David Cearley
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

Unexpected Neil because very few on the left lately have been using language anywhere close to it.

Since the election, legions on the left have been in complete denial about their culpability in delivering Trump to the White House.

I’m a fiscal conservative and a social moderate. I expect people in both parties to be forced toward a policy middle that produces somewhat steady societal progress. That’s not what happened for the past eight years.

For that I blame social media and the media itself. The left reacted to the election like they were completely blindsided, while most on the right could see it coming a mile away.

Obama and his team thought and acted like they had a mandate to force swift and radical social change. Clearly they overreached.

While dems were patting themselves on the back for all the positive good they were doing, they lost more than a thousand legislative seats, several governorships, control of state legislatures by the boatload, and both houses of congress. The democrat party hasn’t held this few seats since the 1920s. Worse, many of Obama’s changes were executive orders rescinded at the stroke of a pen. Others were executive overreach and clear violations of existing law.

I blame social media and the press for the left’s current state of shock. Social media allows us to live in self created echo chambers. Click bait stories are tailored to our current viewpoint. Those stories don’t enlighten, they incite. The press blatantly ignored Obama’s shortcomings, policy disasters, and the growing backlash. Both forces led far far too many on the left to believe that the culture war was over and they were in firm control, all while readily available facts clearly said otherwise.

Normally when movements or people fail to reach their goals, they step back, assess where they went wrong, learn from their mistakes and adopt tactics which will set themselves on a path to winning. That hasn’t happened. Since November, many if not most on the left have focused entirely on the idea that Trump is illegitimate, that the election was stolen, that they didn’t lose, and that they will retake power by any means necessary. The idea that the gloating, shoving people’s faces in it, Obama telling Repugs they can ride in the back, forcing every school in the country to allow transgender’s in kids locker rooms or lose their federal funding, the DOJ forcing companies to make massive donations to DNC affiliated non-profits, deliberately undermining Trump’s ability to effectively do his job, and on and on. A democrat senator the other day called for Trump’s assassination, and it took a week for her to apologize. The ACLU is apologizing for supporting free speech. National news outlets are defending violence against individuals exercising (aberrant) free speech. Anyone who disagreed with an Obama policy, or supports a Trump policy has been routinely smeared as a racist. I have repeatedly pointed out recently that the very large number of people actively seeking to silence their political opponents (this began long before Charlottesville and the Nazi meme), and defending political violence are far more dangerous to democracy than a few White Supremacists, and more dangerous than a fool occupying the White House. Reasonable people observing the tactics of the progressives/democrats believe they are seeing the rise of an authoritarian state, and represent a clear and present danger to democracy itself.

They don’t reject moderate progressive ideology, but after watching progressives gloat for eight years, and witnessing the mass hysteria since Trump was elected, they are very skeptical about ever again allowing those people access to the levers of power.

Watching all this has been incredibly sad. We need two vibrant opposing parties. We need one side that watches the budget and supports business creation and job growth while another demands social justice and wants our ideals to become reality. We have hundreds of years of history where political violence was rare, and generally unacceptable.

Because of all of those things, your objectivity and focus on positive ways to actually change minds rather than denigrate your political opponents is both brave, and greatly appreciated. Your values are what is currently missing from the leadership of the Democrat party, and, frankly, missing from social justice dialog at every level.

I just saw this. I believe it addresses the issue under discussion;

https://arcdigital.media/the-destructive-power-of-progressive-overreach-8f5fc10e2b82

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    David Cearley

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