The Democratic Party's Tuesday Debacle

Across the country, from sea to shining sea, Democrats took a shellacking on Tuesday. It was not just the gubernatorial election in Virginia. The Republicans swept to power in most of the other Virginia elections. They now control the state house, the executive suite and the Virginia House of Delegates.

In states where school boards were in play, Republicans did very well indeed. See link. A Republican candidate nearly won the election for New Jersey governor, but another Republican, a truck driver, deposed the Democratic leader of the state senate. Strangely enough, in New York State and in Seattle Republicans did very well indeed.

It was so bad, it was such a flagrant repudiation of Joe Biden that our mentally defective president could not grasp what had happened. In truth, that was one of the reasons it happened. The American people had discovered that they had been duped into voting for demented Joe. And now they were striking back.

And, of course, Donald Trump was not on the ticket. Better yet, thanks to Facebook and Twitter, Trump was largely silenced during the campaign. Dare we say that this state of affairs is thoroughly appalling, and that these tech giants will hopefully soon meet their maker. And yet, with Trump’s twitter feed being silenced, the Democratic strategy of being anti Trump failed to resonate.

Naturally, Trump supporters consider the election returns to be an utter and complete vindication of their favorite president. In truth, by all appearances, the suburban housewives who flipped Virginia into Republican territory were casting a vote for a sane, sensible, non-belligerent, not hostile, comforting candidate. To imagine that they would vote for Trump seems fanciful, at the least.

If anything, and here goes a prophecy, the election results will cause Republicans to think twice or thrice about running another election campaign with Donald Trump at the head of the ticket. Of course, no one can say so, because those who sympathize with Trump, who feel empathy for the brutality of the attacks on him, will only give up their hope for a restoration when Trump himself bows out.

Voters across the country were casting ballots for issues. They were not voting for or against an oversized persona. And they were voting for calm and reassurance and competence. After all, governor-elect Youngkin was not merely sensible and on message. He was not filling the airwaves with Twitter static. Like it or not, the American people were exercising their rational faculties; they were not moved by appeals to emotion, one way or the other. 

A considerable number of psycho theorists believe that manipulating emotion, stirring up emotion, is the best way to persuade anyone of anything. Some people even imagine that incivility is the way to go. After all, Democrats are anything but civil-- fight fire with fire, as the saying has it.

In truth, the antidote to incivility is rationality-- clear, concise, precise, articulate, sensible rationality. Funnily enough, the chorus of hurt feelings that infested MSNBC and CNN showed precisely what was wrong with today’s politics. Those who were shedding tears over the election outcome should, as the saying goes, get a life. They are placing far too much importance on elections. They seem to believe that their only chance for success in America involves voting themselves a living. They do not seem to feel confident that they earned their way, but that they have profited from certain government programs and mandates. They seem to want to brainwash the country into believing that America owes them a living, not for what they have earned, but for what America did to their ancestors centuries ago.

Anyway, the media and the blogosphere is awash in explanations of the monumental Democratic election faceplant. Among the better analyses is that of Bret Stephens in the New York Times.

After remarking that politicians and pundits are insulting everyone’s intelligence by saying that Youngkin ran a racist campaign-- when you are a racist, everything appears to be evidence of racism-- and dismissing the fact that McAuliffe ran a lousy campaign, Stephens mentions in passing the Biden, or, should we say, the Brandon factor.

Joe Biden has shown himself to be so monstrously incompetent that even the media cannot cover for him.

Finally, there’s Joe Biden. He is manifestly inept. He cannot get his party to pass a popular infrastructure bill. On inflation, Afghanistan and the southern border, he has offered benign assurances that have been summarily contradicted by events. No president elected after World War II lost more public support in his first few months of office than he has, according to Gallup. Biden’s losses are particularly steep among independents. If he doesn’t recover this is bound to have down-ballot effects.

But then, Stephens gets to what he considers to be the meat of the issue, the hidden problems that consigned Democratic candidates to defeat. In essence, voters have figured out that today’s Democratic party is a fraud, that it has been misrepresenting itself, lying to the people, pretending to be one thing, while being another.

The last three explanations are true as far as they go. But they don’t sufficiently capture the Democrats’ deeper problem, which is the persistent and justified perception of a party too often composed of fake moderates and dissembling radicals. Middle-of-the-road voters — the kind who still decide elections in purplish places like Virginia — sense they’ve been bamboozled.

The Biden presidency pretended to be sane and sensible, moderate and middle-of-the-road, but has proved to be radically leftist.

Who’s a fake moderate? Biden campaigned as the most centrist Democrat in last year’s primary field. He is trying to govern as the most socially transformational president since Lyndon B. Johnson. Attorney General Merrick Garland looks like a fake moderate, too willing to cite the power of the federal government after angry parents at school board meetings were labeled domestic terrorists. Whatever happened to Democrats as civil libertarians?

Today’s Biden-led Democratic Party is a lie.

Consider the question of critical race theory and whether it should be taught in public schools. Stephens explains:

As for dissembling radicals, note the way in which the controversy over critical race theory is treated by much of the left as either much ado about an obscure scholarly discipline or, alternatively, a beneficent and necessary set of teachings about the past and present of systemic racism in America.

But C.R.T. is neither obscure nor anodyne. It is, according to many of its leading theoreticians, a “politically committed movement” that often explicitly rejects notions of merit, objectivity, colorblindness and neutrality of law, among other classically liberal concepts.

That’s no reason to ban teaching it or any other way of looking at the world. But it is dishonest to argue that it is anything less than ideologically radical, intensely racialized and deliberately polarizing. It is even more dishonest to suggest that it exists only in academic cloisters. We live in an era of ubiquitous race-based “affinity groups,” incessant allegations of white supremacy, and pervasive censorship and self-censorship in everything from words that can be said and documentaries that can be watched, to jokes that can be laughed at.

Teaching radical ideology is not why we have public schools. Dare we mention that parents want their children to learn science and math, not leftist propaganda. And they have grasped that teachers have not been teaching, that their children have not been learning, and that the American school system has produced graduates who lag far behind their peers around the world in the skills needed to function in the modern economy.

How many parents were punishing Democrats for colluding with the teachers' unions in shutting down school systems across the country?

Stephens explains that today’s Democratic party has become illiberal. This should not be news. We have been saying as much for quite some time. And we recall that during the Trump presidency more than a few old-style liberals deplored the Democratic Party’s turn toward the radical left, and its rejection of democratic decorum and respect for the Constitution:

But the Democrats’ political problem is either dishonesty about the kind of country they want, a lack of self-awareness, or some combination of both. An America in which group identity takes precedence over individual merit, racial categories become moral categories, success based on achievement is denigrated as “privilege” based on ancestry, blind justice is attacked as systemically biased, and independent thinking risks being treated as heresy, will eventually cease to be a free, fair and just country.

Stephens remarks that Trumpism was another manifestation of illiberalism, but in truth, the problem seems largely to be coming from the left:

Many liberals who have tasted the progressive moonshine get the point. But too many still feel obligated to take sides against Trumpism when the real enemy is illiberalism writ large, whatever the source.