Wars seemed to be breaking out everywhere this week — in Kashmir, Congo, and in a new phase in Gaza. Closer to home, Democrats appear to be opening a hot civil war of their own.
Political veteran James Carville was punching down to the ingénue David Hogg, scolding him for ham-handedly seeking to primary party elders.
AOC and Bernie Sanders want to declare war against oligarchs who, ironically, mostly support Democrats and their causes.
The portly Gov. Pritzker is now competing in a speech to New Hampshire Democrats to be the party’s angriest man in the room (of course, when his family is not running Harvard University into the ground with the anti-Western pedagogical trash and open tolerance of campus bigotry).
But there is a certain self-defeating, almost Elmer Fudd quality, overlying these Democratic party contretemps.
In large part, progressives still don’t get why their brand is so toxic, with about only 1 in 5 voters approving of Congressional Democrats.
No, it’s not the message, and no, it’s not the messenger. Voters don’t like the product Democrats are selling — a bigger welfare state, cultural extremism, anti-merit identity politics, shamefully failing public schools, and maximal rejectionism of everything Trump.
And they don’t like the party-wide gaslighting, which Biden’s re-emergence on BBC reminded them of this week.
So, back to Elmer Fudd. Fudd could never catch Bugs Bunny and often wound up shooting himself in the face. Keep this image in mind as you consider what’s happened in the last week or so.
Democrats breathlessly predicted economic apocalypse resulting from tariffs, only to find an economy far more resilient than many experts predicted and clearly able to withstand the temporary tariff stomach-punch.
They swooned to repeal Trump’s tariff authority that they gladly overlorded when Biden employed it.
Meanwhile, Trump started triangulating two key Democratic constituencies — labor and Hollywood, who, in varying degrees, backed the trade reset.
But look around the corner. If the White House can stick the landing on the 17 imminent bilateral trade deals with major global partners, depressurize the squeeze with second-order countries, and narrow the tariff aperture to focus on China’s mendacity, then a major trade reformation could be within sight.
Together with the “big beautiful” tax relief and deregulation bill slated to pass soon, mid-summer could see a major economic boon.
If so, the Elmer Fudd Democrats will have nothing — as is often the case with maximal rejectionists — and will be seen again as the boys and girls that cried wolf, as they were in Russigate and the Nazi slurs directed against Trump.
The second half of the Democratic “message” last week was “due process” for illegal aliens facing deportation, like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador under the Alien Exclusion Act.
But again, Trump could be the Bugs Bunny to the Democrats’ Elmer Fudd by simply using the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which, as a civil statute, affords minimal due process and judicial review.
President Obama demonstrated this when he used the law’s expedited removal provisions to deport over 3 million undocumented immigrants.
As a reported member of MS-13, Garcia has already been found deportable under the INA.
If Trump follows the Obama deportation model, Democrats will surely come up on the short side, not just of public opinion but also the law.
Democrats’ legal strategy is also on the ropes elsewhere. Trump prevailed in the DC Court of Appeals this week on the second of two key DOGE cases on agency downsizing after winning another key one in March on agency head removal.
Trump also prevailed this week at the US Supreme Court on the transgender ban in military service. The president is also likely to win on a host of DEI termination challenges after the Supreme Court banned racial favoritism in 2022.
On the world stage, Trump “peace through strength” air strikes in Yemen — which made the Houthis cry uncle earlier in the week — puts to shame the Obama and Biden appeasement strategies (Biden actually de-designated the Houthis as terrorists and undermined Saudi Arabia’s effort to contain them) and leaves the Democrats exposed as weak and naïve.
So if Democrats still have, in pollster David Shor’s words, a “trust deficit” in these and most other major issues (crime, energy), why can’t they move to the more moderate, tenable center?
I think it’s largely because progressive culture has developed a reward system that betrays the larger electorate.
The clerics of today’s progressive cocoon — the mostly white, college-educated activist and donor classes — know only the vocabulary of identity, victimization, and ever-growing government bureaucracies.
Their preening is a form of self-dealing aimed at self-exaltation. Heretics on issues like biological men in women’s sports, like Rep. Scott Moulton, get Jacobin-like maximal ostracization.
A central idea of this movement is deconstructionism — the almost Maoist idea that we must deconstruct widely accepted norms on gender, racial non-discrimination, secure borders, safe streets, containing public debt, and keeping terrorist supporters out of universities.
That is somehow seen to be the romanticized intellectual heir of the 1970s civil rights movement, for which progressives long to give them some kind of meaning, if not moral superiority.
But it’s a mirage, a set of precepts that time and most voters have passed by — including many of the very identity groups progressives still claim to speak for.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
