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Progressive Spokesmen for “Democracy” Consider the People – and Decide They Don’t Like Them

Posted on Thursday, November 14, 2024
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by David Lewis Schaefer
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41 Comments
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The shocked reaction of liberal “elites” in the media and academia to Donald Trump’s election to a second term presents an odd dichotomy.

On one hand, liberal spokesmen profess to regard the election outcome as a grave threat to democracy. Repeatedly during the campaign, they hurled the repellent epithet “fascist” at Trump and his supporters.

On the other hand, liberals blame the voters themselves for having created this threat. They imply that voters have “selfishly” put bread-and-butter issues like inflation, crime, and unchecked illegal immigration ahead of “justice,” primarily for, in the words of one letter writer to the New York Times, “immigrants, women, gay and transgender people.” To the further outrage of liberals, voters have also chosen their families’ financial wellbeing over other ostensibly liberal causes like climate change.

Moreover, we are told, Kamala Harris’s defeat reflects the prevalence of lamentable prejudices like racism and misogyny (the latter a tendency of which Barack Obama had accused black men before the election). According to writer Jill Filipovic on X, “This election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America.” In sum, in the oft-quoted words of cartoonist Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” character from the 1960’s, to self-styled liberals, Americans “have met the enemy, and he is us.”

The tone for the mainstream liberal (or, more precisely, progressive) reaction to the election was set in a series of November 8 Times headlines with the following titles: “President-Elect Spun His Own Grievances into Political Gold. He Became Vessel for the Anger of Millions;” “For Black Women, Harris Loss only Affirms Their Worst Fears;” “Defeated, Deflated, and Raw, and Wondering: What Now?”; “U.S. Election Sends Alarming Message to an Overheating Earth;” and “Trump’s Win Is Likely to Prolong the Uncertainty of a Gaza Cease-Fire.”

Never, in this writer’s recollection, has the Times devoted so many news stories on a single day to partisan laments over an election outcome.

But the stories’ text provided little factual support for the headlines’ claims. For instance, it is highly unlikely that any typical black woman would have as her “worst fear” the possibility that a “woman of color” would lose a presidential election. In fact, what the story reports is only that “Black female political leaders and organizers” had feared such an eventuality the most.

But like Ms. Filipovic, one such organizer, Waikinya Clanton, “founder of the organizing group Black Women for Kamala,” attributed the loss not to any defect in Harris’s perceived capacity to govern, or to dissatisfaction with the Biden-Harris administration’s policies, but to the flawed character of the nation as a whole: “America has revealed to us her true self,” she remarked, “and we have to decide what we do with her from here” – as if black women formed a unitary political body, who were charged with “deciding” how to treat their country.

Admittedly, in what the Times calls “one small bright spot for the [Democratic] party, two Black women will be in the next Senate for the first time ever.” But as Marcia Fudge, who served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Joe Biden, complained, “We [black women] have for a very long time been the people who did the work, but never been asked to sit at the table.” (Serving as cabinet secretaries or national security advisers, as numerous black people of both sexes have done under both Democratic and Republican administrations over the past five decades, to say nothing of Supreme Court justiceships and seats in both houses of Congress, and Ms. Harris’s own tenure as vice president just doesn’t count, in Ms. Fudge’s view, as “sitting at the table.” It’s the Oval Office or bust!)

As for the prospect of a Trump presidency making a Gaza cease-fire less likely, anyone who’s been following the news with reasonable assiduity in recent months knows that Israeli cease-fire proposals have repeatedly met with rejection by Hamas’s leaders. As the Times story reports, the Biden administration has sought agreement on a “three-stage truce,” according to which Hamas would promise to release its remaining hostages only after Israel withdrew all its troops from Gaza and released an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners – hardly a proposal favorable to Israel’s security, or to the prevention of repeated terrorist attacks against it.

But as regards Donald Trump’s potential capacity to promote peace between Israel and her neighbors, it is he who, during his first term as president, engineered the Abraham Accords between Israel and three Arab states (the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Bahrain). His track record, if anything, suggests a greater likelihood of engendering a secure peace between Israel and other Arab nations (starting, most likely, with Saudi Arabia) – thereby reducing outside support for continued Hamas terrorism.

Additionally, it was under Trump that sanctions on Hamas’s sponsor Iran were imposed, while the U.S. withdrew from the toothless nuclear “deal” – leading to a slowdown of Iran’s work on developing nuclear weapons, only to be followed by a relaxation of sanctions by Joe Biden, coupled with a major renewal of the mullahs’ nuclear project.

The Times’s story on the dire consequences likely to result for the world’s climate under a Trump presidency is even less balanced. While exaggerating the certainty with which weather events like “extreme heat, fire and floods” can be attributed to the emission of greenhouse gases, the story singles out the U.S. as “history’s largest emitter” of such gases (a consequence of the country’s size, prosperity, and contribution to global productivity) and warns that withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords would “hand a win” to China thanks to its “powerful clean-energy industry.”

Unmentioned is the fact that China, despite the accords, keeps building hundreds of new coal-burning plants each year. Also unmentioned is the cost to ordinary Americans’ standard of living from increasingly stringent Federal and state regulations aimed at compelling Americans to purchase electric cars and stoves, requiring companies to pay “carbon taxes” at the ultimate expense of consumers, and so on.

Polls prior to the election repeatedly demonstrated that American voters who either planned to vote for Trump or were “uncommitted” were animated not by racial or gender-based or ethnic or anti-gay prejudice, but by such elemental concerns as the cost of living, the threat posed by “open borders,” and the effects of “depolicing” sponsored by Democratic politicians throughout America’s cities. Without having to be experts on economic policy, ordinary people – not those well-off enough to benefit from substantial stock portfolios – could not avoid being aware of the substantial inflation that was engendered by such massive Biden spending projects as the 2021 American Rescue Plan and the grossly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.

Along the way, those who’d never attended college, or had paid off their college loans, naturally resented the Biden-Harris administration’s repeated endeavors to absolve others’ student debts – at taxpayer expense. And one suspects that plenty who’ve never gone to college are sensible enough to dismiss Biden and Harris’s nonsensical attempt to blame inflation on “price gouging” merchants.

While Harris disowned various unpopular political positions she had espoused in campaigning for the presidential nomination in 2019-20, such as banning fracking and paying for transgender surgery for prisoners and illegal immigrants, voters had every reason to doubt the sincerity of those disclaimers – especially since she repeatedly insisted that she maintained the same “values” as in the past.

The unhappiness with progressive policies on crime was manifested in the 2024 election through the defeat of San Francisco mayor London Breed, Los Angeles district attorney George Gascon, and their counterparts in Oakland. The specter of pro-Hamas riots on college campuses, especially at the nation’s most “selective” schools, throughout the past year, only added to the general sense of disorder.

Finally, most parents reject the notion that public schools should be indoctrinating their kids into the notion that gender is something essentially fluid, and even arranging gender “affirming” procedures without parental knowledge.

None of these concerns seem to have much troubled the Times’s editors or correspondents as they lamented voters’ misguided choice. In this regard one is tempted to recall the dig of the German Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht at the East German regime’s decree, in response to a workers’ strike, “that the people had lost the government’s confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort.”

“Would it not be easier if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?” Brecht asked (after the fact). Fortunately, America’s political institutions foreclose that option from its dissatisfied progressives.

Democrats seeking to recoup their political fortunes in the future would be well advised to follow the counsel of the insightful Times columnist Bret Stephens to renounce their “priggishness, pontification, and pomposity” and instead pursue “the introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time, and the humility to change.”

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.

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Rik!
Rik!
23 days ago

Climate Change? . . . When China, Russia, India, Cuba and the rest is of the Progressively Communist countries “pay their fair share” then and ONLY then will I get on board with “Climate Change” too! The ONLY thing “Progressive” about Democrats is that they are “Progressively” Communist!

Max
Max
23 days ago

MSM blaming everyone except themselves for the way they have botching the truth for years. Unfortunately, MSM will continue their onslaught against the truth as their owners regroup to formulate a new strategy against good. A never-ending battle between good and evil.

Robert Zuccaro
Robert Zuccaro
23 days ago

I like how the media is promoting the narrative of Gabbard and Hegseth being “unqualified” for their prospective jobs but they propagandized for a cackling, word salad of a ninny hammer as President of the United States! Besides refusing to admit their political biases interferes with their ability to report news, they continue to divide the nation.

RC100
RC100
23 days ago

Why do you keep calling them “Progressives?” They are not progressive…. “Regressive” is even too nice. Should be “Oppressive!”

Philip Seth Hammersley
Philip Seth Hammersley
23 days ago

There are plenty of qualified women and blacks to run for President. Kackler is NOT one of them! She has never had a real job or gotten anywhere by her own talents or qualifications!

Rob citizenship
Rob citizenship
23 days ago

Koo Koo Clocks provide some humor And they are. a dependable source of that humor . So the difference between a Koo Koo clock and the political left these days is obvious. There isn’t anything humorous about the left wing political groups ,even though it could be said that someone could set their watch by what they say and do . They are predictable for sure.However, the various policies such as the diversity , equity, inclusion stuff makes it clear that is no room for any disagreement ,which is common to the Communist way of doing things. And isn’t what could be called. Koo Koo — better to call it Com Com ( that would mean In Common with the. Communists ). I’ll stay with the humor of the Koo Koo clock for a laugh .
David Lewis Schaefer wrote a good article here and it should be appreciated for showing how the Leftists think — shows how seriously wrong their ideology is and how people who want to make America a great Country are on the side of what is right and good . In the spirit of Faith, Family and Freedom.

Melinda
Melinda
23 days ago

The arrogance of progressives is beyond comprehension. They are like self centered children (who at least have the excuse of being children). They won’t change until our education system changes and then it will take a generation.

Steve Greenwell
Steve Greenwell
23 days ago

If wanting to keep our freedom, our opportunities to increase wealth, and our heaters and air conditioners is selfishness, than Ayn Rand was right to call it “The Virtue of Selfishness”.

Phillip Nagle
Phillip Nagle
23 days ago

The real fascists are the Democrats who try to hide their true agenda through smear campaigns while transferring power to unelected boards and international organizations. The real danger in the Democrats trying to equate President Trump to Hitler is not that people might believe that Trump is like Hitler, but that people might believe that Hitler was like Trump. These people are little more than Holocaust deniers.

PapaYEC
PapaYEC
23 days ago

These people are Marxist totalitarians and their useful idiots. They are the worst enemies USA has.

Orion Bennett
Orion Bennett
23 days ago

The fact that so many citizens of countries the world over, watched our election … and the processes and faults leading up to it, says that Donald Trump matters. Millions and millions of people who couldn’t even think about voting in the election, were invested in the outcome of this election. Why? Because freedom matters, and the last bastion of freedom … of true freedom, (with all it’s faults) is America. If America fell, (as it was wont to do, proven during the last democrat cycle) … the concept of real freedom would fall. Trump was the deciding point to the rise and fall of our republic.
Without him, our Republic was gone. No one else, in recent decades, was willing to put up much of his own wealth, to bring America to greatness again. None other than a business man, with shall I say it? Brass Balls … could stand up to our corrupt government. Kicking and scratching the entire way … during his first 4 years, changes were made. Some erased by the last abomination administration … but some stuck. And hoping beyond hope that we can overcome the attacks in this 4 years … much more can be done, and I am confident will be done.
The left, has never understood … their goals align with nazi sympathizer george soros, and those privileged elitists, that subscribe to the concept of a one world government rule (where of course they are heads of the new world order.). They no longer can relate to the common man … they see themselves as leaders of men, hence, we who allowed them to think that way … are to blame for being herded like sheep … pawns to their whims.
And we … are called Nazi’s.

Ol'man
Ol'man
23 days ago

Sounds like liberal tears ta me….

michael hess
michael hess
23 days ago

the dumb as crap party is just that dumb. the voters have spoken and the dumb as crap’s plans to socialize the USA are not acceptable to the American people. get gone damn party, you time has come and gone. lie down and die

uncleferd
uncleferd
23 days ago

Liberals’ only “causes” seem to be those which give them unearned “esteem”, or, certain real benefits… in return, of course, for their condemnation of their real benefactors. It’s all wrapped in troubled emotions relating to self-image, so, best to hope they feel better, and leave it there.

Leslie
Leslie
23 days ago

Black female “leaders” need to know that there are not enough black Americans to vote them into ANY office, so they’d better stop their racism claims before they learn they just made people MORE racist because they just wouldn’t shut up.

Vilas Gamble
Vilas Gamble
23 days ago

As I have pointed out before on this site socialist Democrats have abandoned the term liberal in favor of what they think is a more innocuous word… Progressive. In a political sense what does this word mean? According to the dictionary it is defined as “socialist/communist. This is the philosophy of government they have committed themselves to. Their goal is to someday take complete control of the government by using illegal immigrants to far outnumber voters who might oppose them. That is why we need to be ever vigilant as to who their candidates are and be ready to expose them for what their philosophy of government is. The progressive philosophy of Democrats is so ingrained in their party it could take decades before they rid themselves of it, if ever they do. The sad part of all this is that we have so many of our fellow citizens who are willing to vote away the freedom we have enjoyed as a nation for over two hundred years. Remember we must hold Republicans feet to the fire to deliver on the issues we voted them in for. Just keep in mind what President Trump has said, “success will be or revenge”.

Stephen Russell
Stephen Russell
23 days ago

WE DONT LIKE YOUR POLICIES DAY 1

David Millikan
David Millikan
22 days ago

Even Communist harris that couldn’t manage $1 Billion ($690 Million from biden that she illegally took for campaign funds) in Campaign Funds and still ended up $20 Million in Debt is still asking for more funds. This is the same person that couldn’t even manage the Border let alone the National Debt or anything else for that matter. And the dnc is Freaking out because they are now over $20 Million in Debt. Why would anyone want somebody like that in the White House when she WASTED a $BILLION on celebrities and Hollywood? Answer: They live in FANTASY WORLD and SPEND everybody else’s money when it’s NOT theirs. That’s what democrats do. Anything for Power and Control.

Judy Ross
Judy Ross
23 days ago

What is odd is that a democracy is run by the many. Although we live in a Constitutional Republic, when it suits them, the democrats cry foul when the “majority” wins if it is not them.

It would be nice if they could make up their mind, however, they do what they do to “get the job done.”

Robert Chase
Robert Chase
23 days ago

Does this group really not see the emperor has no clothes on?! They protest too much! Cannot imagine voters will forget the attitudes from the LEFT.

FedUp
FedUp
23 days ago

This article highlights one of the main tenants of the far left. It’s NEVER their fault.
It’s not Kamala’s terrible policies/ideas. It’s white women’s fault for not backing her.
It’s not that Kamala had no qualification for the office of the president. It’s because Americans are racist.
It’s not because Kamala wanted to turn the USA into a socialist/Communist country. It’s because Black Men hate women.

anna hubert
anna hubert
23 days ago

People know they are not liked by the gentry who is looking down on them and voted accordingly. Time for soul examination for the gentry, they are lacking in all the departments . Also through the article I read the word woman a few times and had to wonder, how handy the skirt is when needed I thought it was banished..

Glen
Glen
20 days ago

Democrats just can’t get it through their heads that THEY are the problem. We see through all of their schemes of trying to control the masses while stripping us of our rights and our money so they can enrich themselves.

hinckley buzzard
hinckley buzzard
22 days ago

Like Johnny’s grandma said at the parade, “Look—everyone is out of step but Johnny.’

Jack
Jack
23 days ago

The Democrats lost because of their complicity for special interest groups, minorities and affirmative action (DEI). The American people are fed up with the idea of participation trophies. If you want to be admired and held in high esteem, do something besides b**ching because someone else got the brass ring. Set a personal goal within reality and go for it. Sitting around griping about being a victim is old news and don’t want to hear it. Do something for the Country even if you don’t care about yourself.

A row of supercomputers running simulations of quantum cryptography algorithms to test their efficiency and effectiveness
President Joe Biden, son Hunter Biden and sister Valerie Biden walk across the South Lawn of The White House on July 28, 2024 in Washington, DC. President Biden is returning from a weekend trip to Camp David. (Photo by Michael A. McCoy/Getty Images)
President-elect Donald Trump shakes hands with Dana White during the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden on November 16, 2024 in New York City.

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