By Charles C. W. Cooke
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
Were I to be tasked with identifying the most ruinous
mistake that our two political parties have been prone to making in the present
era, I would report without hesitation that, in their separate-but-inimitable
ways, each has contrived to proceed as if their voters were automatons who
could be pushed around by their PR flacks as a magnet might push around an iron
filing. The proximate cause of our having ended up with a Biden–Trump election
— which, Lord help us all, is now to be a Harris–Trump election — is
that, unlike the country at large, the primary voters and party apparatchiks who have a say in the matter desire such
an election. But it is what’s beneath that desire that is more
interesting. Simply put, we have reached the point at which the powerbrokers
within both the Democratic and Republican folds have convinced themselves that
the problems they face are structural — be they massive voter fraud or internalized
racism or media bias or the American constitutional order — rather than
political, and they have advanced from that presumption with reckless abandon.
We are now eight years into Trump’s domination of the
GOP, and his most fervent advocates have still not worked out how to talk
persuasively to his critics. Within the inner sanctum at MAGA Castle, “you’re a
RINO” presumably cuts like a butcher’s knife. In the real world, it elicits
uninterested — perhaps even contemptuous — shrugs. Much as the trans lobby has
yet to work out that when the average voter is told, “If you oppose men in
women’s sports you’re a bigot,” he is more likely to respond, “Okay, then I’m a
bigot” than, “Wow, you’ve convinced me,” so Trump’s backers have yet to grasp
that their cajoling and belligerence and declarations of vanquishment serve to
alienate, rather than to recruit, the skeptics they need to win. One would not
glean this from the overconfidence that is currently radiating from the
post-convention GOP, but, irrespective of the Democratic Party’s many
self-inflicted misfortunes, it remains the case that Donald Trump is not a
popular man. The baggage he carries is real. It is possible that Trump is set
to win in November nevertheless, but, if he does, it will be despite his
reputation not because of it, and his victory will confer no useful mandate for
government. Throughout its history, the United States has elected only a handful
of presidents who have built a durable movement beneath their feet. Donald
Trump is not among them.
Neither, contrary to the preposterous encomia that are
now emanating from the Democratic Party and its friends in the press, is Joe
Biden. Since Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday afternoon, I have heard it
widely suggested that Harris will “inherit” Biden’s achievements, and that this
will help her beat Donald Trump in November. This is nonsense. Certainly, the
media believe that the public should love the Biden–Harris
administration, just as the Democratic Party believes that voters should agree
with its insistence that Biden has been a “historic” and “significant”
president who has achieved “more in four years than most presidents do in eight.”
But the thing is: Voters don’t actually think that. Instead, they hate
President Biden more than they’ve hated any other president in the modern
era — and, amazingly enough, they hate Kamala Harris even more than that. In my
estimation, this hatred is thoroughly deserved — Biden is a bad man, he has been a terrible president, and, far from being inexplicably blind
to his good character or his “achievements,” the public has responded sensibly
to those facts — but, whether one concurs or not, it ought to be obvious that
the coattails on which Kamala Harris is hoping to ride into the White House
simply do not exist.
A friend of mine has taken to observing that the first
party that re-engaged with normal voters and appeared sober over a sustained
period of time would dominate American politics for two decades. Given the
speed of world events, and the nature of our ideological divisions, I doubt
that any such advantage would endure quite that long. Still, the underlying
conceit is solid. If it seems rather odd that we have reached a point at which
trying to win a majority of voters is seen as a distraction from the sanctity
of the block party, that is because it is, indeed, rather odd. Who knew that
Interesting Times would feel so dumb.
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