Decision 2024: While The Right Has Risen, The Left Has Been Doing...What, Exactly?

 

I admire and respect almost all of the progressive values. What I have come to loathe, particularly over the last two years, is both the nihilism in their message, their intolerance towards any who disagree with their perspective and the way that they will rewrite history to suit their narrative.

Whenever I try to point out these flaws in their arguments their reaction is inevitably the same: I am called a racist or a MAGA extremist. I have often argued that true objectivity may be impossible but it’s clear that when it comes to progressives as much as conservatives, if you point out facts that puts them in a negative light – i.e. anything that doesn’t follow the narrative they want – you are accused of essentially giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

I found this out first hand when I wrote an article about the Electoral College in which I pointed out, using maps and historical evidence that for more than half a century the Democrats had essentially chosen to abandon the rural, small vote states for the larger electoral prizes. The moment this article came up, a person I had long considered a friend accused me of being what amounted to being full blown conservative and that by saying Republicans had too much power, I was therefore a monster. Over several exchanges I attempted to reason with this individual (he has since stopped following me) that a system where the majority chooses to shut out any dissenting voices is just as totalitarian as minority rule. His rhetoric continued to escalate, and even after I told him that I had voted Democrat the majority of the time – including 2016 and 2020 – it did nothing to cause him to deescalate.

The closer we get to November, we are going to hear much of the same rants we have heard for the last decade from Democratic publications, progressive fundraisers and left-leaning articles about not just the fate of the republic but how America got this way in the first place. I’ve already seen dozens of these ‘articles’ this year; I expect to see many more. All of them choose to omit something very critical about this fact: the role of the left during this same period that they claim everything has gone to hell.

And their role was: indifference. Indeed for more than forty years and even now, the left’s reaction to the crisis that they now claim was inevitable every step of the way was to essentially do nothing or make ‘both sides’ arguments themselves.  Even as they shout that the sky is falling unless Biden wins in November, there are still quite a few of them who seem indifferent to the idea of supporting him. They will acknowledge that, if the Republicans win, it will lead to the end of America as a democracy and turn us into a full-blown dictatorship. All of the rights that they spent so much time hoping for will essentially be gone. And yet, there are still a percentage – small but enough of a percentage to be the balance in what will be a close election – who see what happens if the GOP wins and are still uncommitted to the idea of supporting Biden.

This should not come as a shock to anyone who spends enough time with progressives. If the cliché of the worst evil comes when good people do nothing, then the left has been guilty of this in every respect for the last forty years.

They have spent a lot of time saluting Jimmy Carter, calling him a saint. I think much of this has to do with his being defeated by Reagan than his actual Presidency. Because Carter, from the moment he started campaigning in Iowa until the day he left office, was always viewed with suspicion if not contempt by the liberal wing of the Democratic party. Part of it was due to his own flaws as a politician to be sure but it also had to do with Carter running as a centrist and governing as one – things which the liberal wing of the Democrats hated then and which the progressive loath now. Indeed, many Democrats supported a primary challenge to Carter from Ted Kennedy, who represented the liberal lion despite all of the character flaws he had as well as the fact he couldn’t even come up with a reason to run for President in a nationally televised interview. Even after Carter trounced him in the primaries and clinched the nomination, Kennedy, supported by the liberal wing, fought his renomination every step of the way. And once Kennedy was finally beating, one of his followers Paul Corbin went to work for Reagan.

It is in this election and much of the ones that follow that I believe the cardinal sin of the left is realized. They are found of the right wing activist who chanted “If fewer people vote, Republicans win.” The left has loved to make that a marching cry ever since the Voting Rights Act was gutted ten years ago, and keep making those arguments whenever gerrymandering, voter purges or outright suppression takes place. That is legitimate. But coming from the left, it's also hypocrisy.

Because for the last two decades of the twentieth century the Republicans didn’t need to bother to purge the vote or indulge in shady maneuvers to make sure fewer people voted. The public was more than willing to comply. Reagan, for all his massive election wins, never got huge numbers of Republicans to come to the polls. But Democrats were equally unwilling to come out in vast numbers to support their candidates. From 1972 to 2000, the voter turnout rate of eligible voters only exceeded 55 percent twice, a gigantic drop from the 1950s and sixties when it had always been between 60 and 64 percent.

Part of it was due to the enfranchisement of 18-21 years olds but I believe much of it had to do with the left’s refusal to come out to vote at all. During this same period the Republican Party had by far the greatest era of success in Presidential elections. From 1972 to 1988 they won four out of five, and in all four they would win at least four hundred electoral votes.

Now the left is keen to point out that during this same period the right was beginning its ‘assault on our freedoms’. They point to the establishment of the Federalist Society, the rise of the Moral Majority, the repeal of the Fairness doctrine which led to both talk radio and right wing networks like Fox News. Fair enough. But if all this was happening and it was apparent to everybody what was the left doing during this same period? Did they come up with a system of justices arguing to protect liberal agenda? Did they come up with a concentrated progressive stand to counter the Gingrich Revolution? Did they try to build an alternative progressive news outlet in the 1990s or indeed at any time from the moment the Fairness Doctrine was repealed? Most importantly, did they realize that as the Republican party was growing ever more conservative did they full-throated endorse the Democrats every step of the way?

No. They did not. What they did was write a lot of books and make a lot of movies arguing that both sides were equally contemptible. They started writing histories arguing that America was a racist and imperialist society unworthy of respect by anybody. They spent as much time as possible arguing that the system was corrupt and that you couldn’t trust it. And they basically didn’t even bother to vote. Say what you will about the right, at least they were willing to play the long game. The left’s entire attitude for the last half-century was to say the game was rigged and that only losers played it.

This became crystal clear in the 2000 election. All of those who want to argue that the election was stolen have conveniently forgotten the election. It was months and months of arguing that there was no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. The only excitement any leftist had during that period was for Ralph Nader’s run, and we all saw how that turned out. (Nader, for the record, remains unrepentant.) And while there was some grumbling in December when the Supreme Court finally stopped the count, was there marching in the streets? Did Democrats talk about W in the terms of not my president? I remember that the outrage didn’t start about W until after the invasion of Iraq more than two years after the fact. Even then, it wasn’t until after it became a disaster that the left began to realize maybe we made a mistake in not voted for Gore. Though it didn’t do enough to convince many of them to come out in huge numbers for John Kerry in 2004. Sure by then they knew W was a monster, but Kerry wasn’t inspiring. The worst moments of W’s term were by far still to come but it wasn’t until nearly two years after all of that the left finally began to make Gore a saint. Even then, the fact was he was the ‘defeated candidate’ which the left loves more.

And there was no talk during W’s term at all about the Supreme Court at all. It certainly didn’t come up during the 2000 election. By this point, we had already seen the kind of appointees the Republicans were capable of making but at no point did anyone make the argument that rights might be destroyed. The left loves to argue now about Alito and Roberts all it wants but during the 2000 election and indeed in 2004, it wasn’t even an issue. They certainly weren’t willing to come out in droves to vote for Democratic senators in 2002 when it would have made a difference and even when there were questions about what might happen in Iraq. The GOP had the best midterms of any party in nearly forty years. And after 2012 when Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that saint of Democratic Women everywhere, was suggested that retirement might be the best issue, she didn’t take the hint. We spent the last three years of her life putting her in a position for sainthood. Had news gotten out of Obama suggested it, I can imagine Democratic Women  shouting: “How dare you?!”

It wasn’t until Scalia’s death in 2016 that the Democrats finally began to cotton to the kind of manipulations Republicans were up to. And even then, there had been no sign the left cared. In 2014, after a government shutdown, the left didn’t do enough to urge Democrats to come to the polls and the Democrats lost control of the Senate. Nor did they come out in huge enough numbers to try and take it back from Republicans. But why should we have been surprised? Donald Trump was going to destroy America but a lot of the left and even some women were indifferent about voting for Hilary. Did they not believe Donald Trump was going to win? Did Hilary campaign badly? Did she win the popular vote? All true. But there were also a lot of Democrats who were angry that Bernie Sanders, who’d never had a real chance of getting the nomination, had lost. So eleven percent of them voted for Trump and two percent for Jill Stein. I am not Hilary Clinton’s biggest fan by a long shot, but last I checked she never promised she wasn’t Bernie. Now of course the left wants to make her their hero because she ‘told the truth’ about Republicans. It wasn’t enough to make many of them vote for her at the time.

And now the left – some of them, anyway – have decided to pick a side. They’re not on the side of the Democrats, not really; they’re just against the Republicans. They turned on Biden the moment he got rid of their monster for him and many of them are still angry he is treating Republicans like human beings. Many of them would have just as soon replaced him the moment he was sworn in with someone younger, more attuned to their views. Given their nature, they might have waited as much a week before they turned on them for bothering to follow just mundane things as ‘the rule of law’ or “free and public debate’ all things they only advocate for when the ‘other side’ is in power and have little use for when they are.

I suppose many will read this and argue that I have failed in my ‘sacred duty’ to spend every waking moment of my career making clear how for half a century the right has manipulated every rule of our legislative, judicial and executive branch, used the media to brainwash the public to believing a false narrative until the current moment when we stand on the bring of a fascist takeover. And I guess I do owe to the left an enormous apology for not being supportive of the battles they have waged during that same period…which seem to be making a complete and full list of every sin for the sole purpose of telling us now that it’s too late to do anything to stop it. That is, when they don’t spend the rest of their time calling both parties equally horrible and that participating the political process, even going so far as to vote if merely to stop the people who are destroying the principles they claim to hold dear, is a sucker’s game. Oh, and completely demonizing anyone who not only holds the views they disagree with but those who argue that these people are human beings and that the Constitution applies to everybody, even the people you disagree with.

It is one thing to look at the world through a binary lens. That is truly horrible enough. But it’s worse when you see from the perspective of far too many African-Americans, women, minority groups and progressives. To them the political sphere is divided into two sides: evil and indifferent. They know very well who the evil side is but even the party that is doing everything in its power to keep evil at bay is not good enough. I once held very strongly to progressive ideals but I was always pragmatic enough to know that ideals are not good enough if you do not have the either the political clout to get them done or the willingness to compromise in order to get some of it done. It’s been clear for more than a century the left has never had enough of the former and they will never possess any of the latter. Half a loaf is how democracy has always worked but it’s been clear for awhile that some progressives would rather have starvation rather than get it.

A lot of this year’s election is going to be decided at the margins and everybody knows it. So I put the question to you, progressives: are you truly willing to fight against evil and the forces that you say are destroying America? Or are you going to do what you do so often, disrupt for the sake of disruption, demand things that no candidate, Democrat or Republican, can give you in any society, and at the end of the day sit the election out because you honestly believe both sides are equally bad? I know what the historical record says. Ball’s in your court.