While arguments rage about Kamala Harris' style and Donald Trump's substance during the 2024 presidential campaign, now in high gear, hard electoral facts remain stubborn things. As much as the right might try to deflect from a trend stretching back 16 years, it is undeniable that we are in the midst of the most progressive era in American politics since, well, never. Will this left-wing age end in November? Or will it be cemented in place? Those are the stakes of this election, and they matter far more than the electoral fortunes of any candidate.
It has been said, and rightfully so, that socialism is easy to vote in but near-impossible to vote out, in large part because a collectivist ruling class validated by voters will leave an indelible socialist stain on a country ruled by a triad of political, media, and corporate elites. They will do so by supersizing their perpetual strategy: more and more entitlements that create dependence on the federal government and can never effectively be taken away. Look what happened when women who for 60 years felt legally entitled to terminate pregnancies at their leisure had that absolute right removed. Pro-abortionists who are suffering through the same economy, inflation, crime, and open borders as the rest of the country are actually willing to vote for more of the same for the sake of having the right to have an abortion anytime, anywhere. And the left has now taken this one issue on which they have an advantage and turned abortion from “safe, legal, and rare” to a badge of honor for all good progressives.
The Progressive Solution: Your Money for Their Ideas
Every solution from the left in general, and Harris in particular these days, is centered around throwing money at a problem – your money. The Democratic presidential nominee keeps thinking up new, unaffordable, pie-in-the-sky giveaways of taxpayer funds, currently adding up to almost two trillion dollars – and counting. For starters, she is offering $25,000 to new homebuyers, pledges to raise the corporate tax rate that spurred tremendous job growth when it was lowered in 2017, and, worst of all, will crack down on “corporate price-gouging,” meaning the federal government would hold the power to tell a grocer how much he is allowed to charge for a loaf of bread. Oh, and she is trying to buy more votes with student debt relief, which has already twice been ruled a violation of the separation of powers by the Supreme Court. All these ideas are presented to change the subject, shame innocent culprits, and explain away the skyrocketing cost of living during the Biden-Harris administration.
The presumption upon which such recklessly irresponsible interventions into the private economy are apparently based is that the national debt is already so high, what’s another couple of trillion? No one will notice or care until it’s too late – when the interest on the runaway national debt is so high that it will squeeze defense and domestic programs to the breaking point. That is, unless the left succeeds with its annual demands for higher taxes to respond to the financial emergency, which perhaps is the left’s ultimate strategy for turning the national debt from a problem into a solution for its insatiable appetite for control.
The New Deal on Steroids
The closest we ever came to today’s left-wing dominance in politics, media, and culture would be during the time of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which dramatically and permanently expanded the role of government. But that was when we were in the midst of the Great Depression, the financial equivalent of the Civil War, and unemployment had reached 25%, a level unthinkable in the modern world. The wisdom of handouts and make-work programs designed to ease the burden on a nation in peril is a debate raging to this day. But FDR was responding to an overwhelming mandate from the electorate, having crushed incumbent Herbert Hoover in a landslide. That is hardly comparable to what we face today when leftists have managed to control the conversation despite consistently unpopular policies on everything from the economy to immigration as they increasingly overwhelm private and public institutions with demands for equity, i.e., guaranteed outcomes, which have mostly been met and are largely irreversible.
Would neoconservative policies that once defined the Republican Party still be palatable to the party faithful today? Of course, the answer is no because Trump has come to dominate the GOP by winning its presidential nomination three times in a row. But just as Trump the man has come to define today’s GOP, it is no one person, but rather an ideology, that now defines the Democrats. Sure, there is talk of relatively moderate rising stars like Governors Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Andy Beshear of Kentucky. But after eight years of Barack Obama, a rise of far-left ideology to counter Trump, and Joe Biden’s progressive governance, the heart of the Democratic Party is far closer to the extreme left than the center.
Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one of the last eight presidential elections. California and New York tip the scales heavily to the left, but those states count just as red states do, so it is the Electoral College alone that saved Republican nominees George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump 16 years later. While it is the subject for another day, did Bush ultimately kill the Republican brand and invite the progressive era? Amid all the adulation over the rise of Obama, it is easy to overlook that Bush’s approval by 2008 had dropped to 28%, the lowest since Hoover during the Depression. So, effectively, the right got hit with a double whammy: the meteoric rise of one of the most compelling, almost worshiped, figures in modern political history and the crash landing of the outgoing Republican president. Put in that context, one can understand how progressives have come to dominate the political discourse since 2008.
Except for the near-miraculous interruption by Trump in 2016, which actually strengthened the far left’s resolve, the country has elected progressives – or those who ultimately governed as such – to the presidency in three of the last four elections. If they make it four out of five, the progressive era will extend well into the future, and we will become a different country. But if Trump wins for the second time in three tries, the progressive age will have been supplanted by the opposite, a true MAGA era.
If Harris loses, the Democrats will go back to the middle only because they will be forced to do so in 2028, just as the party did in nominating centrist Bill Clinton in 1992 after back-to-back electoral disasters with liberals Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. But they will certainly not head to the center if Kamala Harris becomes president, especially now that the two moderates who stopped the most extreme left-wing measures in the current Senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have both retired.
A man named Francis Fukuyama rose to fame after the fall of the Soviet empire by declaring that we had reached “the end of history,” and democracy had vanquished socialism. Little did he realize at the time that the colossus would rise again in the West and that the end of history might well take on the opposite meaning if Harris is elected president.
