Bottom Line: Democrats are Afraid of You

I’m having a problem deciding whether the Biden administration is stupid or evil or just flat-out afraid of us Commoners.

And then I realized that it’s all three. Here’s why.

Our liberal friends never imagined that a Trump could happen. Nothing in their world prepared them for him. So what happens when you are confronted by something completely unexpected? You stop dead in your tracks.

That is one of the basic themes in Jordan B. Peterson’s oeuvre. As he writes in Beyond Order. 12 More Rules for Life:

Many herbivores, comparatively defenseless, facing imminent and brutal death, freeze in place, paralyzed by fear… But to have no more courage than a rabbit is definitely not to be everything you could be.

And Nancy Pelosi is no herbivore, despite her fetish for storing ice-cream in $24,000 refrigerators. Non-herbivores, after freezing in place for a moment when threatened by the fearsome Trump dinosaur, decide what to do next. Friend or foe? Should Dems ignore Trump as a flash in the pan? Should they figure he represented a few dumb deplorables? Or should they treat him as an existential danger?

We know what happened. The Dems chose Door Number Three and embarked on a mission to destroy Trump and everything he represented.

When you choose all-out war, the next thing that happens is that you make Trump and his supporters the frightful enemy, that will smash everything we hold dear — reinstate Jim Crow, smash our wonderful administrative state, and make every woman into a house slave of the patriarchy — unless we act now. And then you bombard your supporters with non-stop propaganda, just like our great leaders did in World War I and II and the Cold War.

Were they right? Did Trump and his MAGA supporters represent an existential threat to the progressive project? Or was the real problem that ordinary American Commoners don’t get no respect from the Democrat educated class, and Donald Trump made them believe that he cared about people like them? You decide.

I suspect that if the Dems had given Trump half a loaf then the whole Trump-MAGA phenomenon would have died away and by 2022 the Dems would be winning a big second-term midterm, and back to business as usual.

But they fought Trump for every slice of the loaf, and the rest is history.

Today the Dems are so scared of the Trump dinosaur that they have convinced themselves they need to revamp the elections system with HR1, protect Capitol Hill with troops and a fence, and ram their agenda down the throats of the opposition in a nearly 50-50 Congress. It is a fight to the death, with no quarter.

Yet their agenda of unlimited immigration, Green New Deal, and systemic racism has absolutely nothing for the ordinary American Commoner. Do they really think they can game the election system enough to stop the blowback in 2022?

To me, the obvious folly and knavery of all this is self-evident. The question I ask is this: is there any way we can persuade our Democrat friends to step back from their determination to win at all costs, to slay the evil dragon of Trumpism even if they destroy America in the process?

The answer is: probably not. When you have persuaded yourself and your supporters that you are fighting evil — especially an evil dragon — you are fighting for survival and for good over evil and nothing you do is too much if it slays the evil dragon.

Back in the day some people thought it would be a good idea to separate morality and politics just a little. The idea was that if you limited government to stuff that almost all people could agree on, such as fighting foreign dictators and domestic thieves and robbers, then people could practice their different moralities without fighting over them in government.

But then, of course, whatabout slavery? Whatabout the workers? Whatabout women? Whatabout systemic racism? Whatabout the inalienable right of transgenders to compete in women’s sports? And off we go to the races.

Did you know there is a word for a society that combines politics and morality? Totalitarian. It might not be such a problem were it not for the historical record, that when you combine morality and politics you get the killing fields of the war of all against all.

Do our liberal friends not get that? Well, maybe, but meanwhile they have terrified their supporters into believing that white supremacy will kill us all.

I suppose the best we can hope for is a resounding 2022 midterm to return Congress solidly into the Republican column — despite the Democrats having done everything possible to make sure that no Republican ever wins an election ever again.

Then, all of a sudden, Democrats will discover the importance of minority rights in the legislature, the eternal sanctity of the filibuster, and the horror of legislating morality.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.