#How Trump changed Democrats and other commentary

Polling whiz: How Don Changed Democrats

Democrats spent the last four years agonizing over how they lost to Donald Trump and how to rejigger their appeal to win again, notes FiveThirtyEight’s Perry Bacon, Jr. “We now have a pretty detailed picture of where the Democratic Party landed”: Post-Trump, “a multiracial group of Obama-style Democrats are in charge.” These Dems are solidly left of center, but “mostly from the ideological middle of the party”; they’re establishment types who generally “haven’t rocked the boat” much. Yet their aim now is to “enact more leftward-leaning policies — compared to the Obama administration, in particular — on both economic and racial issues.” Its establishment pedigree notwithstanding, this party is thus “perhaps the most left-leaning since the days of President Lyndon Johnson.”

Media watch: The Right’s Porn Problem 

At National Review, Kevin Williamson observes that the Internet changed pornography and political journalism in “almost exactly” the same way: “Content became largely free,” and “revenue crashed.” And though “the quality of the product may have declined,” it became “more outlandish and outrageous, which is what matters most.” Like the smut biz, political journalism sells “titillation” — usually not the sexual kind, “but people get an emotional charge” in seeing rivals criticized or insulted, and readers “seek out more extreme, more outrageous” material. Now conservative talk-radio networks are trying to “reinvent themselves” to compete with the “QAnon-dominated post-Trump market” in a “race to the bottom.” Similarly, the Republican Party is trying to figure out how to “include both QAnon kooks” and moderates. Alas, “this house cannot long endure half-kook and half-conservative.”

Watchdog: NY’s Runaway Medicaid Growth

Despite a “once-in-a-century pandemic” that “decimated” revenues, Gov. Cuomo’s Medicaid budget is barely changing, with 4.7 percent growth planned for next year, vs. 4.5 percent this year and 4.7 percent last year, warns the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond. Yet “steady” doesn’t mean “sustainable” growth. “Even when the economy was strong,” Medicaid’s expansion was “throwing the state budget out of balance.” Now, facing multibillion-dollar gaps, “the state can afford it even less,” yet the gov makes “little effort to apply the brakes.” Cuomo’s betting Team Biden will send New York billions more, “relying on short-term relief” to “put off a necessary reckoning.” But unless he and lawmakers deal with the problem now, they’ll “only have to cut deeper when the temporary federal money inevitably goes away.”

Conservative: H’wood’s China-Love Will Deepen

“In 2020, ticket sales at the Chinese box office surpassed the North American box office,” reports The Federalist’s Emily Jashinsky, “making China the world’s top moviegoing market.” Yet even before the pandemic, major studios were desperate to kowtow to Chinese Communist sensibilities, censoring movies and even inserting pro-Beijing propaganda. Now, “the accelerated shift to streaming means insiders expect the domestic box office” may never “fully recover,” making the Chinese market even more crucial for Hollywood dream makers. The movie moguls, of course, don’t seem to mind the hypocrisies: “They wax sanctimonious about American politics, profiting off the media’s fawning coverage of it, while maintaining a calculated silence on the CCP to boost their bank accounts.”

Culture critic: Virtue Hoarders’ Phony Elitism

Catherine Liu’s new book, “Virtue Hoarders,” blasts the “professional-managerial class (PMC), which dominates ‘political organizations, publishing, media, private foundations, think tanks, and the university,’ ” for its baseless but “unshakeable sense of superiority to ordinary-working class people,” Philip Hammond at Spiked relates. Liu riducles “the pretentiousness of PMC self-experimentation” and charges that the “ ‘vanguard corps of PMC elites’ have been actively undermining professional integrity,” rather than defending “the values of scholarship and human service” they claim set them apart. They push an elitist society and resist “the populist hopes of recent years,” which makes the book a timely “part of a larger discussion that has rumbled on over the past four years.” It’s a discussion that clearly “needs to be had.” — Compiled by The Post Editorial Board