Just How Far Will the Left Go? By Victor Davis Hanson.
Progressives are urged to go to stores, gas stations, restaurants and confront Trump Administration officials, in a sort of Obama-like “get in their faces” or “take a gun to a knife fight” advice to make life miserable for anyone who would dare work for Trump.
A former Clinton aide has organized adolescent noise-maker rallies near the White House, ostensibly to make so much racket that Trump will not be able to sleep in the presidential bedroom. Restaurants have refused to serve Trump appointees.
There is no respite from the war against Trump. The NFL, the NBA, late-night comedy shows, cable news, sitcoms, Hollywood movies, books, and music have all found ways to turn their genres into anti-Trump theater.
There is no respite; there is no refuge—not the Super Bowl, not the Emmys, not the Grammys, not the Oscars. Almost every aspect of American culture has been weaponized to delegitimize Trump. …
What a loss:
[The Left] cannot accept that it blew certain victory. A huge fundraising advantage, a toady media, massive defections of Republican establishment intellectuals and pundits, the lack of prior military or political experience of candidate Donald Trump, and a popular vote plurality all proved for naught. The unimaginable then became all too real. …
The Left did not just lose the 2016 election, it lost the Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. And it lost them all to a rash, uncouth Queens-accented Manhattan billionaire reality TV star, who systematically planned to dismantle eight years of Obama Administration executive-orders. And unlike almost all prior politicians Trump when in office kept his promises and systematically went about to halt the supposed progressive future. Think of a liberal nightmare …
They cheated:
The Obama apparat and the proverbial deep state never imagined Trump could win and thus to ensure that he would not just be defeated but humiliated, vied to use the power of government to destroy the Trump candidacy.
The National Security Council was weaponized and thus unmasked the names of surveilled Americans and leaked their names to the press to undermine the Trump campaign. The Department of Justice was weaponized to ensure Hillary Clinton was exonerated for her misdeeds concerning her email server and quid pro quo collusion with a variety of foreign and domestic influence peddlers and buyers. The FBI and CIA were weaponized to subvert the Trump campaign, by peddling an unverified smear dossier, paid for by Hillary Clinton, by implanting informants into the Trump campaign, and by undermining a FISA court through dishonest presentations of evidence for warrants to spy on American citizens. ..
Where now for the left?
If the Left was intellectually honest it would run in November on what it now professes are its new core beliefs: the abolition of ICE, the end to all deportations, open borders, expansions of affirmative action, abortion on demand, and identity politics, cancellation of student debt, universal Medicare-like coverage for Americans of all ages, massive tax hikes, more regulations, and less fossil fuel production, and an EU-like socialist-democratic foreign policy.
But they know they would lose for sure.
The problem is that the above is probably not a 51 percent winnable program. And progressives fear that their base will not allow them to move to the center to capture the old blue-collar white working class, or the Perot, Tea-Party and Blue Dog voter. Nor can they afford to move much further leftward, given they are increasingly dependent on Obama-like identity politics candidates without an Obama-like charismatic candidate.
Democrats privately acknowledge that Obama wrecked the Democratic Party—losing Congress, the presidency, state and local offices, and now the Supreme Court. But they must praise the forces of that wreckage and seek to trump them by becoming the party of hyper-identity politics. In other words, the Democrats know what sort of agenda might bring them back into power as it did in 1992. But they feel that Clintonesque cure is worse than the disease of being in the purer political wilderness without power.
So, for now, they rant, they rave, and they stew, accepting that they cannot do what might save them and therefore they only do more of what is destroying them. Out of that lose-lose dilemma was birthed Trump hatred. Without a persuasive argument, progressives came up with the mantra that Trump is a traitor, and that all they needed to do was to explain to supposedly dense voters that their current economic renaissance was actually jackbooted National Socialism.
How far will the Left go? I fear that we have seen nothing yet.
