The re-election of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president is a humiliating, dystopic nightmare for the progressive left.
Davos elites cannot quite grasp how Trump assembled a multi-racial working class coalition that explicitly rejects their out-of-touch worldview — one that centers identity, big government patronage, and managed the decline of American influence on the global stage.
Call it our Marie Antoinette moment.
Unlike the violent bloodthirsty Jacobins of the French Revolution, this revolt was led by decent, hardworking Americans of all races and backgrounds who wanted dignity, jobs, safe streets, and a strong community.
Trump’s re-election — and the voters’ rejection of the post-modern left — should be no surprise to anyone paying attention in the last two weeks of the campaign, when the depressed early vote for Democrats showcased low enthusiasm for, if not outright defections, from the party.
But the canaries have been chirping in the coal mines for years.
In poll after poll since 2021, large majorities of the electorate voiced dissatisfaction of Democrats on just about everything: Casual attitude on inflation and ever-expanding government spending, a tsunami of 10 million illegal migrants that flooded local communities in a way that even Democratic mayors vociferously protested, a poorly planned Green New Deal that threatened working class jobs without much apparent benefit to the climate, soft-on-crime policies that precipitated huge urban crime waves, experimental genital mutilation on teenagers that lacked scientific backing and open support for the “from the River to the Sea” rhetoric of genocidal terrorists.
In short, they’d had enough of nearly every deconstructionist dialectic of the post-modern, intersectional left that the Democratic party quietly mainlined.
The sanctimony made things even worse: “We are the morally superior ones on migration — just don’t put any of the migrants near our vacation homes in Martha’s Vineyard!” — Democrats seemed to be saying.
Meanwhile, Republicans were busy snatching traditional Democratic real estate and building a cross-racial working-class coalition.
The right validated their anxieties on inflation, AI/automation, free trade, and globalization’s threats to jobs, immigration, the opioid crisis, failing schools, online censorship, and the humiliating loss of American power and deterrence as evidenced by the Afghanistan debacle.
For the most part, Democrats completely lack self-awareness about the scope of the needed course correction.
The opiate of the abortion issue may have salvaged the midterm congressional elections but only delayed a deeper reckoning of the corpus, as the underperformance of the issue on Tuesday made abundantly clear.
But rather than turning to bread and butter, Democrats supplemented the Biden-era policy anemia with a diet of lawfare — the ill-fated, 11th-hour campaign season attempts to deny Trump ballot access and show-trial him in the middle of election season.
Most of this failed, and much of it was seen by the public as political—and all of this revived Trump politically.
No American has ever been charged the way Alvin Bragg charged Donald Trump in New York, and many voters smelled a rat.
The failed lawfare campaign was derivative of the anti-Trump Resist movement — which started in 2017 with Russiagate and still serves as the main diet of the priggish left.
And while contempt, and its near cousin anger, may boost otherwise faltering cable news viewership and fundraising for liberal politicians, it certainly hasn’t solved any of the burning problems facing working Americans in the last eight years.
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The latest incarnation of the Resist movement is to insist that Trump is a fascist — foolish if for no other reason than that it insults the over half the electorate that voted for Trump, as writer Bret Stephens recently pointed out.
But, the other option for Democrats is a shift back to their historical position in the political center where most voters reside — a shift that rejects the elevation of Resist 2.0 as the north star, identity as the explanation of nearly every issue under the sun, and one that recognizes that working-class Americans want politicians to protect a level economic playing field.
They want a growth-oriented private sector, rather than what they see as the demeaning patronage of big government handouts.
Vocational education, fair trade, thoughtful clean energy, and safe, opioid-free streets are where Dems can start to triangulate and claw back.
Modern groupthink has an almost religious quality: Once the clergy hands down the edicts — say Obama, Pelosi, and Schumer decreeing Kamala Harris as the nominee — few of the congregants question it for fear of excommunication.
No chardonnay hours, no parties, no state dinners if you dissent. That’s what gave us the lying about Biden’s infirmity, the futility of perpetual lawfare, and the vacuousness of the Campaign of Joy.
Like the Phoenix, the Trump victory could be the best thing to happen to Democrats if they shift to the center with an emphasis on building things rather than tearing the other side down.
But to do that, the Democratic clerics who lead groupthink will have to step up and say no to the mainstream media and cable voices — along with activists and politicians who all have their narrow, self-serving motivations to be the morality leaders of Resist 2.0.
Julian Epstein is the former Democratic chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.
