Progressives Doubling Down
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) campaigning for Hillary Clinton, October 2016. Warren is one of the leading forces in the Democratic Party.
Wikimedia Commons / Tim Pierce
Elizabeth Warren, one of the Democratic senators from Massachusetts and pictured above, offered something of an olive branch to Donald Trump in the wake of his election as president. The day after the election, she stated, “It’s no secret that I didn’t want to see Donald Trump win yesterday … But the integrity of our democracy is more important than any individual election, and those of us who supported Hillary Clinton will respect this result. President-elect Trump promised to rebuild our economy for working people, and I offer to put aside our differences and work with him on that task.” Yet, the conclusion that this statement was mere window dressing is unavoidable when you consider other declarations she made a day later. Picturing Trump as a racial bigot, she pledged the Democratic Party would “stand up to bigotry,” and that Trump “encouraged a toxic stew of hatred and fear” during his campaign.
We will fight back against attacks on Latinos, on African Americans, on women’s [sic], on Muslims, on immigrants, on disabled Americans, on anyone. … Whether Donald Trump sits in a glass tower or sits in the White House, we will not give an inch on this, not now, not ever. … his entire campaign was fueled on racism and bigotry. … We are not turning this country over to what Donald Trump has sold, we are just not.
Good Advice Ignored
Warren’s comments seem to exemplify how the the Democratic Party is going to react to their wide-ranging and deep defeat last week. Not only have the Republicans captured the White House and retained control of both the House and Senate, but they also now hold the governorships of two-thirds of the states, and in 50 percent of all the states they possess the governorship along with control of both houses of their state legislature; Democrats control only four states to this degree. The GOP now controls a record 69 of 99 state legislative chambers. Yet, Democrats like Elizabeth Warren show every sign of doubling down on the policies that have produced this profound defeat.
As defeat often inspires after a bitter, wide-ranging election loss, advice from all over has descended on the Democratic Party on how to react. What seems to have shocked the Democrats the most has been the Republican theft of working-class voters away from them. Bernie Sanders tells us he is “deeply humiliated” because of this loss. CNN reports his saying that
Donald Trump “very effectively” tapped into “the anger and angst and pain that many working class people are feeling,” the Vermont independent senator who challenged Clinton in the Democratic primary said on “CBS This Morning.”
When was the last time you heard any left-wing politician saying a Republican could appreciate the “anger and angst” of anyone? In the view of progressives, Republican politicians are supposed to be primarily the tools of crony-capitalists, totally incapable of empathizing with anyone.
Realizing they have lost the working class has generated a number of recommendations on how to get them back. In the view of many — including apparently Hillary Clinton — the working-class defection was due to the widely reported revolt against the malfeasance of the political, economic, academic, and main stream media elites. This is an opinion I endorsed and commented upon in the post Turning of the Tide of Dirigisme?, however my explanations for the rising of that revolt might be somewhat different from those of progressives. Progressives tend to limit the elites they criticize to crony-capitalists and Republican politicians; I emphasize the entire zoo of them, with the exception of Republican politicians, who I think bear minimal blame.
Not to be outdone in providing good advice for the Democratic Party, I fashioned my own in The Analysis of Reality. Unfortunately, I suspect the Democrats will not take my advice very seriously. Pity.
Democratic Battle Plans
Rather than responding to their defeat with introspection, Democrats seem much more intent to double down on the positions that got them into trouble in the first place. Foremost among these positions are the ones on racism and misogyny as social problems, on which Democrats are very much hung-up. No one will deny these hateful practices continue to some small degree, but these are problems that were fundamentally solved in the 1960s and 1970s and are addressable in courts of law. Remaining manifestations are more appropriately handled in the private interactions of individuals and groups of individuals, possibly with the assistance of the courts. As I have noted before, in any chaotic system — which human societies most definitely are — disturbances in local balances in the system are more effectively rebalanced at the local level.
As Jonah Goldberg has commented in the National Review, every time a Democrat turns around, he/she sees evidence of racism, and if what the Democrat sees is not racist, it must be misogynistic. At the very beginning of his essay, Goldberg reviews a few recent headlines and post titles:
“The Electoral College Is an Instrument of White Supremacy — and Sexism,” exclaimed Slate magazine.
CNN: “Math Is Racist: How Data Is Driving Inequality.” [Surely this title must have been written with tongue placed very firmly in cheek!]
From the NBC affiliate in Oklahoma: “‘To Be White Is to Be Racist,’ Norman Student Offended by Teacher’s Lecture.”
The evil racist genes of the American people must be very dominant indeed if this progressive view of social reality were true.
Back when racism and misogyny were real society-threatening ills, progressives could congratulate themselves for their virtue in opposing those sins. Certainly over time it has confirmed in them a feeling of moral superiority over their fellow citizens. It would seem that progressives just do not like common, working class people because they are viewed by the progressive savants as “irredeemable”, belonging to a “basket of deplorables” as Hillary Clinton claimed: The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, and whatever other foul things you can imagine.
Progressives actually seem to believe this cartoon caricature of the American people and of anyone who would vote for Donald Trump, which is to say, about half the nation. They believe Donald Trump himself fits that caricature, which gives them the motivation to resist Trump at every turn, to wage a scorched earth, take-no-prisoners ideological and political warfare to obliterate the incoming Trump administration.
One tipoff progressives are thinking this way comes from how little progressives have been criticizing the sometimes violent riots of their followers protesting the Trump election. Jed Babbin, a contributing editor at The American Spectator and a former deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H. W. Bush administration, began a recent post on this incipient war with the following words:
If you’re puzzled by the conflict between the Democrats’ proclamations that they’re willing to give President-elect Trump a chance and the many riots against Trump taking place every night since the election, don’t be. The fact that none of the Dems’ leadership from Hillary Clinton on down have asked for calm and condemned the rioting is enough to prove that they’ve not missed a beat between Hillary’s campaign and Mr. Trump’s imminent presidency.
They’re still in the “no justice, no peace” frame of mind. Justice, to them, consisted of Hillary winning the election, and they won’t allow anything resembling political peace because she didn’t.
Babbin tells us, “They’re prepping the congressional battlefield for the two toughest fights the Dems will have in 2017: the repeal of Obamacare and the confirmation of Trump’s nomination of a conservative to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.”
The way Congress is currently structured, Trump should have no troubles getting most of his program through the House of Representatives. The really troublesome ideological warfare will be waged when the enabling legislation reaches the Senate, where despite Republican control the Democrats have the capability to filibuster a bill to death. After the just concluded elections, Republicans have 52 votes with the Democrats holding 48. To be able to execute cloture on a filibuster and shut it down, Republicans would need a supermajority of 60 votes. Republicans might possibly get repeal and replace of Obamacare through the Senate by somehow arranging it to be a part of a bill of reconciliation. (Shades of how Democrats passed Obamacare in the first place!) However, if Democrats want to filibuster a Supreme Court nomination, or for that matter any judicial nomination, nothing can stop them. The only possible Republican response would seem to be the “nuclear option” of amending Senate rules to outlaw the filibuster.
How should Republicans respond to the all-out, total ideological war that will be waged by the Democrats? I will comment on that problem in future posts.
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