Left-wing billionaire Tom Steyer's frantic campaign to impeach President Trump highlights a mania within the Democratic Party that will continue to prevent it from being able to provide a coherent message to voters not already safely locked inside the party's claustrophobic progressive shoebox.
Speaking at the progressive Netroots Nation conference in New Orleans, Steyer recently ripped Democratic congressional leaders for failing to move to impeach Trump.
“I don’t see the Democratic establishment doing anything real to stop him,” Steyer bellowed.
Tom Steyer
“They’re not willing to face the devastating and obvious facts about this president. Like the fact that Donald Trump is wildly corrupt, and we are well past the threshold to kick him out of office.”
Justifying It All
Incredibly, Steyer offered the following as justification for impeachment, according to The Post:
“There’s so many things that are going to happen between November 2018 and November 2020…. What experts tell us, who are psychologists and psychiatrists, is that this president is only going to get worse. We got 78 leading psychologists and psychiatrists to opine on this guy, and they said two things: He is a malignant narcissist, which is something he shares with every dictator you can think of. And he’s deteriorating. Whatever you think of him today, it’s going to get worse. There’s a human expectation that there’s a reversion to the mean. There’s not going to be a reversion to the mean.”
Steyer was referencing a January letter sent to the White House by a group of mental health professionals who have never examined Trump. According to Politico, "Steyer’s team was approached about the letter by John Gartner, a psychologist who founded Duty to Warn, a group that calls for Trump to be removed from office because he is, according to the group, 'psychologically unfit.'"
One of the psychiatrists who signed the letter revealed his fears that an unstable Trump will start a nuclear war. It is an image Steyer has brought up more than once himself.
The impeachment petition that Steyer is promoting, which has more than 5.5 million signatures, reads:
"Donald Trump has brought us to the brink of nuclear war, obstructed justice, and taken money from foreign governments. We need to impeach this dangerous president."
In June, it was widely reported that Steyer, in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, said "[m]aybe we can have, like, a nuclear war and then we get a real course correction” from Trump's presidency."
He immediately backpedaled from that insane comment but here he is in October in a video for "Need to Impeach" ominously saying Trump "is a clear and present danger, who's mentally unstable and armed with nuclear weapons, and they [politicians] do nothing.”
Identity Politics
Steyer's sincere belief that he is fighting to prevent nuclear Armageddon spotlights precisely what decades of Democratic devotion to identity politics, scapegoating of opponents and embracing victimhood as a voting bloc inevitably lead to: progressive activists in their ranks so filled with messianic zeal and certainty in their cause that they feel they have the duty – not just the right but the obligation – to overturn the results of a presidential election that did not go their way.
These are people so locked in their airtight bubbles that they can no longer even understand a differing worldview, much less tolerate it.
The single biggest negative result for Democrats from this unhinged mindset is how it has completely cut the party off from working-class Americans.
Author: Joe Schaeffer
And yet it seems a new Democrat tactic is dawning: trying to please both social justice progressives and more pragmatic-minded Dems who realize they must reach out to working Americans by wedding identity politics to economic concerns.
Persistence?
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts gave the new party line a test-drive at Netroots Nation when she proclaimed: “The pundits will say it’s impossible for us to build a coalition that cuts across issues and communities – that Democrats have to choose between being the party of the white working class and the party of Black Lives Matter.”
“They will say it. Nevertheless: We will persist.”
This no doubt intentionally references what new socialist Dem star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has emphasized, though Ocasio-Cortez is more blunt in directly linking economics with identity politics. The 28-year-old who toppled veteran establishment Dem Rep. Joe Crowley in New York told The Nation in June:
“I can’t name a single issue with roots in race that doesn’t have economic implications, and I cannot think of a single economic issue that doesn’t have racial implications. The idea that we have to separate them out and choose one is a con.”
If Democrats really think tying working-class concerns to racial identity politics is a path to the American heartland, perhaps they should reflect that working Americans see unchecked illegal immigration as a drain on their wages and ability to find jobs.
Pandering to illegal aliens is a major spoke in the Democrats' identity politics wheel.
This is not the way forward.
