "the people." It's a behavioral problem. And it's a fact. 

Mills wants Democrats to relearn honesty (which also implies authenticity):

"Democrats should have surrogates going on Joe Rogan’s show to talk about the H-1B visa dispute, making sure people understand the contempt that Trump’s billionaire buddies have for working Americans. They should recruit people from outside politics to deliver the messages on social media and podcasts. And they need to deploy Pete Buttigieg. Hell, give him his own podcast. The legacy media is no longer reaching enough Americans to shape elections and Democrats should quit relying on it to inform the public.

I'm too old and worn-out now to be in that vanguard. Intelligence and education are two separate and different things. Some of the smartest I've known have been relatively un- or under-educated, and some of the dumbest people on the planet are "academics." I'd recommend that educated progressives stop making fun of grammatical flubs, stop defining and denigrating their supposed enemies as yahoos, stop acting like snobs and know-it-alls and try to reclaim the humility we learned about in Sunday School.

Mills's Substack column, PoliticsNC, is well worth subscribing to.