What Do They Want?

For four long years, leftists, their progressive cousins, and their political party, the Democrats, have been consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome. From the day Trump was elected, they mobilized the four constituencies—their media (meaning almost all media and social media outlets run by big tech), the Democratic party itself, #NeverTrump Republicans, and thousands of government employees who comprise the deep state—to "resist" Donald Trump. In order to make themselves feel justified in their endeavor, they demonized Trump, calling him a "white supremacist," the reincarnation of "Hitler, a "fascist," a "racist." They used the entire woke outrage vocabulary to convince the public that orange man baaad.

They enlisted the FBI to initiate a soft coup, in an attempt to unseat Trump. They initiated a 2-year special counsel investigation that turned up nothing. They even impeached the man for a phone call. But they failed ... until they used COVID hysteria, fostered by a dishonest and corrupt media that understood it could be used as a political weapon. They used the same media to suppress any negative stories that might impact Trump's opponent during the campaign (think: the growing Biden scandal) and then, to ensure election victory, did some questionable things in Democratically controlled cities in battleground states. 

Trump lost. He'll be gone in less than 5 weeks. 

But the four constituencies didn't stop there. They happily accused anyone and everyone who supported Trump's policies, even if they didn't like his narcissistic, combative and often bombastic style, of being just as bad as their cartoon image of Trump. His 70-odd million supporters were true "deplorables," beneath contempt. After all, they rejected the Woke catechism, they still believed in merit and personal responsibility, they pushed back when petty tyrants told them to hide in their houses, they didn't believe that the United States is "systemically racist," they wanted big government to get out of their way and let them live their lives. 

The Woke were outraged that the deplorables pushed back. And because the woke couldn't win the argument, they resorted to name calling every chance they got. I suppose the feeling of superiority it gave them just couldn't be resisted.

But all of this has a price, and Glen Reynolds discusses it in an important op-ed in the NY Post:

Democrats won the election, but they don’t seem very happy about it. And with reason: The election failed in its main purpose, which was to shut down the Deplorables.

The Deplorables, in Hillary Clinton’s infamous term, are working- and middle-class people who haven’t bought into the progressive agenda. They’re people who don’t see the rise of the tech oligarchy as a plus, who don’t think “woke” politics make sense, who have jobs that produce tangible outputs. They’re nearly half the country.

This election was supposed to demoralize them, crushing President Trump and his supporters in a double-digit landslide that would give the Democrats solid control of the White House and Congress — and, with a little judicious court-packing, of the judicial branch, too. The Deplorables would be made to realize that they aren’t in charge, that if they want to ride, they’ll have to (in Barack Obama’s famous words) ride in the back.

Only it didn’t work out that way. The big congressional victories turned into lost House seats for the Democrats. And the presidential election was hardly a crushing victory. For an election to really take, the losers have to admit that they’ve been beaten. And to admit that they’ve been beaten, they have to think they actually lost fair and square. Not many Trump supporters think that.

Leaving aside charges of voter fraud and vote-rigging, there is the undisputable fact that Big Media and Big Tech put not just a thumb, but both hands, on the scales to influence the result.

As much as possible, the media ignored the Hunter Biden scandal and Joe Biden’s role in it, first reported in this paper. When blue-check reporters did pay attention, they claimed, falsely and without evidence, that the reports were “Russian disinformation.”

Big Tech shut down the accounts of people who shared the story, and Twitter even blocked sharing the link via direct messages.

The machinations worked, but at a high price: According to a McLaughlin poll, enough Joe Biden voters say they would have changed their votes had they known of the Hunter Biden scandal that they would have produced solid Trump win. The impression of tech-media-corporate underhandedness will long endure.

So the Deplorables are still around, and they’re still angry. And as long as they’re still around, and still angry, the Democrats can’t actually get what they want.

The question that each of us must ask is: "Exactly what does the new Democratic party want?" It's the same question that Cubans should have asked about Fidel Castro's legions in the 1950s or Venezuelans should have asked about Hugo Chavez's cadres in the late 1990s. It's a question that will be answered over the coming few years, and I suspect an awful lot of Americans won't like the answer one little bit.