Weird Tales
If H.P. Lovecraft had been a Democratic/progressive political strategist...
It may be that in the fullness of time common sense will prevail, but in these early days of the Trump Restoration, denialism and magical thinking dominate the Left’s reaction to the brutal reality check that “our democracy” has administered to them.
The claim that Kamala Harris, supposedly the most qualified presidential candidate in the history of the Galaxy, was unfairly deprived of her rightful due by a cabal of racist White male devils and their servile concubines is all too easily lampooned. That fruit hangs so low that I disdain to pluck it. What does interest me is the future of the Democratic Party—the broad Left’s institutional representative.
Just now, that future seems bleak. The Left’s instinct is to retreat into its silo, where never will be heard a skeptical word regarding the orthodoxies that torpedoed Team Kamala. She did everything right! She ran a flawless campaign! So why did she lose? Misogyny! Racism! Fascism!
Well, no, Jill Filopovic’s alternate reality notwithstanding, the Bratgirl did not run a flawless campaign. Let’s be honest: Harris was a dud.
I don’t say that that Democrats, progressives and leftists must now grovel at the feet of the Ogre Trump. A robust opposition, free to make its case, is the sine qua non of “our democracy.” America’s Founders and Framers sanctified that principle with the First Amendment. But if the opposition’s case is founded on lunatic conspiracy theorizing, unhinged paranoia, and general weirdness, that’s a problem.
For yes, postmodern progressivism in all its forms is profoundly weird. Who could have foreseen, in its bra-burning adolescence, that American feminism would capitulate to the sinister ideology of gender? But today, in the name of feminism, women and girls are being shamed and bullied into sharing their private spaces and yielding their athletic achievements to men posing as women. Is that weird enough for you?
If not, there’s always Joe Biden, whose hapless and hilarious presidency was cobbled together by the Democratic Party’s progressive base. Biden was weird to begin with, of course, but the comrades added an ideological twist by convincing the credulous old fool that he had the makings of a latter-day FDR. He, Joe Biden, had it within his power to impose fundamental change on backward, deplorable America. Because vanity is the besetting sin of stupid people, Joe Biden ate it up. And the results were truly weird.
As things turned out, fundamental change meant open borders and uncontrolled illegal immigration. It meant defunding and demonizing the police. It meant DEI and CRT. It meant a foreign policy based on delusional thinking. It meant masking, social distancing, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, forever and ever, amen. It meant the Green New Deal. It meant trillions of dollars of deficit spending, leading inevitably to a painful and persistent inflationary spike. And it didn’t help that as these disasters were unfolding, the President was losing his marbles. Talk about weird!
The Democrats’ remedy for these disasters was weirder still. They denied reality for as long as possible and then, making nonsense of their claims to be the staunch defenders of “our democracy,” they launched a coup, booting Biden from the top of the ticket. His replacement: Vice President Kamala Harris, the very model of a California progressive.
I trust it’s not necessary to reiterate the weirdness of the Bratgirl and her misbegotten campaign, nor the weirdness of her most dedicated supporters, who seemed blind to Harris’s countless deficiencies. However, this post-election moment is worthy of note.
Nor, I think, is it necessary to review in detail other examples of progressive weirdness, for instance “climate change” hysteria. In that connection it seems sufficient to cite career weirdo Al Gore’s recent Davos meltdown on that subject.
Unsurprisingly, Americans hated all of this: the entirety of the radical progressive agenda that Biden embraced and promoted, his personal incapacity, the Democrat/progressive plot to cover up the President’s descent into senility. As an expression of their displeasure, they voted Donald Trump back into the presidency.
In short, Democrats and progressives accomplished the seemingly impossible: They made Donald Trump seem relatively normal. How weird is that?
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That *is* weird. Stranger than fiction.