Woke Democrats are going to get Donald Trump re-elected

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Donald Trump’s second term as US president, not so long ago, was regarded as a wish-fulfilment fantasy conjured by fanatical admirers in red MAGA caps. In the real world, so the official narrative ran, Joe Biden, the experienced senior politician and guarantor of stability, had restored the rightful order of things, the elites were back in control and the Trump presidency would go down in history as a freakish interlude from which Americans had emerged chastened.

That was the received wisdom, just a few months ago, among the American mainstream media, the liberal commentariat, the Democratic establishment and the echo chamber that amplifies their views among the similarly bien-pensant media here in Britain. Now, however, just 11 months into the Biden administration, the return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office in 2024 is being widely canvassed, not chiefly among conservatives but by pillars of the American liberal establishment, and not as a marginal hazard but as a growing likelihood.

The voices proclaiming the second coming of The Donald are not predominantly emanating from The Wall Street Journal or the National Review, but from New York magazine, The Atlantic and other stalwart mouthpieces of the elite consensus. David A. Graham in The Atlantic, has criticised Democrats for obsessing over the wrong threat: “Many members of the uneasy coalition of Democrats and former Republicans who oppose Trump are frantically focused on the danger of Trump and his GOP allies trying to steal the 2022 and especially 2024 elections… But these watchdogs risk missing the graver danger: Trump could win this fair and square.”

Graham had the objectivity to recognise Trump’s chances of winning over the electorate, but he did not quite find sufficient detachment to analyse why the Democrats were focused on a theoretical threat of an election “steal” rather than the substantial one of a legitimate victory. The truth is that the Democrats are so puffed up with entitlement and moral self-righteousness that they cannot conceive of Trump winning other than illegitimately. The ordained order of things is rule by Democrats and their RINO (Republican In Name Only) useful idiots: any deviation from that axiom, as in 2016-2020, can only be an illegal usurpation. Such tunnel vision is not the best guide to countering a serious electoral challenge.

Jonathan Chait, in New York magazine, has a lengthy analysis of “Why Joe Biden’s Popular Agenda Is So Unpopular”. Interestingly, he traces the Democrats’ woes back to a statistical error in Barack Obama’s exit polls as long ago as 2012. Those polls simplistically concluded that Obama had won the presidency despite losing the white vote by 20 points. That false prospectus convinced the Democrats they must become the party of African-American and Latino voters, prioritising the liberalisation of immigration law. Even if the polls had been correct, that policy was based on the questionable assumption that ethnic minority voters want the world and his dog to come and live in their neighbourhoods.

As Chait recounts, it was nearly four years later that Nate Cohn discovered those exit polls had significantly under-counted the old white working-class element of the electorate that had actually supplied Obama’s winning margin in the upper Midwest. By then, the Democratic Party was embarked on its lemming stampede to fragment American society along racial lines in its quest for electoral advantage. Even when the backlash from older white voters in the Rust Belt presumed to scupper the coronation of the anointed one, Hillary Clinton, Democratic strategists, instead of going back to the drawing-board, doubled down on their woke strategy.

Will scientists ever isolate the virus, or gene, or whatever it is that inspires political parties to embrace their own dissolution? In Britain, we have seen it repeatedly with Labour, from the Bevanites, to the Militant Tendency, to the Corbynistas. Nor are the Tories immune to the contagion, from the grisly “modernisation” charade to Boris’s dedicated sawing away at the bough on which he is seated. But the auto-destruction of the Democratic Party in America is a truly spectacular disaster movie.

To imagine that Middle America can successfully be wooed via BLM/Antifa riots, the imposition of Critical Race Theory, the elimination of women’s private spaces in the name of the crazed “trans” cult, the demonisation of one race on the pretext of eliminating “white privilege”, an obsession with promoting large-scale abortion up to birth, a demand to defund the police, and an attack on America’s elemental history and culture, culminating recently in the removal of the statue of Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father and primary author of the Declaration of Independence, from New York City Hall, demonstrates an extravagant divorce from the thinking of mainstream America. 

That is precisely the kind of cult-like self-absorption that makes political parties unelectable and consigns them to the wilderness. The further problem for the Democrats is that their more mainstream policies, based on once popular centre-left ideas, are also imploding. Joe Biden’s fiscal policies may be redistributive, but they are unpopular with Joe Public because they are fuelling inflation, aggravating government borrowing and endangering the economy. America is not naturally a begging-bowl society, while the electorate is fiscally intelligent and has instinctive self-help in its DNA.

As Chait points out, voters support adding dental and optical benefits to Medicare, home health care for elderly and disabled citizens, and similar welfare provisions, but Democratic centrists in the Senate cut these programmes down or rejected them. The party is at war with itself. Chait  identifies the ideological problem of millionaire and billionaire donors and “non-profits”, in conjunction with the “college-educated” activists, driving the party relentlessly leftwards. The voters who are the supposed beneficiaries of their woke agenda do not want the police defunded: they want their protective presence in their dangerous neighbourhoods. 

In short, the American political scene resembles a campus in which the ideologically driven snowflakes are the Democratic Party activists and their leftist faction. Joe Biden was envisaged as the establishment safe pair of hands who would reassure centrist voters by ignoring the woke menagerie; instead, he has given in to the crazies. As for his supposed political experience and maturity, since Afghanistan nobody will ever again dare float that canard: Joe is the same old hack politician he always was, with a patina of narcoleptic inanition added to the mix. As for his vice-president, with popularity ratings lower than George III in the aftermath of the Battle of Lexington she seems an unlikely heir apparent.

And all this is before the fat man sings: once Trump starts campaigning, at which he is very good, while inflation rises, QE comes home to roost and infuriated parents lynch woke school boards, does anyone seriously believe the Democrats will be able to appeal to their record? Even Mitt Romney, the Senate’s anti-Trump hold-out, says Trump will win in 2024. Mitch McConnell is willing to back Trump, the Never Trump movement in the GOP is dead and the nomination is Donald’s for the asking. The Republican establishment that resisted him strongly in 2016 knows it dare not next time around.

If Trump wanted to recover the presidency (and why wouldn’t he?), the Republicans could not countenance the nomination of any other candidate, for fear of the punishment they would receive from their core base. Time was, the Democrats were a formidable party of state, imbued with authority and gravitas. Today, with the Squad, BLM and a medley of neo-Marxist space cadets hanging like a millstone around its neck, the Democratic Party seems bound for extinction. The question is: can a dotard president, dependent on a bunch of dementedly woke billionaire donors and “college-educated” ideologues recover electability by 2024? No wonder, across America, conservatives are dusting down their MAGA caps again.