MILITANT NORMALS CAN PUSH BACK.

Chris Stigall sees what Our Progressive Betters are doing.

We’re living in a time of great provocation directed at the American people from those in elected office.  Virtually all levels of government are barely hiding the disdain and contempt they have for the people they’re supposed to serve.

The pandemic has given county commissioners, school boards, health directors, mayors, governors and federal officials an emperor complex, lording over our daily lives deciding which privilege they will or won’t allow based on their whims.

They justify it by calling it science.  It’s not.  It’s provocation and it's working for the left on many fronts in very effective ways.

It's more like a restoration of the primitive, with the denunciation of heretics being the way to control people. Yes, I still owe you an elaboration of that claim. But that's for another day.

Government agents big and small and their fascist corporate partners flexing their muscles, poking you in the chest, smiling as they call you an insurrectionist and just daring you to cross them.

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians was written at a time when fathers were kings of their homes and wielded total, unquestionable authority. It’s Paul’s biblical warning to fathers not to behave as tyrants lest they produce restless or rebellious children who ultimately resent them.

That same warning should be heeded by public officials who forget we’re a republic and “consent of the governed” is still the order of things.  Ignoring that fact will produce a “restless and rebellious” electorate, too.

And that’s just what the provocateurs in charge are hoping.

I'm not sure about that last sentence: the provocateurs in charge might be hoping that the traditional incantations and totems will still work.  Rick Moran suggests the provocateurs are in trouble.  "One Republican super PAC — the Congressional Leadership Fund — is testing three specific war-winning strategies in swing districts this week that will highlight the incompetence, the stupidity, and the radicalism of the Democratic Party. They are running ads targeting three vulnerable Democratic House members on three issues of great importance to all Americans: inflation, violent crime, and the teaching of critical race theory in schools."  I've called attention thereto before, with "It's a side benefit that the artsy establishment is of a piece with that part of the policy establishment with a history of being soft on crime, soft on communism (when that was a thing) and soft on counterterrorism."  The technocratic overreach that has been the corona tyranny can also be a winning pragmatic populist message, if delivered properly.

Mr Moran continues,

Democrats know that their soft underbelly is exposed to crime given the “reforms” in big cities instituted by radical prosecutors. And it’s hard to avoid being blamed for rising inflation when the leader of their party demands Congress spend trillions of dollars we don’t have. They also know their vulnerability on critical race theory, which will be finessed by the GOP into an indictment of teachers’ unions.

There's more.

It will be hard for the Democrats to hide inflation from the voters for long. The left will try to explain inflation as something other than massively excessive government spending. They will almost certainly try to blame Donald Trump. They can’t hide it for long. When gas and food prices begin to skyrocket, people will know exactly whom to blame.

The crime problem is more effective in the suburbs, where people worry about spillover from the Democratic-run big cities. But it isn’t a stretch for Americans living in less-populated regions of the country to see the danger and vote accordingly.

Mr Moran is not as sure how the Republicans, or pragmatic populists, can turn woke education into a winning issues. Longtime Democrat court intellectual Ruy Teixeira, who has been thinking for some time about the way reality can mug the self-styled progressives, is more worried.

The Fox News Fallacy is having a dire effect on many Democrats. This is the idea that if Fox News (substitute here the conservative bête noire of your choice if you prefer) criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often. The problem is that an issue is not necessarily completely invalid just because Fox News mentions it. That depends on the issue. If there is something to the issue and persuadable voters have real concerns, you will not allay those concerns by embracing the Fox News Fallacy. In fact, you'll probably intensify them by giving such voters the impression that Democrats simply don't care about their concerns and will do nothing to address them. That will undermine the Democrats’ ability to respond to predictable attacks against their candidates in 2022 and raise the likelihood of a midterm debacle.

Being perceived as soft on crime is not a good thing.  Being too willing to import the third world is not a good thing.  And critical studies, which might be one thing in the common room, are too easily distorted into a vulgar and off-putting version.

It is easy to see why parents might worry about such ideas, regardless of what they're called, influencing educational practices. These worries cannot be bludgeoned away by saying [critical race theory] has no influence and parents just don't want their kids taught about slavery. Parents are far more worried about their children being arrayed into hierarchies of privilege and oppression and encouraged to see everything through a racial lens than they are concerned with their children learning about historical incidents and practices of racism.

Parents might also be far more worried about their children not learning how to spell, to write coherent sentences, to find the right answer.

Mr Teixeira concludes with a suggestion that might even appeal to pragmatic populists.  "Democrats would be well-advised to focus instead on an inclusive nationalism that emphasizes what Americans have in common and their right not just to economic prosperity but to public safety, secure borders and a world-class but non-ideological education for their children."  Indeed.