A Party of Prigs and
Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat
- Nov. 6, 2024
A
story in chess lore involves the great Danish-Jewish player Aron Nimzowitsch,
who, at a tournament in the mid-1920s, found himself struggling against the
German master Friedrich Sämisch. Infuriated at the thought of losing to an
opponent he considered inferior, Nimzowitsch jumped on the table and shouted,
“To this idiot I must lose?”
It’s
a thought that must have crossed the minds of more than a few liberal pundits
and Democratic eminences late Tuesday night, as Kamala Harris’s hopes for
winning the presidency began suddenly to fade.
How,
indeed, did Democrats lose so badly, considering how they saw Donald Trump — a
twice-impeached former president, a felon, a fascist, a bigot, a buffoon, a
demented old man, an object of nonstop late-night mockery and incessant moral
condemnation? The theory that many Democrats will be tempted to adopt is that a
nation prone to racism, sexism, xenophobia and rank stupidity fell prey to the
type of demagoguery that once beguiled Germany into electing Adolf Hitler.
It’s a theory that has a lot of explanatory power — though
only of an unwitting sort. The broad inability of liberals to understand
Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to their beliefs is itself
part of the explanation for his historic, and entirely avoidable, comeback.
Why
did Harris lose? There were many tactical missteps: her choice of a progressive
running mate who would not help deliver a must-win state like Pennsylvania or
Michigan; her inability to separate herself from President Biden; her foolish designation of Trump as a fascist, which,
by implication, suggested his supporters were themselves quasi-fascist; her
overreliance on celebrity surrogates as she struggled to articulate a
compelling rationale for her candidacy; her failure to forthrightly repudiate
some of the more radical positions she took as a candidate in 2019, other than
by relying on stock expressions like “My values haven’t changed.”
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There
was also the larger error of anointing Harris without political competition —
an insult to the democratic process that handed the nomination to a candidate
who, as some of us warned at the time, was exceptionally
weak. That, in turn, came about because Democrats failed to take Biden’s
obvious mental decline seriously until June’s debate debacle (and then allowed
him to cling to the nomination for a few weeks more), making it difficult to
hold even a truncated mini-primary.
But
these mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview.
First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if
not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that
way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see
how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much
of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics
when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.
Regarding
the first, I’ve lost track of the number of times liberal pundits have
attempted to steer readers to arcane data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve to
explain why Americans should stop freaking out over sharply higher prices of
consumer goods or the rising financing costs on their homes and cars. Or
insisted there was no migration crisis at
the southern border. Or averred that Biden was sharp as
a tack and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a jerk.
Yet when Americans saw and experienced things otherwise (as extensive survey
data showed they did) the characteristic liberal response was to treat the
complaints not only as baseless but also as immoral. The effect was to insult
voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues. You could
see this every time Harris mentioned, in answer to questions about the border,
that she had prosecuted transnational criminal gangs: Her answer was
nonresponsive to the central complaint that there was a migration crisis
straining hundreds of communities, irrespective of whether the migrants
committed crimes.
The
dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something
else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various
progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about
biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed
by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white
skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new
terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s
borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.
The
Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics
of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It
also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural
norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but
don’t like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot
this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and
transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the
presidency.
Last,
liberals thought that the best way to stop Trump was to treat him not as a
normal, if obnoxious, political figure with bad policy ideas but as a mortal
threat to democracy itself. Whether or not he is such a threat, this style of
opposition led Democrats astray. It goaded them into their own form of
antidemocratic politics — using the courts to try to get Trump’s name struck
from the ballot in Colorado or trying to put him in prison on hard-to-follow
charges. It distracted them from the task of developing and articulating
superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing. And
it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the
country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact.
Today,
the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and
pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how’s that ever going to be a
winning electoral look?
I voted reluctantly for Harris because of my fears for what
a second Trump term might bring — in Ukraine, our trade policy, civic life, the
moral health of the conservative movement writ large. Right now, my larger fear
is that liberals lack the introspection to see where they went wrong, the
discipline to do better next time and the humility to change.
