If you think that the strategy that has been employed by Democrats to gain control of the House (and Senate!) is working, consider the graph above. A 6 point advantage in the generic Congressional ballot is not enough for Democrats to gain control of the House let alone the Senate. Back in December Democrats had a 13 point advantage. Since then they’ve lost that and, well, there is not trend—no actual movement one way or another. Despite demonstrations, Marcusist guerrilla theater, and the incessant press onslaught, there’s been little change since February.
The editors of the Wall Street Journal declaim:
Hillary Clinton lost the Presidency in 2016 for many reasons but one was surely because she called people who disagreed with her a “basket of deplorables.†Millions of Americans knew who she meant, and nearly 63 million voted for Donald J. Trump.
The political left is now repeating that mistake as its cultural and political vanguard sends a message of condescension, hostility and now ostracism to anyone who voted for Mr. Trump or has worked with or for him for the good of the country. Their relentless contempt might end up re-electing him.
On that score don’t underestimate how the refusal by a restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, to serve White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders will resonate politically. Ms. Sanders had taken a seat at the Red Hen with several others on Friday when owner Stephanie Wilkinson asked her to leave. Ms. Wilkinson told the press, which is turning her into Rosa Parks, that her restaurant “has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation.â€
Except toward people who don’t share Ms. Wilkinson’s views. Rest assured every Trump supporter in America will be reminded of this episode from here to November. The message: Now you’re so deplorable they won’t serve you in their restaurants.
Meanwhile, hecklers ran Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen out of a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C. last week. Protesters are also harassing Ms. Nielsen at home, blaring audio of crying children detained at the border and shouting “no justice, no sleep.â€
Then there’s actor Seth Rogen, who bragged on TV that he recently refused to take a picture with Paul Ryan and the House Speaker’s sons. He delivered a lecture instead. Apparently rudeness to children is now a badge of courage.
No doubt some on the right behave as badly—though when they do they don’t become media heroes. But the irony is that the main beneficiary of all this is Donald Trump.
Republicans know that Mr. Trump often acts deplorably, and many also dislike his immigration policies, especially his recent separation of parents from children. The resulting political uproar, not least from Republicans, has caused the White House to change policy and keep immigrant families together.
But Republicans and other voters also know when they are being sneered at and marginalized. They don’t think it’s un-American to ask if maybe immigrant parents shouldn’t take their toddlers on a dangerous illegal trip across the border. They may not like Mr. Trump personally, but they do like that he stands up to the cultural arbiters who hate them. Mr. Rogen and his fellow political censors won’t admit it, but they are playing into Donald Trump’s hands.
Yeah, that’s definitely the way to win converts.
It’s a warped class conflict. The top 0.1 percent have hit upon an ingenious method for directing working-class ire away from themselves: employ a 9.9% professional-class to afflict the 90% for you. They do it with usurious loans, with threats of termination in the workplace, with ruinous insurance agents, with shame and mockery. Tesla workers don’t get browbeaten by Elon Musk, they get it from a white collar MBA, the very sort of person the Democrats consider their base.
I don’t believe it’s an intentional strategy. I think the 9.9% pursue it as an objective.
That’s quite a techno-conspiratorial jumble, Ben.
Shorter: if you want to persuade someone, or attract their vote, don’t incessantly call them stupid, racist shitheads, when they don’t believe or act like they are stupid, racist shitheads. A novel and controversial notion, I know……..
Drew,
A lot of people misuse the word “conspiracy”: it’s something secret and the goal is an illegality. So let’s not make such mistakes in the future.
Dave,
It was an outgrowth of the post-war domestic order that an intelligentsia of capital would administer the machine because they have the requisite expertise the 0.1% did not. This was in fact predicted by Mikhail Bakunin who argued the intellectual class would, depending on the environment, either establish a Red Bureacracy like we saw in the Soviet Union, or become the enablers of the predator class as we have seen in the United States.
We now have a stituation in which thr 0.1% have decided they don’t need the 9.9% and can run the machine by themselves, while the 9.9% are demanding a return to the historical arrangement.
Both produce the same outcome of tranferring wealth from the 90% to the 0.1%.
Aye, aye, Captain sir.