The Outstater
On the Democrats’ Weirdity
AMERICAN VOTERS have figured out that today’s Democrat Party is odd, its liberal wing palpably so, even visibly.
David Harsanyi of the Washington Examiner argues that is the lesson of Biden’s election loss: “Yearning for a government that upholds law and order is a normal inclination for any citizen. Attacking people who demand the law be followed, whether on the border or in our cities, is abnormal. And very weird.”
So, can you spot liberal Democrats on the street, pick them out in a group photo?
Not perfectly. Robert Redford and Scarlett Johansson, after all, are liberals. But do the members of the congressional “squad,” for example, look vaguely familiar? How about the typical Antifa rioter? Of course they do, they’re faces from your junior high school phys ed class — the misfits, bless their hearts, Hersaryi’s weirdos.
Granted, many of us are misfits at one time or another but we compensate in healthy ways or simply outgrow it. For those who do not, there is the Democrat Party where resentment and envy hold sway. It is there you can hear the promise to “get even” by bringing everyone else down for laughing at you on the dreaded rope climb or commenting on your hair.
Even the leftish Chatgbt concedes when prompted that the Party attracts those who feel marginalized — again, young adults who had a socially rough adolescence, but also members of the LGBTQ+ community, certainly, and individuals who think that race or ethnic identity has been used to cheat them somehow. Also, there are those who adopt alternative if not strange lifestyles and philosophies as a matter of whim, perversity or affectation, including some in our wealthiest class.
Fortunately, they are few in number. Unfortunately, they sit atop many American institutions, mostly in the soft professions of journalism, the humanities, the arts and politics. That is predictable, says the economist Thomas Sowell: “The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they don’t work. Therefore, we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas don’t have to work in order to survive.”
Things are changing — sort of.
Liberals themselves are reading the election results as a hint that the Party might want to put a lid on it. Greg Casar, the new chair of the House Progressive Caucus, says Democrats should return to economic issues and to representing “everyday” people. He says that the Party “must put winning above being right all of the time.”
A weird way of putting things, but there you have it. — tcl
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