The shocked reaction of liberal “elites” in the media and academia to Donald Trump’s election to a second term presents an odd dichotomy.
On one hand, liberal spokesmen profess to regard the election outcome as a grave threat to democracy. Repeatedly during the campaign, they hurled the repellent epithet “fascist” at Trump and his supporters.
On the other hand, liberals blame the voters themselves for having created this threat. They imply that voters have “selfishly” put bread-and-butter issues like inflation, crime, and unchecked illegal immigration ahead of “justice,” primarily for, in the words of one letter writer to the New York Times, “immigrants, women, gay and transgender people.” To the further outrage of liberals, voters have also chosen their families’ financial wellbeing over other ostensibly liberal causes like climate change.
Moreover, we are told, Kamala Harris’s defeat reflects the prevalence of lamentable prejudices like racism and misogyny (the latter a tendency of which Barack Obama had accused black men before the election). According to writer Jill Filipovic on X, “This election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America.” In sum, in the oft-quoted words of cartoonist Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” character from the 1960’s, to self-styled liberals, Americans “have met the enemy, and he is us.”
The tone for the mainstream liberal (or, more precisely, progressive) reaction to the election was set in a series of November 8 Times headlines with the following titles: “President-Elect Spun His Own Grievances into Political Gold. He Became Vessel for the Anger of Millions;” “For Black Women, Harris Loss only Affirms Their Worst Fears;” “Defeated, Deflated, and Raw, and Wondering: What Now?”; “U.S. Election Sends Alarming Message to an Overheating Earth;” and “Trump’s Win Is Likely to Prolong the Uncertainty of a Gaza Cease-Fire.”
Never, in this writer’s recollection, has the Times devoted so many news stories on a single day to partisan laments over an election outcome.
But the stories’ text provided little factual support for the headlines’ claims. For instance, it is highly unlikely that any typical black woman would have as her “worst fear” the possibility that a “woman of color” would lose a presidential election. In fact, what the story reports is only that “Black female political leaders and organizers” had feared such an eventuality the most.
But like Ms. Filipovic, one such organizer, Waikinya Clanton, “founder of the organizing group Black Women for Kamala,” attributed the loss not to any defect in Harris’s perceived capacity to govern, or to dissatisfaction with the Biden-Harris administration’s policies, but to the flawed character of the nation as a whole: “America has revealed to us her true self,” she remarked, “and we have to decide what we do with her from here” – as if black women formed a unitary political body, who were charged with “deciding” how to treat their country.
Admittedly, in what the Times calls “one small bright spot for the [Democratic] party, two Black women will be in the next Senate for the first time ever.” But as Marcia Fudge, who served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Joe Biden, complained, “We [black women] have for a very long time been the people who did the work, but never been asked to sit at the table.” (Serving as cabinet secretaries or national security advisers, as numerous black people of both sexes have done under both Democratic and Republican administrations over the past five decades, to say nothing of Supreme Court justiceships and seats in both houses of Congress, and Ms. Harris’s own tenure as vice president just doesn’t count, in Ms. Fudge’s view, as “sitting at the table.” It’s the Oval Office or bust!)
As for the prospect of a Trump presidency making a Gaza cease-fire less likely, anyone who’s been following the news with reasonable assiduity in recent months knows that Israeli cease-fire proposals have repeatedly met with rejection by Hamas’s leaders. As the Times story reports, the Biden administration has sought agreement on a “three-stage truce,” according to which Hamas would promise to release its remaining hostages only after Israel withdrew all its troops from Gaza and released an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners – hardly a proposal favorable to Israel’s security, or to the prevention of repeated terrorist attacks against it.
But as regards Donald Trump’s potential capacity to promote peace between Israel and her neighbors, it is he who, during his first term as president, engineered the Abraham Accords between Israel and three Arab states (the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Bahrain). His track record, if anything, suggests a greater likelihood of engendering a secure peace between Israel and other Arab nations (starting, most likely, with Saudi Arabia) – thereby reducing outside support for continued Hamas terrorism.
Additionally, it was under Trump that sanctions on Hamas’s sponsor Iran were imposed, while the U.S. withdrew from the toothless nuclear “deal” – leading to a slowdown of Iran’s work on developing nuclear weapons, only to be followed by a relaxation of sanctions by Joe Biden, coupled with a major renewal of the mullahs’ nuclear project.
The Times’s story on the dire consequences likely to result for the world’s climate under a Trump presidency is even less balanced. While exaggerating the certainty with which weather events like “extreme heat, fire and floods” can be attributed to the emission of greenhouse gases, the story singles out the U.S. as “history’s largest emitter” of such gases (a consequence of the country’s size, prosperity, and contribution to global productivity) and warns that withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords would “hand a win” to China thanks to its “powerful clean-energy industry.”
Unmentioned is the fact that China, despite the accords, keeps building hundreds of new coal-burning plants each year. Also unmentioned is the cost to ordinary Americans’ standard of living from increasingly stringent Federal and state regulations aimed at compelling Americans to purchase electric cars and stoves, requiring companies to pay “carbon taxes” at the ultimate expense of consumers, and so on.
Polls prior to the election repeatedly demonstrated that American voters who either planned to vote for Trump or were “uncommitted” were animated not by racial or gender-based or ethnic or anti-gay prejudice, but by such elemental concerns as the cost of living, the threat posed by “open borders,” and the effects of “depolicing” sponsored by Democratic politicians throughout America’s cities. Without having to be experts on economic policy, ordinary people – not those well-off enough to benefit from substantial stock portfolios – could not avoid being aware of the substantial inflation that was engendered by such massive Biden spending projects as the 2021 American Rescue Plan and the grossly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.
Along the way, those who’d never attended college, or had paid off their college loans, naturally resented the Biden-Harris administration’s repeated endeavors to absolve others’ student debts – at taxpayer expense. And one suspects that plenty who’ve never gone to college are sensible enough to dismiss Biden and Harris’s nonsensical attempt to blame inflation on “price gouging” merchants.
While Harris disowned various unpopular political positions she had espoused in campaigning for the presidential nomination in 2019-20, such as banning fracking and paying for transgender surgery for prisoners and illegal immigrants, voters had every reason to doubt the sincerity of those disclaimers – especially since she repeatedly insisted that she maintained the same “values” as in the past.
The unhappiness with progressive policies on crime was manifested in the 2024 election through the defeat of San Francisco mayor London Breed, Los Angeles district attorney George Gascon, and their counterparts in Oakland. The specter of pro-Hamas riots on college campuses, especially at the nation’s most “selective” schools, throughout the past year, only added to the general sense of disorder.
Finally, most parents reject the notion that public schools should be indoctrinating their kids into the notion that gender is something essentially fluid, and even arranging gender “affirming” procedures without parental knowledge.
None of these concerns seem to have much troubled the Times’s editors or correspondents as they lamented voters’ misguided choice. In this regard one is tempted to recall the dig of the German Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht at the East German regime’s decree, in response to a workers’ strike, “that the people had lost the government’s confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort.”
“Would it not be easier if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?” Brecht asked (after the fact). Fortunately, America’s political institutions foreclose that option from its dissatisfied progressives.
Democrats seeking to recoup their political fortunes in the future would be well advised to follow the counsel of the insightful Times columnist Bret Stephens to renounce their “priggishness, pontification, and pomposity” and instead pursue “the introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time, and the humility to change.”
David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.
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