The election’s big loser is the Democrats’ narrative

A narrative that arrogantly insults the people whose votes the party wants and needs, and ignores their concerns and problems, is destined to lose.

By Bruce Thorton, Frontpage Magazine

On Tuesday Donald Trump’s “shellacking,” to borrow a word from Barack Obama––winning not just the electoral college, but also the popular vote and the Senate majority–– is a definitive repudiation not just of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, but of a political narrative over a century in the making.

As always, bad policies are the fruit of bad ideas, but arrogance about the superiority of those ideas carries within them nemesis, the punisher of hubris that may be delayed, but never escaped.

Today’s Democrats have embraced a narrative––call it “left,” “progressive,” “socialist,” “woke,” or what you will–– which rejects holding people accountable for their actions.

Instead, a crude determinism shapes and governs their behavior. Hence, we’re told that poverty, capitalism, injustice, racism, sexism, and all the other -isms and -phobias explain people’s crimes and failures.

So we get Democrat policies that ignore or legitimize illegal border crossings, shoplifters, bums and addicts befouling our cities, repeat felons, no bail release for arrestees, and numerous other dangerous absurdities.

Since the ordinary law-abiding “moral majority” have to suffer the physical and economic consequences of these policies, which increased significantly under the Democrats, it’s no wonder they voted for a president who promises to restore law and order.

Another bad idea that harms our economy and pocketbooks is green “climate change” policies that ignore the laws of physics and wage war on fossil fuels, which have created the West’s unprecedented wealth and quality of life for billions of people worldwide.

This bad policy reflects the scientism of self-styled “bright” Democrats, who “follow the science” and yet resort to pseudo-science for gratifying their fundamentalist cult of environmentalism, and their need to signal their superior virtue.

Again, the citizens are hit with expensive energy prices and intrusive regulations. Meanwhile, the forced switch to intermittent “renewable energy” like windmills and solar panels makes producers dependent on fossil fuels for their construction, and for providing electricity for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

Then there is the “transgender” cult that believes the biological sexes are cultural constructs, and that chemical and unnecessary permanent surgical interventions can restore children to their actual “gender.”

Moreover, aggressive promotion of this unscientific idea is encouraged in schools, polices our free speech, and subjects girls and women to “trans” males occupying women’s restrooms and sports. Democrats have endorsed these farcical programs, as Kamala Harris did during her campaign.

But transgenderism is just an off-shoot of the illiberal DEI identity-politics protocols Democrats have imposed on virtually all our public institutions, including schools and businesses.

These policies that ignore merit and violate the Civil Rights Act in practice are a tyranny of the minority, and offend the common sense and practical wisdom, as well as the religion and traditions of millions of citizens––creating another large cohort of voters who found refuge from the Dem’s narrative in Donald Trump’s recognition of these forgotten citizens.”

The new “woke” Democrats, of course, have long made clear their disdain, if not hatred of, those citizens by calling them “deplorables,” “bitter clingers,” “smelly Wal-Mart shoppers,” “white supremacists,” “semi-fascists,” “garbage,” and bearers of numerous “phobias” that bespeak their ignorance and bigotry.”

This bad habit was popularized by Barack Obama’s “bitter clingers,” which he reprised just before the election, when he scolded some black men for not supporting Kamala because they’re misogynists––yet again turning an important constituency to the other candidate who in his previous term served their interests well.

A narrative that arrogantly insults the people whose votes the party wants and needs, and ignores their concerns and problems, is destined to lose.

But the Dems’ narrative is steeped in the arrogance and class privilege that have characterized technocrats since Plato’s Republic.

The intellectual ancestors of today’s Democrat Party, the Progressives, were riddled with such haughty disdain and smug sense of superiority, an “ugly blend of sanctimony, self-interest, and social-connections,” as Fred Siegel in his valuable 2014 book The Revolt Against the Masses put it.

Most people dislike being talked down to and insulted, especially Americans. And they bristle when people believing preposterous, pseudo-scientific ideas and programs use state power to compel others to comply.

More importantly, they will resist when such overreach affects their unalienable rights and freedoms enshrined in the Constitution.

Furthermore, the collusion of Democrats and federal agencies with newspaper “fact-checkers” and social media censors, and those who seek to dismantle our Constitutional right to speak, worship, and freely use public spaces––as the Biden administration did under cover of the Covid crisis without scientific justification–– has been another producer of citizens offended and materially damaged by this self-serving overreach.

Finally, the Democrat narrative, like early Progressivism, centers on this dismantling of the Constitutional order of separated and mutually balancing powers, along with our unalienable rights.

That order was designed to guarantee the freedom of citizens from an irreducibly complex diversity of ethnicities, faiths, mores, customs, and numerous other ways that peoples express their identities.

For progressives then and now, that true diversity is considered inefficient for running a government in a technologically sophisticated world.

And for progressives, so is the Constitution and its guard-rails for preventing tyranny from any faction attempting to concentrate and centralize power in an elite, whether of wealth or “expertise.” Or, as Woodrow Wilson put it, the few who are “wise” should control the many who are not.

In word and deed, the Biden administration and the Democrat Party have been laboring over continuing this century-old assault against the Constitution.

They have proposed eliminating guard-rails such as limiting the Senate’s size to two per state, and instead making it dependent on population, and expanding the Supreme Court and subjecting justices to external auditors who could compel justices to recuse themselves.

But such technocratic schemes always create the moral hazard expressed by the Roman satirist Juvenal: “Who will actually guard the guardians?”

We have already seen attacks on our Bill of Rights in the postwar period, including in some Republican administrations.

The election of Donald Trump will slow down and we hope stop the current excesses of government power and interference in our lives. But we must go farther and restore the integrity of the Constitution.

For in the end, it’s not just about the economy or the border or taxes. It’s about our ordered liberty, the true freedom that is less and less a feature of the Democrat’s narrative, which has been the big loser in this election––for now.

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