Eventually, the cries of the rights will peter out because they’ve already lost, they have no hope of changing the outcome and their Fearless Leader will, after instructing Stephen Miller to trash the West Wing, slink away before the Secret Service unceremoniously assists Trump’s exist. Let it go, kids. He’s gone. The war is over. Trump lost.
But the next war has already begun.
Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) went ballistic on the party’s left wing during a conference call Thursday, blaming her unexpectedly narrow reelection on calls to “defund the police” and “socialism.” “We do not need to use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” she said. Spanberger is right as a matter of political strategy, but she’s delusional if she thinks the party’s left is going to go quietly.
And no lesser a player as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez made that clear in her response.
So the whole “progressivism is bad” argument just doesn’t have any compelling evidence that I’ve seen. When it comes to “Defund” & “Socialism” attacks, people need to realize these are racial resentment attacks. You’re not gonna make that go away. You can make it less effective.
This should come as no surprise, as it’s been made abundantly clear that anything short of reinventing America as a Woke Utopia is racist. But there is some compelling evidence. Trump didn’t lose by ten points, no less 80-20% as he should have. The Republicans gains House seats and didn’t lose the Senate, although it remains to be seen whether they won the Senate based on the Georgia runoff. In other words, this was no runaway condemnation of Trump, Republicans or conservatism. At best, Biden eked out a win by the skin of his very long teeth.
And then there’s Biden. Old. White. Man. Not Sanders. Not Warren. Surely not Kamala Harris. David Brooks sums up the obvious.
The image of a possible future G.O.P. emerged — a multiracial working-class party. Republicans made surprising gains among Latinos, African-Americans and Muslims. Trump won the largest share of the nonwhite vote of any Republican candidate in 60 years. That wasn’t done by Trumpian race-baiting but because of the party’s reputation for championing personal agency and personal responsibility, and for boosting small businesses and economic growth. That can be built on.
Are black and Hispanic voters big Trump fans, or big progressive haters? Just as Biden’s campaign was based on one argument, “I’m not Trump,” Trump’s allure to those not white supremacists was “I’m all that stands between you and these crazy social justice warriors.”
The irony is that the woke believe they’re fighting for the sake of black and Hispanic voters, except they call the latter “Latinx,” which largely encapsulates the problem. Hispanics don’t want to be called Latinx, and really don’t want some unduly passionate white college kid to try to ram it down their throat. They want to be Americans. They want to be able to succeed. They know that will never happen with the subsistence wing, dedicated to empathy and mediocrity.
More compelling evidence, you say?
Meanwhile, voters told Democrats that they, too, would benefit if they played up policy and played down cultural concerns of their Portlandia/graduate-schooled/defund-the-police wing.
If there was ever going to be a Democratic blowout election, this was it — against an immoral candidate with a criminally incompetent record. But Democrats failed to pull it off.
This was a point that became obvious four years ago: never would the woke have a better opportunity to seize control of a nation than against the most vulgar, amoral, deceitful ignoramus. Their initial push was for their primary candidates, Bernie from the socialist perspective and liz from the critical theory perspective. Both lost, and they got stuck with the old institutionalist moderate, Joe. But they would choke back their vomit and vote Joe to rid themselves of the more evil candidate, no matter how bad the taste in their mouth.
As Spanberger said, the price of the left wing was high. It cost the Dems seats in the House. It cost the Dems likely control of the Senate. It almost cost them a presidency. But the unduly passionate don’t learn lessons easily because they’re just so darned passionate. Not only does that mean they don’t get the practical message, that their extremism almost returned Trump to office, but the political message. No thanks.
But if this election is to have lasting meaning, we cannot see a Biden campaign victory as license to cast away politics as a presence in our daily lives. We cannot succumb to the liberal temptation parodied by the comedian Kylie Brakeman to “vote for Biden so we can all get back to brunch.”
However effective it might have been at closing this race, this restorationist fantasy would be a terrible governing philosophy.
says this because America was horrible before Trump, the worst it had ever been, apparently forgetting that Obama was president. And recognizing that there is neither a mandate nor even the power to give the woke the hegemony to be the new boss, they’ve got a plan to accomplish what the nation and the Democratic Party has decisively rejected.
“A public health and economic crisis is not the time for incremental steps, small ideas or meekness,” Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, a leading Democrat in the House Progressive Caucus, told me. “Joe Biden can deliver on this from Day 1 with executive orders and administrative actions that cancel student debt, lower drug prices, strengthen workers’ rights and cut emissions.” The American Prospect recently published “277 Policies for Which Biden Need Not Ask Permission,” based on the results of the Biden-Sanders unity task force.
Does it matter, even dawn on them, that they didn’t win, that they don’t reflect the majority of a nation and that America wants a return to normality and not their childish insanity? Nope. Not for a moment.
Poor Joe Biden is going to find himself caught in a squeeze. While there are still serious problems to be addressed, he not only has to face Republicans trying to cut his throat in the front, but the progressives trying to shove in the knife from the back. Much as those of us who have spent careers fighting for serious effective change hope that Biden will have a successful presidency, the biggest obstacle will not be Biden’s ability to fend off the right, but to shut down the crazies to his left.
If the best we can do is return to having brunch, it won’t be Trump’s fault, but the woke who haven’t figured out yet that America isn’t interested in trading right tyranny for left. That’s the next battle for rational liberals. There will no doubt be plenty of very serious disputes with what Biden does when he assumes the presidency, but remember that the alternative to bad isn’t necessarily good. It can always get worse.
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