“There should be a real liberal party in this country, and I don’t mean a crackpot professional one.” Pres. Harry Truman
The once and future President Donald Trump earned a victory two weeks ago has been decisive on all fronts, a rebuke of the last four years of far-left policies. But the ongoing question after an election like this is how will the shellacked party react to its shellacking?
For example, when voters handed Democrats won the 2006 midterms, all of us Republicans in Washington understood it was because of the Iraq War. President Bush even responded, to show he respected the will of the electorate, by immediately replacing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Some Democrats have been able to offer a mea culpa for the last four years, with some in the DNC going so far as to call the far-left “a freakshow.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) criticized his own party for abandoning the working class. Rep. Richie Torres (D-NY) called defunding the police an “absurdity.” CNN’s Van Jones called the Democrats who support Hamas terrorists “idiots.”
But many are digging their heels into the quicksand of wokeness.
Democrat governors have announced a “resistance group” against Pres. Trump. Obama adviser Ben Rhodes blames voter anger with Democrats on “our democracy,” whatever that means. Former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki insists that Democrats shouldn’t abandon the deeply unpopular issue of letting transgender boys compete in girls sports. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) blames her party’s losses on VP Kamala Harris not having enough time as candidate, even though Democrats in the 2020 primary rejected her so fast she dropped out in 2019!
When she conceded, Harris herself promised her supporters would “keep fighting,” but for what? Unaffordable housing? More violent crime? Rolling out the red carpet to Putin’s war machine with their terrible energy policies? Giving the Taliban $7 billion in military hardware?
Given that the election loss inspired one Democrat voter to murder their father with an axe, maybe incendiary phrases like “keep fighting” should be retired.
But while Democrats and allied media love incendiary rhetoric like “far right” to condemn their political opponents, the irrefutable fact is that Democrats are the ones who have radicalized. Pew Research came to this conclusion in 2017
Financial Times reconfirmed it this month:
Indeed, Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Jr, and Trump himself all used to be Democrats, alienated by the party’s sharp left turn.
Now as someone who makes his livelihood from Republicans winning elections, I am perfectly fine with Democrats not learning the lessons from their disastrous foray into “hipster Marxism.” But as someone who wants the best possible outcomes for the country, I hope they can learn some lessons.
This will get me in trouble if I ever run for office, but we need liberalism. Our government works best when we have conservatives conserving those institutions that work on behalf of the majority of people, and liberals defending the liberties (that’s where we get the word) of those individuals where it might not. For example, conservatives champion law enforcement while liberals protect the rights of the accused.
This constructive conflict is why our country and the world have been so prosperous the last 70 years. But we’ve seen however the problem that when those on the left get too much power, they don’t know what to do with themselves.
The fundamental psychological defect of 21st Century Democrats is they can’t be the adult in the room. They don’t want to be the resident assistant (RA) in the dorm who has to end the party and tell people to go to bed. They want to be the rebel, the protesters who don’t clean up after themselves, the cool mom from Mean Girls. When Republicans can’t lose, we get well-run states like Utah, Tennessee, and South Dakota. But when Democrats can’t lose, we get disasters like San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle.
So one hopes that for the sake of the country that Democrats can make liberalism liberal again. Maybe for 2026, they can print up some blue hats that say that?
Jared Whitley has worked in the US Senate and White House. He has an MBA from Hult business school in Dubai. For his musings in Utah Policy, the Top of the Rockies competition this year named him the best columnist in the Intermountain West.
