Elizabeth Warren Is a Disaster for the Democrats

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

 

It’s always the “but” that gets you. There you are, hurtling through the start of the sentence, making all the right points, saying all the necessary things, conveying all that needs to be conveyed, and then, Bam!, out comes that pesky coordinating conjunction that ruins the exercise in an instant. In her revolting statement on the assassination of Brian Thompson, the former CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts fell prey to this trap. “Violence is never the answer,” Warren said. “But,” she continued, “people can only be pushed so far.”

 

Ah.

 

As one might have augured, Warren’s “but” was the overture to a catastrophic series of statements that, taken together, rendered all that came before them entirely moot. The killing represented “a warning,” Warren suggested,

 

that if you push people hard enough they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.

 

There’s a word for this sort of argument in the expansive English language. That word is “justification.”

 

Contrast Warren’s words with those from her fellow Democratic senator, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. About the murderer, Fetterman said, “He’s the asshole that’s going to die in prison.” About those celebrating him online, Fetterman said, “A sewer is going to sewer: that’s what social media is about.” About the mainstream press’s sympathetic takes, Fetterman said, “I don’t know why the media wants to turn that into a story, just with these trolls saying these kinds of things anonymously like that.” His conclusion was perfect: “Remember,” Fetterman advised, “he has two children that are going to grow up without their father. It’s vile. And if you’ve gunned someone down that you don’t happen to agree with their views or the business that they’re in, hey, you know, I’m next, they’re next, he’s next, she’s next.”

 

Americans seeking good examples should resolve to be a Fetterman rather than a Warren.

 

The results of the 2024 elections have accorded the Democrats the opportunity to wonder who they are and to debate who they ought to be. The contrast on display between John Fetterman and Elizabeth Warren might be useful in that endeavor. Broadly speaking, the Elizabeth Warrens of the world do not help the Democrats win power or advance their ideas. Broadly speaking, the John Fettermans of the world help to achieve both. Were an alien to descend into America in the hope of discerning some patterns in our politics, one trend he would swiftly sniff out is that the country does not much like aloof Massachusetts progressives. Along with Minnesota, which produced both Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, Massachusetts’s modern claim to fame is that it produced Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. There is, it seems, something in the way that lefties from Massachusetts behave that gives the electorate the heebie-jeebies. By excusing murder, Elizabeth Warren has confirmed that this habit will be tough to break.

 

As a matter of fact, one can construct a plausible case that Elizabeth Warren and her batty worldview are directly responsible for many of the Democrats’ current woes. It was Warren’s lurch into extremism that inspired Kamala Harris to adopt many of the positions she promulgated in 2019 — positions that Harris struggled to shed during this year’s presidential election. And it was the coterie of Warren-inspired White House staffers who successfully seized the moderate Joe Biden after his winning 2020 campaign and transformed him into a myopically left-wing president whom a majority of Americans came to loathe. It should perhaps have been obvious that Warren was a crank when she started tweeting out sentiments such as, “Black trans and cis women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are the backbone of our democracy” without having first been threatened with waterboarding. But if it was not clear then, the consequences of her influence have now made the indictment clear. Warren is a disaster for her party, a disaster for America, and a disaster for the basic human decency that we are entitled to expect from our politicians — no ifs or buts apply.