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If Kamala Harris loses next week, and the Senate falls to the GOP, as I strongly expect, there will be zero introspection by Democrats that maybe one reason they lost is that they did a crap job of running the country. Even though Ruy Teixeira has tried to warn Democrats that their leading ideas are stupid and unpopular, Democrats will come up with every excuse imaginable that doesn’t involve looking into the mirror. (Watch especially for the theme that “the American people are stupid/racist,” etc.)
Thus it is welcome to see Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal make this point so well in his Tuesday column, that is up early on the website. Though no fan of Trump, Baker wonders:
We are conflicted, however, because of this simple, enraging thought about the Democrats themselves: Are we really going to let them get away with exploiting that unease, using our doubts and manipulating our angst to validate retrospectively the damage they have wrought in the past four years and to approve proactively what they might do in the next four?
Their deceitfully vacuous campaign, its invitation to sign up to a blank slate on their plans for another term and a collective amnesia about their work in the current one, their empty pantsuit of a candidate, incessantly blurting inanitiesinto the media void, incapable of articulating a single substantive idea for governing—what they amount to is nothing less than an abuse of the voters’ scruples, an exploitation of the yearning many have for a hint of normalcy. Don’t doubt that the Democrats fully intend to repurpose that passive desire into another sweeping mandate for their divisive and destructive ideology.
That’s the reason it seems, a week from Election Day, that enough Americans are ready to take their chances on another term for Mr. Trump. They want to tell the Democrats: You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to drive the country ever further into your new progressive dystopia, deepening our divisions and sapping our strength, and then turn around and say to the voters: Sorry, but it’s us or Hitler. . .
When [Trump] sulkily left office on Jan. 20, 2021, his approval rating was 34%, according to Gallup, the lowest at the end of a president’s first term since Jimmy Carter.
That should have been the end of him politically, yet his fortunes have revived—not because of some genius work of rehabilitation on his or his supporters’ part, but entirely because of his Democratic opponents’ arrogance, overreach and ineptitude.
They wilfully misinterpreted a small majority for Joe Biden, who was presented in his campaign as the personification of dull political normalcy, as a mandate for presidential and legislative activism on an historic scale. They took a country at the end of its mental tether, exhausted by a pandemic and bitter partisanship, and—using their time-honored tactic of never letting a crisis go to waste—sought to reshape it in the image of their own extremist ideals.
Bowing to a fundamentalist lunacy that walls are somehow immoral, that America owes the world a home and a living, they opened the border, unleashing socially and economically destabilizing forces that will take decades to repair.
They propagated antiscientific nonsense about “gender” and antihistorical nonsense about race that have inflicted new wounds on our social fabric and reopened old scars.
There’s more, but this is enough to get the point.