Progressives’ Anti-America Cope

By Noah Rothman 

Thursday, November 07, 2024 

 

Where have all the protests gone? What has become of the so-called “resistance” to Donald Trump that erupted shortly after his election to the White House in 2016? The absence of social unrest — even mild social perturbation — in the wake of Trump’s restoration to the presidency is conspicuous. Perhaps it is the collective shrug from the American electorate that is leading Democrats inclined toward self-soothing rationalizations for Trump’s return to power not to anger but, rather, a sense of betrayal. 

 

Today, a variety of enterprising political mercenaries are busily crafting excuses for the Democratic Party’s electoral misfortunes. That is unremarkable. What is unique in this moment, however, is the degree to which the excuse-makers are imbued not with resolve but resignation. The infidelity of the American electorate has come as a deflating shock. And that shock has imposed a crisis of faith on the former president’s most aggrieved opponents. 

 

If America can embrace Donald Trump with full knowledge of who he is and what he is capable of, then this is not the country they believed it to be. Maybe it never was. 

 

This line of reasoning, such as it is, begins with the supposition that neither Kamala Harris nor her party is responsible for Tuesday’s outcomes. Hers “was a historic flawlessly run campaign,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid exclaimed. That sentiment was echoed in a wildly popular social-media post by journalist and essayist Victoria Brownworth. “There is one critical takeaway here,” Brownworth wrote. “Kamala Harris was not the problem.” So, what was the problem? Put simply: you. 

 

“This is fundamentally about America, toxic masculinity, [and] white supremacy,” Boston University Law School visiting professor Jed Shugerman declared. “Blaming Harris would be part of that problem, not the solution.” Author and columnist Jill Filipovic agreed. This election “was not an indictment of Kamala Harris,” she proposed. “It was an indictment of America.” In her extended remarks, she added that, for all of this country’s promise and its capacity for reinvention, Trump’s reelection is evidence of America’s fateful tendency “to return, again and again, to the darkest corners of our past.” 

 

Former CNBC anchor John Harwood appears similarly embittered by the election results. “If you’re accustomed, as I am, to believing that a critical mass of Americans embraces the values of freedom, pluralism, and common sense, the choice voters made defies comprehension,” he wrote. “The arc of history in 2024 bent not toward justice, as Martin Luther King Jr. liked to say, but away from it.” 

 

Some who did not incriminate America writ large narrowed their indictment to the false promise of American egalitarianism — a philosophy that even the minority voters who benefit from it inexplicably rejected. 

 

“Watching Latinos chase model minority status has never sat *well* with black people, but this is a wound the Black community won’t soon forget,” The Nation correspondent Elie Mystal mused. “White supremacy cannot be defeated unless we’re all in it together (obviously, a majority of white people are not gonna help). But… this election really shows that a lot of other ‘people of color’ do not want to defeat white supremacy, they want to join it.” 

 

This one really has everything. The accusation that Donald Trump’s historically strong performance with Latino voters is attributable entirely to the fact that those voters sought only to ingratiate themselves with white people is grotesque. The allegation that white Americans are hostile to the advancement of minorities similarly so. The scare-quotes meant to imply that Trump backers are not authentic minorities — up to and including the roughly one in five black men who cast a ballot for Trump — serves only to buttress a terminally flawed theory of everything. 

 

But this outlook was not limited to soapbox agitators ensconced in epistemically cloistered far-left redoubts. “Democrats need to be mature, and they need to be honest. And they need to say, ‘Yes, there is misogyny, but it’s not just misogyny from white men,’” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough opined. “It’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from black men — things we’ve all been talking about — who do not want a woman leading them.” 

 

That anti-female animus has apparently been internalized by women, too. Or at least, white women. Back to Reid: “This will be the second opportunity that white women in this country have had to change the way that they interact with the patriarchy,” she said. It was up to them to “do the right thing,” and they failed. 

 

It’s not hard to understand why Democrats want to avoid conducting a proper examination of the delusions that led Biden to see his narrow 2020 election victory (a victory Democratic lawmakers further down the ballot did not share) as a mandate to remake the American social compact. They would rather not drill down on the profligacy that made inflationary pressure worse, the fashionable racial favoritism that compelled them to violate the Constitution’s proscriptions against discrimination, and faddish far-left cultural manias that imposed undue hardships on women even as appeals to women became the centerpiece of the Democrats’ campaigns. 

 

But in casting about for something that absolves them of the consequences of their own poor judgment, too many have settled on the notion that their fellow Americans are consumed with internecine hatreds and that the country itself has betrayed its own ideals. 

 

This is a recipe for self-marginalization. 

 

Some of the Left’s most influential voices have already lost the vocabulary necessary to reach a majority of American voters where they live. Now, they’re talking themselves out of the exercise entirely. What’s the point when so many of their fellow countrymen are motivated by irrational animus? Those voters didn’t reason themselves into a vote for Trump, and it’s unlikely they can be reasoned out of their support for his candidacy. It’s a cognitive construct that assigns to Harris voters a monopoly on virtue, persuasive potency, and common sense. Their opponents, therefore, cannot be convinced. They can only be contained. 

 

It is unlikely that the far-left activist class can hold onto this outlook for long — not if it seeks to reclaim any influence over the course of political events in the United States. Americans do not believe their country is a bad place populated by evil people, nor do they subscribe to the notion that America’s fundamental goodness is contingent on electoral outcomes. The narrative promulgated by those who are wounded by Tuesday’s results only gives its proponents license to retreat from public life. It’s not they who must engage in introspection. It’s the country that has to change. 

 

This is a bitter recrimination, not well-meaning criticism. But it is not intended for its supposed targets. It is an emotional comfort blanket for depressed leftists. And it only forestalls their reckoning with a country they no longer understand. The sooner they dispense with it, the sooner they can repair the trust they’ve sacrificed.