Are the Radical Progressive Left America’s “Deplorables” Now?
I know there have to be at least a dozen reasons why a majority of Americans voted for Donald Trump in last week’s presidential election, and an equal number of reasons why Kamala Harris lost. But after having a week to process Trump’s stunning victory, I’m convinced that one of the most significant factors was the radical progressive left agenda — aka wokeness — which was roundly repudiated by Americans of all political stripes.
Anti-Woke
I’d describe myself as a Bill Maher liberal — a lifelong Democrat inclined toward liberal positions on things like abortion rights, gun safety, racial and gender equality and environmental protection, but adamantly opposed to woke political correctness carried to ridiculous extremes.
As much as anyone, I despise the far left’s attitude of moral superiority, their constant lecturing on all the sins of white people and Western culture, their incessant emphasis on race and gender and oppressive insistence on their own awkward, euphemistic vocabulary. But I don’t despise it enough to have voted for Donald Trump. As soon as I heard the recording of him pressing Georgia’s secretary of state to “find me eleven thousand seven hundred and eighty votes” four years ago, that was all it took to disqualify him as a presidential candidate in my mind. And that incriminating recorded phone call was just the tip of Trump’s insurrectionist iceberg.
One-Question Litmus Test
Before Nov. 5, 2024, I believed in my heart of hearts that most of my fellow Americans would feel the same when the time came to cast their votes. Now, in post-election retrospect, I’d wager that a simple, one-question survey could have determined the outcome of this election:
Which is the more disqualifying factor for you in choosing the next president:
— Candidate tried to overturn the results of the last election? ___
— Candidate is sympathetic to and may be influenced by the woke liberal left agenda? ___
For me and most of my friends and family, Trump’s efforts to overturn the last election were categorically disqualifying. But for many other friends — as well as some family members — being sick and tired of continually getting lectured to or shut down by Progressives over their political views was just too much, especially when added to the real policy issues they favored Trump’s positions on. For them, the chance of Trump ending the horrible Russian-Ukranian and Israel-Hamas wars, lowering prices on groceries and gas, reducing taxes and implementing an effective immigration policy was worth their vote. And if they were undecided, their abhorrence of the radical left sealed the deal.
Democrats Awakening
That realization is seeping its way into the minds of Democrats and the party’s leadership. U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) has been making the rounds in the media with a painfully honest message. “We as Democrats are more concerned about offending people and just getting all our words right than actually having legitimate, serious debates about issues that matter,” he has said.
Moulton is being dragged over the coals by far left liberals for saying that although he generally supports transgender rights, he has two daughters and doesn’t “want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. As a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” he added.
Moulton told Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe today that Democrats are experiencing a “cultural mismatch” with the American people. Things will not end well, he warned, “If the rabid left continues to define the Democratic Party.”
Among the liberal policies Moulton blamed for enraging citizens are criminal justice reform measures like preventing law enforcement from punishing shoplifters. As a result, customers in many cities are forced to not only pay higher prices for common items like soap and toothpaste, but to endure the annoying wait for store employees to unlock them from behind their plastic encasements.
And Moulton is not alone. U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) posted on X yesterday that “Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ or ‘From the River to the Sea’ or Latinx.’”
In her column in the New York Times this past weekend, Maureen Dowd called out the Democratic Party for embracing “a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation.” She estimated that this “alienated half the country or more.”
Democratic political strategist James Carville told Dowd his party could not “wash off the stench” of what he calls “identitarianism,” — his term for woke. “Defund the police,” he said, are “the three stupidest words in the English language.”
A Different World
Hillary Clinton shot herself in the foot when she ran against Trump in 2016, declaring that half of Trump’s supporters were a “basket of deplorables.”
So who are the “deplorables” now?
Kamala Harris tried the best she could to thread the needle between the moderate and far left wings of the Democratic Party. We’ve learned you can’t thread the woke needle; you can only be punctured by it. Now the Democratic Party has to figure out how to stop the bleeding.
Life Imitates Politics
Meanwhile, my wife and I were walking down the street in our New York neighborhood last weekend and came upon a young Black guy who looked to be in his 20s, preparing to deliver a pallet of Amazon packages. We heard him shouting, to no one in particular, “C’mon y’all! The sun is out. Trump is in. And we’re gonna get stuff done.”
After we got over our surprise, we talked about what we’d just witnessed and decided to try to share the guy’s optimism for as long as circumstances would allow.
It wasn’t long. Only until this evening’s news, when we learned that Trump had picked South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem for Homeland Security Secretary; Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswami to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency; and Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host with an admirable military record but no government experience, to head the Defense Department.
Now we’re back to hoping for the best but bracing for the worst, trying not to worry how bad it may get before it gets better.
