It’s been said that the first task in extracting yourself from a hole of your own making is to stop digging. Only then can the lengthy process of repair and recovery begin. In the wake of their stinging repudiation on Nov. 5, have Democrats and the hard left been willing to face the blaring music that reached full volume on Election Day, or are they making the cavernous hole they dug for themselves deeper and wider?
As they enter the inevitable “five stages of grief” over Republicans winning the whole kit and caboodle – namely control of the White House, Senate, and House – on top of the prevailing conservative majority on the Supreme Court, most on the left appear stuck between the first two stages: denial and anger. They largely took care of the first stage in the run-up to Election Day, pre-staging their denial with all manner of forecasts of a big victory by Kamala Harris that came up woefully short. Having thrown the kitchen sink at Donald Trump for almost a decade, they had convinced themselves that legal warfare and fearmongering about the death of democracy would sufficiently alarm everyday Americans, especially young women and their mercurial suburban counterparts offended by Trump’s brazen personality.
They pinned their hopes on labeling their archenemy a fascist, neo-Nazi, and white supremacist, a fledgling dictator whose 70-plus million supporters are low-life, deplorable, irredeemable garbage. They deluded themselves into believing their prevailing but increasingly repellent woke ideology could be sufficiently moderated and repackaged for this one crucial election cycle. They ignored all the warning signs heralded by the likes of Gallup. With the help of corporate media openly and furiously advocating for their cause, they convinced themselves that they would continue to attract overwhelming support from minority voters upon whom they have perpetually pinned their hopes. They persuaded themselves that these strategies would serve as their firewall in an election of existential consequence for both sides.
How could they have been so wrong?
The Root Cause
The left’s second stage of grief, anger, has been expressed in the many unhinged responses and threats by the woke remnant – The View, MSNBC, near-psychotic Tik-Tokers, recalcitrant left-wing politicians doubling down on their protection of lawbreaking immigrants – who have moved beyond denial, having no choice but to absorb hard numbers proving that their worldview was roundly repudiated by the electorate. But if they want to move on to stage three, bargaining, when one begins to ask the “what if” questions, they need only look in the mirror. And what they will find is that the root cause of their coulda, woulda, shoulda can be traced back to a single day, May 25, 2020, when George Floyd was killed: Their response to the Floyd affair resulted in the meteoric rise of Black Lives Matter, identity politics, and cancel culture.
The left, quaking in fear, bent the knee to Marxist extremists who ruled that awful summer. An extreme ideology captured an entire major political party in the blink of an eye. Buttoned-down institutions that had previously distanced themselves from political ideology fell in line, and the country became almost unrecognizable. Leaders on the left, caught up in the insanity, did not possess the foresight to realize that identity politics and wokeness would become increasingly repugnant to Americans who once took tolerance and free speech for granted.
They kept digging the hole deeper, thanks in large part to the aid and comfort of Joe Biden, who ran for president on a pledge to unite the nation but then surrounded himself with quasi-radicals given broad power to enforce the newfound dictates of a party that had lurched further left than at any time in American history. A narrow and disputed victory in 2020 was turned into a license to run roughshod over the norms of a nation they called institutionally racist, sexist, and xenophobic. They latched on to one-time conservatives whose Trump derangement turned them into useful idiots willing to renounce their lifelong beliefs – Bill Kristol, Liz and Dick Cheney, Adam Kinzinger et al. – and adopted another thoroughly discredited philosophy, neoconservatism and its inherent appetite for war. The joining of woke and neocon became an explosive cocktail.
But are leftists willing to recognize their culpability in the re-election of their mortal enemy? The early signs are not promising. Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over the conviction of Trump on the flimsiest of evidence, instead of simply vacating the case, has put things on hold in what appears to be a feeble attempt to revisit sentencing after Trump leaves the White House. Then, as if to confirm widespread objections to last-minute, pandemic-era alterations to voting laws in 2020, Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, recently stated the quiet part out loud, openly flouting election law by declaring she would count ballots ruled by her state’s Supreme Court to be ineligible: “I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country, and people violate laws any time they want.”
Then there was the head-spinning recent poll that found Harris far ahead of every other potential contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, with 41% support compared to single digits for everyone else. Is this simply the result of her familiarity, or a sign that even rank-and-file Democrats still somehow believe she is their best hope for winning back the presidency? But Harris keeps on keeping on. After raising more than a billion dollars for her campaign, she is out of cash and in debt, begging for more money for her “Harris Fight Fund,” making a highly dubious claim in an email to supporters: “There are still races that are either too close to call, or within the margin of recounts … We're ready to defend those races, but that is going to take resources, so we're relying on you today. Will you contribute $50?”
A Political Autopsy of the Election
In 2012, after a one-sided defeat by Mitt Romney at the hands of Barack Obama, Republicans famously conducted a self-described autopsy, jumping from stage-one denial to stage-three bargaining in short order. While their comeback plan was ultimately overtaken by the shocking rise of Trump, they were willing to move past denial and anger straight to an assessment of how so many on their side had gotten it wrong. Will the Democratic Party engage in a similarly honest self-evaluation in the weeks ahead?
After decades in Congress, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer – who had promised to trash the upper chamber's long-standing filibuster (a bulwark for bipartisanship) and then called for a bipartisan spirit when the Senate turned red – should be as well-positioned as anyone to lead the effort in a leaderless party. But if the sum of leftist appeal in the years ahead continues to be hatred of Trump and pandering to wokeness, they will likely be handed another brutal defeat in four years.
Now, it is Trump who has the opportunity – and, by all accounts, the willingness – to run roughshod on those who seized the country from the normal, red-blooded citizenry. This dramatic turn back to the right, or more precisely the common-sense center, by those awakened to wokeness, is best exemplified by the NFL, where player uniforms and end zones were adorned with slogans like “end racism” and “stop hate” in the aftermath of the Floyd affair. But now the “Trump Dance” has supplanted those lofty mottos. How incredibly humiliating that must be for the left.
With stage one denial no longer possible, stage two anger continuing to animate their behavior, and stage three bargaining all but inevitable, stages four and five of depression and acceptance are still in the distance for this party in the wilderness, wondering how everything went so terribly wrong.
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