CONFESS YOUR EXPERT FAILURE.

The cope coming from The Atlantic has been enjoyable of late.  Self-proclaimed Expert Tom Nichols at least acknowledges that the coastal cosmopolitans have a problem.  "Many Americans know exactly who Trump is, and they like it."

Well, yeah, and having a lousy major-party alternative doesn't change minds.

Mr Nichols's elaboration is instructive.

The belief that at some point Trump voters will have finally had enough is an ordinary human response to seeing people you care about—in this case fellow citizens—associate with someone you know to be awful. Much like watching a friend in an unhealthy relationship, you think that each new outrage is going to be the one that provokes the final split, and yet it never does: Your friend, instead of breaking off the relationship, makes excuses.

He didn’t mean it. You don’t understand him like I do.

But this analogy is wrong, because it’s based on the faulty assumption that one of the people in the relationship is unhappy. Maybe the better analogy is the friend you didn’t know very well in high school, someone who perhaps was quiet and not very popular, who shows up at your 20th reunion on the arm of a loudmouthed boor—think a cross between Herb Tarlek and David Duke—who tells offensive stories and racist jokes. She thinks he’s wonderful and laughs at everything he says.

But what she really enjoys, all these years after high school, is how uncomfortable he’s making you.

And this, in brief, is the problem for Kamala Harris in this election. She and others have likely hoped that, at some point, Trump will reveal himself as such an obvious, existential threat that even many Republican voters will walk away from him. (She delivered a short statement today emphasizing Kelly’s comments.) For millions of the GOP faithful, however, Trump’s daily attempts to breach new frontiers of hideousness are not offensive but reassuring. They want Trump to be awful—precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins. If Trump’s campaign was focused on handing out tax breaks and lowering gas prices, he’d be losing, because for his base, none of that yawn-inducing policy stuff is transgressive enough to be exciting. (Just ask Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who each in their own way tried to run as a Trump alternative.)

Some Trump voters may believe his lies. But plenty more want Trump to be terrifying and stomach-turning so that reelecting him will be a fully realized act of social revenge. Harris cannot propose any policy, offer any benefit, or adopt any position that competes with that feeling.

Perhaps a little more discomfiture for Tom Nichols and his ilk is in order.  He persists in his fantasies.

Rather than reckoning with the greatest mistake they’ve ever made at the ballot box, they have decided that their only recourse is to put Trump back in the Oval Office. For them, restoring Trump would be both vindication and vengeance. It would prove that 2016 was not a fluke, and horrify people both they and Trump hate.

I am not hopeful that Democrats will rally in large enough numbers to prevent this outcome. Harris’s campaign has wisely avoided a slew of traps and pitfalls, but too many Democrats are reverting to form, complaining about wonky intraparty policy differences while Trump fulminates against democracy itself.

The absence of introspection on the cosmopolitan left just might lead to lots of liberal tears.  Power Line's Steven Hayward raises that possibility.

Even though Ruy Teixeira has tried to warn Democrats that their leading ideas are stupid and unpopular, Democrats will come up with every excuse imaginable that doesn’t involve looking into the mirror. (Watch especially for the theme that “the American people are stupid/racist,” etc.)

Thus it is welcome to see Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal make this point so well in his Tuesday column, that is up early on the website.

Well, yes, Mr Nichols's column ends with fulminations against the bad attitudes of the voters who might, and I stress might, return Mr Trump to the presidency.  He fails to engage the base causes, if you will, of that voter discontent. "Fool me twice, shame on me.  'That's been my stance from the beginning, the Democrat establishment presenting Mr Biden as what I term an 'anodyne Democrat,' although if you were paying attention, dear reader, you would see that he was running on Bernie Sanders's platform, and his presidency is a destructive mix of that platform, Barack Obama's Weimar America freak show, and his vanity.'"

Mr Baker sees the same thing.

We are conflicted, however, because of this simple, enraging thought about the Democrats themselves: Are we really going to let them get away with exploiting that unease, using our doubts and manipulating our angst to validate retrospectively the damage they have wrought in the past four years and to approve proactively what they might do in the next four?

Their deceitfully vacuous campaign, its invitation to sign up to a blank slate on their plans for another term and a collective amnesia about their work in the current one, their empty pantsuit of a candidate, incessantly blurting inanities into the media void, incapable of articulating a single substantive idea for governing—what they amount to is nothing less than an abuse of the voters’ scruples, an exploitation of the yearning many have for a hint of normalcy. Don’t doubt that the Democrats fully intend to repurpose that passive desire into another sweeping mandate for their divisive and destructive ideology.

That’s the reason it seems, a week from Election Day, that enough Americans are ready to take their chances on another term for Mr. Trump. They want to tell the Democrats: You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to drive the country ever further into your new progressive dystopia, deepening our divisions and sapping our strength, and then turn around and say to the voters: Sorry, but it’s us or Hitler.

For all the talk of Mr. Trump’s character flaws, this is the unhappy political reality at the end of this long, enervating election—it’s the Democrats who have brought us to this place.

And, once Dementia Joe was installed in office, the Weimar freak show and the Sanders platform became reality, with a dose of totalitarianism thrown in.

They wilfully misinterpreted a small majority for Joe Biden, who was presented in his campaign as the personification of dull political normalcy, as a mandate for presidential and legislative activism on an historic scale. They took a country at the end of its mental tether, exhausted by a pandemic and bitter partisanship, and—using their time-honored tactic of never letting a crisis go to waste—sought to reshape it in the image of their own extremist ideals.

Bowing to a fundamentalist lunacy that walls are somehow immoral, that America owes the world a home and a living, they opened the border, unleashing socially and economically destabilizing forces that will take decades to repair.

They propagated antiscientific nonsense about “gender” and antihistorical nonsense about race that have inflicted new wounds on our social fabric and reopened old scars.

They brought shame on America’s reputation and critically undermined our strength by executing a disastrous surrender to the enemy in Afghanistan and thereby emboldening far larger foes in Europe and the Middle East.

Their zealotry helped turn the president who had left office in a cloud of shame into a figure of some pity with an excessively vengeful campaign of criminal and civil litigation aimed not only at harming his political and business prospects but at sending him to prison for the rest of his life.

Reap what you sow, Tom Nichols, and all your process-worshipping ilk.  Sasha Stone takes stock.

You see, the anti-fascists are the ones who demand you drop all of your friendships if you vote for the fascists. It might sound confusing, but it’s not. All you have to do is conform or else.

You might have heard that “conform or else” is the very definition of fascism, but really, it’s how you get rid of it. You pressure everyone you know to do what we tell you to do, think how we want you to think, speak how we want you to speak or we will DESTROY YOU.

And the Militant Normals say NO.

Joy comes in the morning, as the Psalmist says, but by late evening of an incompetent political campaign, the paranoid bitterness really takes over. That’s what we’re seeing in the late stages of the Democrats’ ill-conceived attempt to win with a deeply unpopular and incompetent candidate who never received any primary votes. The October Surprise is that (shockingly!) after nine years of facing Donald Trump, the Democratic Party has no surprises. Like some ill-educated drunk, all they can do is sputter the “F” word over and over. In this case, we refer to “Fascism.”

That lack of a real surprise shouldn’t be surprising. As anybody with a passing acquaintance with the retail political skills of Kamala Harris (Top Chef champion: Word Salad division) or the titanic weirdness of Tim Jong Walz (Elmer Fudd impersonator and Supreme Leader of the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota) knew that the campaign of “Joy” was not to last. The Harris-Walz Campaign’s flailing finally landed this week exactly where the parody/prophecy publication The Babylon Bee predicted in July: “Dems Announce Comprehensive Plan To Win Election By Calling Trump ‘Hitler’ Again.”

David Deavel concludes his column echoing Mr Baker.

But there’s a greater danger to Democrats than the electorate merely ceasing to take seriously this now-74-year-old schtick. Because Democrats constantly accuse Republicans of tyranny, authoritarianism, and dictatorship, more voters are starting to consider whether it is now time to apply Rush Limbaugh’s famous dictum: What they accuse you of they are doing right now. After all, Donald Trump did not pursue his political enemies with the power of the DOJ. The Democrats did.

Too many Americans now understand that the various legal cases concocted against Trump are without merit. That’s why “convicted felon” and all the rest of these silly phrases for Trump are not sticking.

They are remembering how the DOJ went after parents upset at school boards adopting DEI and LGBT agendas without informing the parents. They remember pro-life activists being arrested at gunpoint in front of their families.

There's more to it than "not sticking." Tee shirts and seed caps with "I'm Voting for the Felon" sold pretty well at the county fairs.

One more week of the mud being slung before the votes are counted.