All the right people are responding to the “vibe” of the Harris campaign. But I tend to look for a different “vibe”: what is the subliminal message from our liberal friends?

For instance, Oliver Wiseman at the Free Press wonders why Trump isn’t running away with the election. Maybe because the regime media is pushing Kamala Harris as Wonder Girl on us? And because the Democrats have spent the last eight years dirtying up Trump with everything from Russia to lawfare?

Or there is Andrew Sullivan:

we have to choose between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the venal or the vacuous, the awful or the empty, the malignant or the mediocre.

Yes, Harris is “vacuous… empty… mediocre”, but Trump! “He has broken the norm… accepting the results of an election.”

Yep. All is not sweetness and light in Liberal-land. They aren’t admitting it to themselves, or to each other. But they can feel the “vibes.”

Want to know what your problem is, dear liberal friends? No, I didn’t think you did. But I’ll go ahead anyway.

Your problem is that you refuse to learn from your mistakes. (Mistakes? What mistakes? We liberals are the educated ones, the experts, the evolved ones…)

Mistake #1: Botching the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The whole point of central banking -- that you progressives created in 1913 -- is to be the lender of last resort. So you let 659 banks fail in 1929, 1,350 in 1930, 2,293 in 1931, 1,453 in 1932, and 4,000 in 1933. Then FDR cranked government spending up into the stratosphere and, experts agree, extended the Depression by seven years.

But to this very day, you liberals think you saved the U.S. from a fate worse than death in the 1930s.

Mistake #2: 1970s Stagflation. Sure, the Bretton Woods monetary stitch-up of 1944 was bound to collapse eventually. Pity that Joan, wife of Vice-President Walter Mondale, recommended G. William Miller for chairman of the Fed in 1978, and he botched inflation. But at least Paul Volcker, backed by an amiable dunce, Ronald Reagan, showed us how to do it in 1979-81. Then with blistering interest rates and Ronald Reagan’s tax rate cuts the 1981-82 recession turned into an amazing boom, that Democrats to this day disparage as “trickle-down economics.”

Mistake #3: Botching the Crash of 2008. You’d think the disaster of the failing banks after 1929 would have taught the Fed a lesson. But in 2008, as the liar-loan real-estate boom of the 2000s collapsed, Little Ben Bernanke said he didn’t have the authority to bail out Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Then America’s First Black President went ahead and attempted to get out of the Great Recession with another New Deal and big-time spending. It took the tax-rate cuts of the “venal… awful… malignant” Donald Trump to get the economy going again.

Mistake #4: Botching COVID. I suppose that if you are a bureaucrat manager in the healthcare bureaucracy everyone agrees that it’s a good idea to shut the country down to protect everyone from a pandemic. That was the first mistake, on Trump’s watch. Then the Fed increased the money supply by 40 percent over two years to give everyone free checks while they sat at home waiting out the pandemic. That was the second mistake. Then the Biden administration decided to keep the free checks going for another year and also bust the budget with the Green New Deal. That was the third mistake. Really: what were they thinking?

The four Mistakes I listed above were failures of the experts. Experts are supposed to know how to avoid depressions, how to nip inflation in the bud, how to manage pandemics without tanking the economy. But they don’t. “Never trust experts,” said Britain’s Lord Salisbury.

But I want to go bigger. The reason that Wiseman and Sullivan are nervous is because of the “vibe.” Something is off. And at the gut level, you could note two songs of note hitting the charts: “Fighter,” in the country style, and “Bulletproof Trump” in the hip-hop style.

And bigger still. How come the civil rights era didn’t blossom into a new era of sweetness and light? How come the presidency of the First Black President was an economic blah and ended up with the presidency of the “venal… awful… malignant” Trump instead of the First Woman President? How come the 2020 presidential nomination had to be sensibly curated by wise political experts? How come the reelection campaign of Scranton Joe in 2024 had to be aborted by the same wise political experts? And how come the just and compassionate policy of successfully assimilating migrants with the help of devoted activists from the nation’s best NGOs got to be humiliated by racist-sexist-homophobe deplorables and their crude AI-generated cat memes?

Do you see the problem, seen from the perspective of our liberal friends? I used to feel sorry for them.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: AT via Magic Studio