By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, July 05, 2018
Key Trump administration officials have been confronted
at restaurants. Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) urged protesters to
hound Trump officials at restaurants, gas stations, or department stores.
Progressive pundits and the liberal media almost daily
think up new ways of characterizing President Trump as a Nazi, fascist, tyrant,
or buffoon. Celebrities openly fantasize about doing harm to Trump.
What is behind the unprecedented furor?
Just as Barack Obama was not a centrist, neither is
Trump. Obama promised to fundamentally transform the United States. Trump
pledged to do the same and more — but in the exact opposite direction.
The Trump agenda enrages the Left in much the same manner
that Obamacare, the Obama tax hikes, Obama’s liberal Supreme Court picks, and
the Iran nuclear deal goaded the Right.
Yet the current progressive meltdown is about more than
just political differences. The outrage is mostly about power — or rather, the
utter and unexpected loss of it.
In 2009, Obama seemed to usher in a progressive
revolution for a generation.
Democrats controlled the House. They had a supermajority
in the Senate. Obama had a chance to ensure a liberal majority on the Supreme
Court for years.
Democrats had gained on Republicans at the state and
local levels. The media, universities, professional sports, Hollywood, and
popular culture were all solidly left-wing.
A Republican had not won 51 percent of the popular vote
in a presidential election since George H.W. Bush’s 1988 defeat of Democrat
Michael Dukakis. Before 2016, Republicans had lost the popular vote in five of
the previous six presidential elections.
And then visions of a generation of progressive grandeur
abruptly vanished.
Obama left behind a polarized nation. Democrats lost both
the House and the Senate. During Obama’s tenure, Democrats lost more than 1,000
seats at the state level.
Presumptive winner Hillary Clinton blew the 2016
presidential election.
Foolishly, Clinton tried to ensure a landslide victory by
wasting precious campaign time in unwinnable red states such as Arizona and
Georgia. Meanwhile, she too often neglected winnable purple states such as
Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all of which Obama had
won in 2008 and 2012. Clinton apparently forgot that the Electoral College, not
the popular vote, elects a president.
After his election, President Trump did not implode as
predicted. By following the Obama precedent of relying on executive orders,
Trump began recalibrating everything from immigration enforcement to energy
development.
Abroad, Trump did what no other Republican president
would have dared, bombing ISIS into submission, canceling the Iran deal,
seeking to denuclearize North Korea, pulling out of the Paris climate accord, and
moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The U.S. economy took off with new tax cuts and
deregulation. Radical improvement in unemployment, economic growth, and oil and
natural-gas production created new consumer and business confidence.
Despite his frequent crudeness, Trump is inching toward a
50 percent approval rating in a few polls. That has only made an impotent
opposition grow even more furious — both at the other half of the country for
supporting Trump, and at a buoyant Trump himself for baiting and ridiculing
progressives in the fashion of no prior president.
Worse still, much of the loss of progressive power was at
least partly self-inflicted.
Former Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid
foolishly dropped the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster for
executive appointments and most judicial nominations in 2013. That blunder
ensured Republicans the chance to remake the Supreme Court when they took over
the Senate in 2014.
Obama chose not to try to win over his opposition, but to
alienate it by veering hard left in his second term. Hillary Clinton foolishly
got herself into a number of personal scandals that embarrassed her party and
helped lead to her defeat.
In reaction to the sudden loss of political power,
Democrats would have been wise to run to the center, as did Bill Clinton, who
all but ended the era of the Reagan Republicans.
They could have dropped their obsession with identity
politics and instead attempted to win over blue-collar voters with more
inclusive class appeals rather than racial appeals.
Instead, Democrats have endlessly replayed the 2016
election. In Groundhog Day fashion, Hillary Clinton repeatedly offered tired
excuses for her loss.
To progressives, Trump became not an opponent to be
beaten with a better agenda, but an evil to be destroyed. Moderate Democrats
were written off as dense; left-wing fringe elements were praised as clever.
Voters in 2016 bristled at redistribution, open borders,
bigger government, and higher taxes, but progressives are now promising those
voters even more of what they didn’t want.
Furious over the sudden and unexpected loss of power,
enraged progressives have so far done almost everything to lose even more of
it.
And that paradox only leads to more furor.
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