Remember that slogan “It’s the economy, stupid” coined by James Carville during Bill Clinton’s 1992 election campaign? It epitomized the Democrat political supremacy during the ’90s and it never stopped being smugly cited by those on the left.
Well, right now, the equivalent Democrat slogan is “It’s the identity, stupid.” Except instead of winning Democrats elections, it’s an increasingly significant factor in why they’re losing them. A pivot towards the economy helped Bill. An obsession with identity politics hindered Hillary.
I won’t rehash how the Democrats have been derailed by their decade-long fixation with transgender bathrooms, marriage equality and divisive racial politics except to note that, by my reckoning, Obama will be remembered by historians for having left five key legacies: Obamacare, a lackluster economic record, killing Osama Bin Laden, rampant social liberalism and having engineered the election of Trump.
Nobody has dared mention this to Obama in his fawning exit TV interviews but clearly the governing style and policy priorities of the 44th President paved the way for the election of the 45th. By governing from such a leftist perspective, Obama polarized the nation in ways that made possible the turbulent events of the last 18 months.
Right now the Democrats are so busy saying to each other “this is not a normal President” or self-righteously refusing to support Trump before he’s even taken office that they conveniently forget they have long accused us Republicans (admittedly with some justification) of being against Obama from the outset.
I’m not expecting people who didn’t vote for Trump to treat him like he’s some kind of superhero. But his opponents must stop treating him like he’s the lead in a horror movie remake of Edward Scissorhands and talking about his supporters as though they are Satan’s spawn.
Did you see the recent Bob and Sally meme? It was a much-needed call for bipartisanship: “This is Bob. He voted for Trump. This is Bob’s friend Sally. Sally voted for Clinton. Bob & Sally are still friends, because Bob and Sally are both adults. Be like Bob and Sally.”
Liberal thinker Amy Brann has amended the meme, and her mean-spirited post got shared 70,000 times on Facebook. She wrote:” Sally feels betrayed by Bob because he voted for someone who: mocked the disabled, bullied the media, made racist comments, was accused by many women of sexual assault, degraded an entire religion, and was the candidate of the KKK. She thinks even if Bob isn’t a racist, abelist, misogynistic, xenophobic sexual predator, he was fine voting for one. This distresses her.
“Sally realizes Bob never really shared her values. She believes her life would be better off without someone who places Trump’s showmanship over common human decency. Sally won’t normalize Trump. She refuses to be gaslit.”
Well, obviously, Bob and Sally’s friendship should be able to survive political differences of opinion, and if Sally is a genuine liberal she would tolerate Bob voting for Trump on the grounds that backing a different political horse doesn’t make him a bad person.
I’m well aware that for us conservatives liberals freaking out on social media supplies a fun, even satisfying, spectacle on a primal level. The gif that keeps on giving, you might call it. But the shrillness from the other side is not doing any of us any favors.
Putting the needs of their interest groups before ideas, people or imaginative policies is damaging the time-honored two-party democratic system. The Republican President might be the one who revealed he likes “grabbing [women] by the pussy” but it’s the Democrats who are fatally ignoring the body politic.
Their position on close to everything is absurd. When not found pitting Bob against Sally, they’re busy defending the mainstream media (while casually ignoring the fact that Hillary was probably the least press-friendly candidate of modern times).
Liberals need to start fighting Republicans on policies and drop the PC obsession. They’ve broadly won the culture war anyway so why are they even fighting these battles? Because I guess it’s easier in the short-term to deify Planned Parenthood than it is to come up with winning tax proposals that mean something to middle America.
But everybody would benefit if they got with the program (and I’m not talking about LGBTQ programs at universities or safe spaces to protect the next generation of left-wing ‘thinkers’ from the reality that Trump just got elected).
Bitter liberal commentators and historians often said Reagan was a “lucky” President. Actually Trump is much luckier than the Gipper and not just because his Republican presidential rivals proved so useless at responding to his message or movement.
Trump’s enemies on the left continue to spew the same old apocalyptic insults at him—partly you suspect because he is so withering about their pet causes, many of which do not speak to the silent majority.
This might be lucky for Trump. But the colossal absence of effective Democrat thinking is not so lucky for the rest of us.