Virginians have a chance on Nov. 2 to take the side of their state’s historical giants of 1776. Doing so requires repudiating corrosive leftist forces that are sacrificing cherished values, rejecting the gubernatorial candidacy and demagogic campaign of Democrat Terry McAuliffe, and choosing Republican Glenn Youngkin as their next governor.
One of the great Virginians I refer to is Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, who nevertheless is now persona non grata among radicals who increasingly control the Democratic Party, which he founded. He was a slaveholder, which means he held views typical of many 18th-century white gentlemen rather than those of the 21st century. Despite his wondrous achievement in the making of America, he committed the sin of being a man of his time, so statues of him are being junked. The latest is being removed from New York City Council, where it has stood for 100 years.
This is what Jefferson’s party has become, a gathering of ruthless ideologues who expunge inconvenient people and history, a trait typical of tyrants. McAuliffe has what may be the misfortune of being the party’s principal exponent today, because his race is the highest-profile election of the year and a focus of national attention.
It is neck and neck, and the Democratic Party is marshaling its biggest guns to avoid losing it. It’s betting the credibility of every star in the blue firmament, including former President Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Vice President Kamala Harris, and President Joe Biden. All are stumping for McAuliffe, imploring Virginians in effect to abandon the values that their great commonwealth compatriot drafted for humanity.
Central to McAuliffe’s campaign are two of the Left’s most extreme and divisive policies, on race and gender. He accuses Youngkin of being a racist, as I’ve previously noted, because he disapproves of children being indoctrinated with critical race theory in grade school.
Democrats have been losing marginal numbers of black and other minority voters for the past four election cycles, and they’re frantic that the party’s grip on power is doomed if the trend continues. So McAuliffe and company are hysterically pointing the dread finger of racism at Youngkin to alienate sensible, independent-minded African American voters from him.
Obama has been wheeled in repeatedly to buttress McAuliffe’s appeal to black voters. His efforts included an odious speech recently, mocking Youngkin with dripping disdain for the sin of being a successful chief executive who supposedly couldn’t therefore represent ordinary people.
To persuade black voters yet further that he’s with them, McAuliffe then brought in Stacey Abrams, a black Democrat who lost the Georgia governor’s race three years ago and has been peddling the lie ever since that Republicans stole the election from her. (Perhaps she gave Donald Trump the idea of his big lie on the national level.)
It is McAuliffe who is out of touch with ordinary people, as Youngkin has noted to great effect in advertisements that do nothing more complicated than replaying video of the Democrat declaring that parents should mind their own business and not have a say in what their sons and daughters learn in school.
Parents in Virginia, like parents everywhere, are aghast at the anti-white racism and transgender propaganda that they discovered when they tuned into all those Zoom classes during the pandemic and saw what teachers were drumming into the heads of their children.
It will be a political earthquake if the Democrats lose Virginia, for the state shifted rapidly from red to deep blue as the suburbs just south of the Potomac grew commensurately with ballooning federal government just across the river in Washington, D.C.
But the shock that a Republican victory would deliver to our national politics is a necessary one. It would deliver the message that the public does not want what the Left is peddling these days, the public does not approve of the increasingly divisive demagogic tactics that Democrats are using to win, and citizens are determined to reclaim their rightful place as the decision-makers in our republic.
Elections give voters the opportunity to retake control and rebuke politicians and activists whose antics too often succeed because most sensible people act on the understanding that they have better things to do with their lives than engage deeply in politics.
That view is an unaffordable luxury now. If Virginia voters can find the will to resist leftist ideology and its Democratic representatives, they can start to rebalance our politics and begin the restoration of reason and decency as prerequisite qualities in our politicians.
