In 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez complained that she and leftist allies were being placed on a blacklist by Democratic Party regulars. It turns out that this was not a principled objection, for now, she wants to be the one making the list.
Disturbingly, this seems also to be the view of a wide range of Democrats, which is ironic because four years ago, they were accusing President Trump, baselessly, of course, of trying to take office and then arrest his political opponents.
Now, Democrats and Republican grifters allied to them in the poseur “resistance” are calling for the personal and professional destruction of everyone who has stood by or “enabled” Trump, including even the attorneys now assisting him in various state legal battles.
Their vindictive attitude is absurd and disgraceful on so many levels that it is hard to know where to begin.
First, Trump isn’t Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. He is a president who, far from destroying federal institutions, has been held in check by them. His administration was not an apartheid regime requiring a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” as a prerequisite for national healing and recovery. He was not a dictator who changed the Senate’s rules and packed the Supreme Court, as Democrats aspire to do. He even advanced the cause of civil rights, for all the spurious cries of “racism” that critics have frothed about in their frivolous wokeness. In the face of elite white liberal opinion, actual nonwhite voters just gave Trump a higher share of their vote than they have given any Republican since 1960.
Anyone who thinks democracy will be restored after a four-year absence on Jan. 20 is afflicted with such partisanship as to have lost historical perspective.
In fact, if not for Trump’s uncouth, bombastic, and ultimately repellent personal manner, people would probably discuss his presidency as an obvious success. They would remember him for making the biggest stride toward Middle East peace in at least 40 years. They would remember him as the first president since Jimmy Carter who didn’t invade another country, who brokered a fairer criminal justice system, who presided over the strongest economy since at least the Eisenhower era, and for a major tax reform that benefited lower-income working people the most.
It should also be evident by now that voters, even as they decided not to reelect Trump, did so by a narrow margin. They were neither as upset nor as angry and alienated as the elite expected or as the elite was itself. The results show no support for the vindictive revenge that self-important resisters are calling for because they also reelected most Trump-supporting politicians.
It was already evident last week that Democrats’ expected gains had failed to materialize in the Senate. But, stunningly, not a single Republican House incumbent who voted against Trump’s impeachment was defeated in the election. Democrats appear on pace to lose a dozen House seats on net, with their only three pickups coming due to court-ordered redistricting in North Carolina and a retirement in Georgia. Republicans also gained ground in state legislatures. If voters were angry with or tired of Trump, they found a way to express it while rewarding Republicans.
It turns out that voters, including some large number of anti-Trump voters, are practical about the party system. In the absence of actual crimes or corruption (and voters reasonably noticed that these did not feature in Trump’s presidency), they understand that Republicans will stand by a Republican president.
After the 2020 election, Democrats lack even a mandate for radical change or for vigilante retaliation. They need to calm down and take themselves less seriously. That’s what voters did this past week — stayed calm and didn’t take the Left seriously.
