Should they lose in November, don’t expect Democrats to offer any introspective explanation for their defeat. Why not? If Biden pulls a Clinton redux, failing to capture the Midwest, the blue party will once again be out in the cold.
So wouldn’t the smart move be, you know, finding another way across America’s welcome mat?
Don’t put your chips on it. In the #MeToo epoch, no should mean no. But like frisky Willie at intern happy hour, they’ll laugh and wink and sweet talk to make it mean yes.
Democrats Move Hard Left
Another Election Day misfire won’t take away from what is currently the Democratic Party’s biggest asset: a mapped-out future.
The party that just formally nominated a 77-year-old white man as its standard-bearer knows exactly where it’s going—beating feet immediately in the other direction.
Joe Biden is the last roar of his particular dinosaur cline. The market-amiable, little-guy defending taxonomy is all but dead in the Democrats’ political-animal kingdom. The Scranton son is a lone holdout.
Should he win the Oval, he’ll be a kept man, leashed and led by a camarilla of ideological progressives. Biden himself has admitted to being “transitional,” gelding his own presidency before it begins.
The squealing, shirty children of the hard-left are the future of Joe’s party. The Biden legacy, should there be one, won’t be bequeathed prorated to the disciples of diversity; they’re already paid in full.
What Does the Post Trump GOP Look Like?
Compare this to the Republican Party’s uncertain future. The pachydermatous party totters uncomfortably on a tightrope between optimates and less-heeled populares. The G.O.P. can’t make up its mind on whether it wants to represent a working-class, culturally conservative constituency, or remain pawns of the socially libertine business class.
Most times, it tries to ride in the via media, paying lip service to the beleaguered mindset of patriotic provincials while giving carte blanche to rapacious hedge-fund operators.
This dynamic is creating untenable internecine conflict among the Republican base and its commanding elites.
Donald Trump drafted the party fulcrum further along the working-class plank. But, not to the extent that the Democrats’ fervently progressive base has dragged their party leftward. The once mulish leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer is thoroughly tamed.
Pelosi let progressive backbenchers bully her into impeaching the President; she’s just endorsed progressive upstart Rep. Joe Kennedy in his primary challenge to the aging Senator Markey of Massachusetts.
Once a flinty deal maker, Speaker Pelosi couldn’t even trade a worn-out nag with the Trump Administration on a new corona relief bill. The younger, more ardent members of her caucus offered no conciliatory wiggle room.
It was chocolate for dinner or tantrum. Pelosi handed over the Hershey’s.
Biden has been pushed into a similarly tough spot. As reporter Evan Osnos explains, the former Vice President has inverted the traditional campaign volte-face: “In the usual course of a Presidential campaign, a Democrat leans left during the primary and then marches right in the general election. Biden went the opposite direction.”
After running as a financier-friendly, moderate liberal to counter the unapologetic socialism of his opponents, Biden now heeds their demands. He binned his long-time support of the Hyde Amendment, which debarred Washington from funding abortion.
Both Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’s free-lunch giveaway on student debt is now on the Biden policy menu. The irony of the Democrats’ first non-Ivy presidential candidate in a generation proposing a costly bail out of the collegiate big leagues is lost on the left.
Even former President Obama noted the shift: “If you look at Joe Biden’s goals and Bernie Sanders’s goals, they’re not that different, from a forty-thousand-foot level.”
The Democratic supersessionism is nearing completion. Out is the old New Deal coalition of intellectuals, labor unions, white culchies, corrupt heelers, and urban minorities. In is an all-encompassing philosophy of wokeism that shuns anyone with bourgeois interests like living in a safe middle-class suburb.
Robin DiAngelo is the high priest of the ecclesia Democratus. Antifa are the devout votaries; brawling with police is their votive.
Political parties can’t live on small-dollar donations alone. They need an overarching cosmovision, faith in a higher purpose. Democratic leadership and the rank-in-file are fully embracing multiculturalism, doing it up brown in welcoming demographic upheaval.
The GOP is Trump, For Good or Ill – For Now
Even with the Republican National Convention in full swing, the party has no platform to offer other than four more years. This is normally a telltale sign of senescence, a lack of ideas, a void of justifiable existence. The unaddressed tension of the Republicans’ priorities may not ultimately doom the party, however.
Trump resurrected the America First brand from its World War II-era ashes. Yet his record on nationalist fidelity is mixed. The globe-scouring military adventurism and corporate servility of the former G.O.P. threatens a comeback upon Trump’s departure.
Despite this tug o’war, Republicans stand to benefit from the Democratic old guard waiving its sallow and mottled flag to the Robespierrian wokesters. A future with a tumbril is still a future. But Black Lives Matter activists setting small businesses aflame in a must-win state makes for compelling campaign ads.
It’s hard to find the asphalt on Pennsylvania Avenue if you’re wandering in the wilderness. But even as Republicans try to find a way out of the woods post-Trump, they may have a helpful guide.
The impetuous destructiveness of the new Democrats could burn a path out of the thicket. By doing nothing other than watch the inferno, Republicans could be gifted with finding the White House in the clearing.