Fans of the old “The Far Side” cartoons might remember the one that captures exactly what the American people were thinking on Nov. 5. Picture a trio of “king’s men” standing helpless over a shattered Humpty Dumpty while a trio of horses stands ready to repair the wreckage. The caption has the horses’ spokesman addressing the king’s men: “OK, OK, you guys have had your chance — the horses want another shot at it.”
Replace “king’s men” with the “hard left’s henchmen” and you have the apparatchiks who are responsible for the Democratic Party’s great fall on Nov. 5. Replace “spokesman” with “Donald Trump,” and you have a president-elect who stands ready to repair the wreckage that will be the legacy of the Biden administration — a broken border, an ailing economy and a world in crisis.
Pundits who predict that Trump’s landslide victory over Kamala Harris marks the end of the hard left’s control of the Democratic Party should review 19th-century writer Ralph Waldo Emerson’s timeless insight into the “battle” between conservatism and liberalism: “Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was yesterday’s “hot personality,” but today, AOC finds herself the object of resistance — from within her own party.
When Emerson noted that each political party “exposes the abuses of the other,” he did not foresee an election where smart members of the losing party would admit to the abuses that led to its defeat. Do not expect former Speaker Nancy Pelosi to say out loud that the plot to brand Trump “fascist” has failed spectacularly because she herself has said that Trump “is using the tactics of a fascist government.” But when Pelosi derailed AOC’s bid to become the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, she hobbled the firebrand’s mission to lead the resistance against the president-elect’s “fascist agenda.”
Pelosi is not the only Democrat who was “mugged” by the reality that the American people just rejected the knows-best militant who tried posing as “joy.” Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton admits that Kamala Harris “lost, in part, because we shame and belittle too many opinions held by too many voters,” while Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman blames Harris’ loss on “all of the very hard-left kind of ‘woke’ things … that our colleagues might say in these hard blue kinds of districts.”
Even New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has noted, “Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke.” But do not expect Dowd’s colleagues at the Times to revise their claim that “Over the next four years, Americans must be clear-eyed about the threat to the nation … and be prepared to exercise their rights in defense of the country and the people, laws, institutions and values that have kept it strong.”
The New York Times’ call for the American people to oppose Trump’s plan to restore the laws, institutions and values that made America great may resonate with deranged young women who shave their heads to protest Trump’s victory. But clear-eyed Americans will ignore a press corps that has willfully and maliciously covered up the cognitive decline of a sitting president and made plans to subvert the agenda of our incoming president.
The smart money has ignored The New York Times by flocking to Mar-a-Lago, hat in hand, to curry favor with our incoming president. The CEOs of Apple, Google and Amazon know that Firehouse Strategies executive Alex Conant was right on target when he said, “the smart CEOs realize it’s better to shape an agenda than fight an agenda.” Business tycoon Kevin O’Leary is “licking his chops at the good times ahead for business leaders under Trump 2.0.”
Emerson’s concluding insight into the “irreconcilable antagonism” between conservatism and liberalism is that “in a true society … both must combine.”
For now, however, clear-eyed Americans are betting on the Trump team to repair the damage done by liberalism run amok.
Nan Miller is professor emerita in literature from Meredith College.
