The Democrats Are Building Themselves a Suicide Machine

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, March 18, 2022

 

The Democrats are in political trouble, and the media bear much of the blame.

 

This is not because the media have ceased to be horribly biased in the Democrats’ favor. They remain that, and hopelessly so. Rather, it’s because the media have become more crazy, more self-confident, and less respected than ever, and because this shift has rendered their bias less useful than it once was.

 

For reasons that remain alien to me, almost the entirety of the American press — as well as much of academia and the entertainment industry — has spent the last five years assiduously adopting an exceptionally weird race- and gender-essentialist ideology that pretty much everyone outside of those institutions absolutely loathes. And, in its infinite wisdom, the Democratic Party has followed suit. The result has been the creation of a narrow, extremely peculiar feedback loop, within which the institutional Democratic Party and its friends in the press have concocted — and then adopted — a set of bizarro-world ideas that are met with confusion and horror once they are released into the general population. Bit by bit, piece by piece, tweet by tweet, the wagon to which the Democrats have hitched themselves is becoming a suicide machine.

 

It is this process of mutual reinforcement that has brought us widely mocked and politically toxic neologisms such as “birthing people,” “Latinx,” “BIPOC,” “cisgendered,” and “chestfeeding.” It is this process that has yielded the smashing successes that were the Defund the Police movement, the introduction of critical race theory in schools, and an obsessive focus on the riots of January 6. It is this process that has led figures such Jen Psaki (who has not only lived in both camps, but who still has a foot in each one) to believe that she can make criticisms vanish simply by pretending that they are “right wing.” It is this process that has led to men trouncing women in women’s sports in the name of an ersatz “justice” in which about seven actual people believe. And it is this process that has convinced the Democratic Party in Florida and beyond that if they insist loudly enough that kindergartners ought to be taught about gender fluidity, the general public will magically come to agree.

 

Can the Democrats stop this? No, they cannot. The arrangement worked for them when journalists acted as mere stenographers, but now that those journalists have become full partners in the ruse, the tail has started to wag the dog. Yes, the press still habitually elevates Democrats and their ideas. And, yes, the press still habitually savages Republicans, who are treated reflexively as abnormal. But, as it has grown bolder and more ideological, the journalistic class has become just as willing to use the Democratic Party to spread its own ideas as to be used by the Democratic Party as the promulgators of its cause.

 

From this predicament, there is no obvious escape. Why did the entire Democratic Party pay for the stupidity of Defund the Police in 2020, even though only the fringes had fully endorsed it? Because the media loved the idea, so they tied it to the Democrats’ brand, cast the Republicans as the bad guys in the story, and pushed it as hard as they could. Why did Terry McAuliffe blow the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election? Because the press told him that parents loved being cut out of their kids’ educations and that those who didn’t were a troglodyte minority — and, fool that he is, McAuliffe believed them. Why is Chuck Schumer so baffled by Joe Manchin’s recalcitrance? You get the picture.

 

Competition keeps people sharp. Antagonism does, too. Without them, one is liable to become complacent, flabby, and dumb. The average elected Democrat now spends his days being agreed with on the Sunday shows, having his slogans and characterizations mindlessly repeated in the newspapers, and watching in false comfort as his most stupid ideas are taken seriously and his critics’ objections are labeled “controversial.” If he gets any pushback at all, it comes from the left, and it is rendered in a language that none of the voters who pose a threat to him is able to speak. The Democratic Party’s present plight is in part the product of bad timing and weak leadership at the top, and yet its general inability to cope with the bad hand that it has been dealt is being made immeasurably worse by the decades it has spent being mollycoddled by lunatics. As a result of its incestuous relationship with the press, the vast majority of elected Democrats have simply not been prepared for battle. The consequence: Calamity.