Why do today’s Democrats feel content demonizing half the population as “white supremacists” and “domestic terrorists”? Why do they embrace “woke” policies enjoying little popular support? They’re certainly not taking a page out of Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends & Influence People, that’s for sure.
While part of the explanation could be political zealotry and tone deafness, some observers promulgate another theory.
“After pulling off the statistics-bending, six-fold swing-state wonder in the wee hours of election night 2020, perhaps Democrats now have reason to believe they’re no longer accountable to voters,” wrote the Federalist’s Bob Anderson yesterday. “Public opinion and polls become meaningless when you control the election process, when the courts turn a blind eye, and when the media blocks any honest inquiry.”
What some say may reflect this is a recent slip of the tongue — and perhaps a Freudian slip — by far-left congressman and speaker of the house heir apparent Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). While touting the “Freedom to Vote” (i.e., Taking Vote Fraud National) bill, he said it was “inspired by Hugo Chávez,” the despotic Venezuelan leader, before conspicuously “correcting” himself and saying “César Chávez” (video below).
A gaffe? Perhaps. Yet Jeffries is no Joe Biden. In fact, New York magazine praised him in 2019 as a disciplined man “incapable of making” gaffes. Reporting on this, commentator Monica Showalter knows where she stands. She writes that Jeffries’
self-revision in that video, that he was talking about “César” Chávez, is total nonsense. César Chávez was a famous labor organizer who had little to do with voting rights. He had a job in his youth registering voters, but that’s a nothingburger compared to his claim to fame with organizing a large union and advocating for rural workers’ rights. Hugo Chávez, by contrast, is the late, unlamented Venezuelan dictator who pioneered rigged elections under gaslighting claims, repeated on the American left, of expanding democracy for all. Hugo was able to seize absolute power by corrupting Venezuela’s election process, starting in 2004, when he knew he was an unpopular political goner and subject to a recall referendum under his own revised constitution. Chávez put the power to call a recall out there for public relations purposes and was shocked when the Venezuelan public took him up on it. After that happened, he was all about the rigging.
In fairness, anyone frequently doing public speaking will fumble occasionally. Yet here’s what’s not in doubt: Whether it’s the wasteful “Build Back Better” bill, ending the filibuster, election-rigging proposals, “transgender” advocacy, advantaging illegals over citizens, or some other woke outrage, Democrats now govern almost wholly contrary to the people’s will — and show no sign of stopping.
In fact, Biden and Kamala Harris are intensely unpopular, as is their party, and they’re all heading for assumed midterm disaster. Yet while President Bill Clinton popularized “triangulation” — a strategy of compromise — the Biden administration refuses to change course.
Now, “Democrats may fail at policy, but they’ve always been reliably competent at the game of politics, zeroing in on votes with great precision,” writes Anderson. “Have you noticed they haven’t been themselves lately, though?”
“Even after taking a shellacking in statewide elections in Virginia and New Jersey last November, a moment when sane politicians typically learn from defeat, they instead doubled down,” he continues.
“We’re left to ponder: Have Democrats lost the ability to navigate public opinion?” he later added.
Anderson also states that despite Biden and the Democrats being at approximately 42 percent in the Real Clear Politics polling average — the midterm dead zone — “they seem unconcerned.” He then suggested what I’ve long suspected was a factor:
The Democrats don’t worry about winning sufficient votes because they can now believe they can steal them.
Apropos to this, Anderson also related something late radio host Rush Limbaugh said just a month before the 2020 election. To wit: The Democrats
resent the whole premise behind elections. Look, they don’t believe they should have to persuade anybody to agree with them.… The modern-day Democrats have to go through the motions of campaigning, and they have to go through the motions of trying to win the hearts and minds of voters. But they resent the h-ll out of it. And in their world, it’s the one thing standing in their way: This need, this requirement to win elections. And I’m just telling you: As soon as they can figure out a way to eliminate elections, they will do it.
Limbaugh often used to say, “I know liberals.” He did, too. I know that because I know liberals — and the way of the demagogue (forgive the redundancy).
Understand the mentality: For all their faults, successful politicians are smarter than the average bear (Kamala Harris and a few others excepted); not geniuses, mind you, but smarter. Combined with their exaggerated sense of their own importance and abilities — and the tendency of godless, relativistic people to deify themselves — this often leads to steroid-engorged superciliousness.
In other words, they believe they’re better than us and that we’re just too stupid to know it and empower them sufficiently. We’re the dumb primates who, because of our knuckle-dragging ignorance, throw a monkey wrench into the pseudo-elites’ enlightened plans; we’re the yahoos who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment,” as Barack Obama put it when the mask dropped in 2008. For this reason, we deserve to have our will thwarted by our “betters” — by any means necessary.
This mentality was possibly what motivated Hillary Clinton’s shrill 2016-campaign outburst when, frustrated and enraged that she could lose to Donald Trump, she exclaimed “Why aren’t I 50 points ahead?!” (video below).
But Hillary knew why: We were all too doltishly deplorable to elect the right people. But, don’t worry, the Democrats have a remedy for that.
