Dominic Green
The Democrats’ civil war has already begun
There is, as our presumptive and somewhat presumptuous president Malaprop told us on Sunday, a time to plant and a time for the other thing. There is a time for healing, and a time for massing your advisers in a garden centre and taking your enemies to court for stealing the election. A time for introducing your granddaughter as your dead son, and a time for calling upon the endorsement of ‘General Stanley McGeneral’.
As it is written in the Book of Roger McGuinn, ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’ Turn, turn, turn: Now it is time for the Democrats to turn on each other before their triumph is certain.
Within hours of Biden claiming victory, the Democratic left was trading Twitter snark with the centrists. The fanaticism and fellow-traveling of the wokist horde is one reason why this election was so close. It is also crucial to the Democrats’ failure to flip the Senate and, it appears, to grow their lead in the House.
The voters who lacked the stomach for another four years of Donald Trump split their votes to prevent the Democrats from enacting the policies Biden campaigned on. This habit infuriates politicians because it thwarts their desire to impose their programs on the rest of us, and it elicits the contempt of the media, which has its own ideas about what’s good for the plebs. But it is eminently sensible.
An election is more than an opportunity to choose the next government. It is an opportunity to protect ourselves against the next government’s plans to spoil our lives. The public knows that the Democratic left is out of control. Sensibly, the voters have insured themselves against disaster by jamming the wheels of Congress.
Naturally, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has launched her government in exile — like de Gaulle after the Fall of France, only on Twitter. Its only functioning ministry is the Trump Accountability Project, which gathers evidence to prevent anyone associated with Trump, even the humblest stenographer, from getting perches in think tanks or daytime TV, or wherever it is regime criminals go in winter. So much for Pete Buttigeig’s call for unity, outreach and tolerance.
Ocasio-Cortez has called for archiving of the statements of ‘Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future’. She also complains that the party managers aren’t interested in her experience in overturning their preferred candidates.
The Democratic left knows the centrists will blame them for the closeness of this election, and that the centrists will lock them out in order to retain the House in the 2022 midterms. The left will, as it likes to do, fight for institutional influence when it should be courting the voters — especially as the Democratic coalition is no steadier on its legs than Biden is.
This election confirmed the vanity of presuming that all non-white Americans would automatically vote Democratic on the grounds of their melanin count. Though the media incessantly painted Trump as a ‘white supremacist’, exit polls suggest that he improved on his 2016 performance among minority voters. He won the votes of one in three Latino and Asian Americans and, admittedly on a much more modest scale, performed better with African Americans.
Inside the party, the forever war will continue. The public dislikes identity politics. The public must be made to like identity politics. The more the Democrats turn on each other, the faster the public will turn away from them.
