The election aftermath continues to roil the Smart People, and the final Friday short takes before Thanksgiving features a prologue of Wagnerian proportions. There will be no Black Friday short takes.
First, smug loses. "Democratic strategists fixated on defending the status quo, telling voters struggling to make ends meet that they didn’t understand the economy and that it was doing fine. If the public is upset and an incumbent party just replies, 'No, it’s OK, you just don’t get it,' that incumbent is cruising for defeat; this is a lesson Democrats should have underlined when Hillary Clinton’s smug rejoinder to the Trump movement—'America is already great'—fell so completely flat. But because of their own class-inflected blind spots, that continues to be the basic message liberals send to the American people: 'You don’t get it.' And the message in return was, 'No, you don’t get it.'" Will the establishmentarians get it good and hard? Not just yet. "In one sanctimonious declaration after another, Democrats are registering their disgust for the people they blame most for losing the 2024 presidential election. The American people." So it always is with losing skippers. Down goes MSNBC. "There is reason to believe that MSNBC is uniquely ill-suited to bounce back in the post-Biden era. The network's top personalities exude all of the traits many Democrats argue have caused the party to lose touch with normal Americans. Sneering condescension. Inscrutable woke vocabulary. A tendency to embrace bizarre conspiracy theories and view every political problem through the lens of patriarchal white supremacy."
Second, Constitutional norms matter. "Populism has always been an essential element of the coalition of the right, and it has a lot to offer in a time of elite failure and a collapse of trustworthiness. But left to itself, it tends toward a corrosive alienation from American institutions, and toward the rejection of the boundaries of republican government. Populism must be balanced by conservatism, which pushes back on both fronts and which is also utterly essential at this moment."
Third, the strongest case for limiting the power of the presidency is the power of the presidency itself. "Trump himself has always been a form of snapback against the overreach of what came before. Barack Obama tried to remake American politics in his image: high-handed, intersectional and replete with authoritarian overtones. Trump came along and ripped the idol off his pedestal. Joe Biden tried to transform American politics by radically reinterpreting the bargain between American citizens and their government. Trump is returning to reject that never-requested transformation."
Fourth, advise and consent is real. "Hegseth’s nomination, which came as a shock to members of Congress who will ultimately be asked to vote to confirm him, reflects a broader trend among Trump’s Cabinet-level nominations and White House appointments — grievance-fueled loyalists whose disdain for a perceived establishment matches Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to governing and disregard for expertise and experience in a government that tens of millions of Americans depend on." Expertise and experience hasn't held up so well recently, has it?
Fifth, getting mugged by reality changes minds. "I have voted Democrat all my life. I supported soft-on-crime candidates because I didn’t want to see people go to prison and lose their chance at a better life. But now I see the ruin that we have to live with as a result of these policies. The white liberals in the suburbs do not live with the consequences of their votes."
Sixth, there might be a way out of the punishment cycles. "Please don’t do to us what we were going to do to you. Schumer is obviously concerned that Republicans might embrace a scheme to eliminate the filibuster and pass all sorts of consequential legislation with no Democratic input at all. That wouldn’t be bipartisan! Fortunately for Schumer, Republicans have been more principled than Democrats when it comes to the legislative filibuster, and to the filibuster in general. Republicans realize that even though they will have the majority for the next two years, they might be back in the minority at any time after that. So Schumer will not get it good and hard the way he planned to give it to Republicans." Norms exist for a reason. “When I am the weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle.”
The weekly round-up of pithy (below the jump, they will be) elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.
1. Potted Hegel. "It’s the oversimplification of a midwit who’s read too much Hegel, who thinks that history has a 'right side,' and who calls everybody else simpletons." History cannot take sides. Calling voters simpletons backfires. "The Democrats will have to figure out how to attract them as adults, as opposed to treating them like children."
2. There are limits to Process. “Well, there you have it, my friend. It’s the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.”
3. Those dogs better hunt. "Sources confirmed that the Department of Homeland Security was being replaced by one hot chick with a shotgun."
4. Truth will out. "[Thirteeners] would no longer put up with the travesties of the past four or eight or 10 years, or whenever you mark the beginning of the Great Awokening: the cancel culture, the pronoun fetish, the war on supposed 'disinformation,' and all the rest of it."
5. Let them perform a Trump Dance first. "It is time for American college students to work harder and party less."
6. Indeed. "Today is a great day to run for every local office from dog catcher to drain commissioner." The local elections, dear reader, often occur in the spring.
7. Devolve, delegate, and unbundle. "Many candidates who overperformed in swing districts were, simultaneously, economically populist, culturally conservative, anti-regulation and anti-corruption, reflecting the complexity of voters that the groups try to sand down." Don't expect utopia. "America may have voted for Trump, but that doesn’t mean most Americans actually want Trumpism."
8. Urban Progressive Privilege. “Even the most sexist or bigoted rich white person in many other contexts wouldn’t be able to exploit women and minorities at the level the typical liberal professional in a city like Seattle, San Francisco, or Chicago does in their day-to-day lives. The infrastructure simply isn’t there.”
9. A parenting lesson. "The more that you tell people what they can’t do, what’s intolerable, you must not do this, you should not do this, the more they’re going to rebel." Normals have their own settings for what's intolerable. Thus "You're the teachers' union education party and you've turned schools and colleges into a joke. You just lost a crazy contest to an actual crazy person." By being crazier. "When these voters looked around at the Democrats who govern them at the federal, state, and local levels, they saw a party that didn’t even appear to be trying."
10. The mandate is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. "It’s the DNC-MSM: Their party’s presidents get 'mandates' no matter if they needed a third party candidate to help them squeak by; the other side isn’t allowed a mandate no matter how popular he was at the ballot box."
11. Proud words. Strong words. We The People. "If the public wants to stop illegal immigration and you don’t, then you are going to be unpopular."
12. Running on fumes, and Botox? "The longer Progressive Era, with its many chapters, has been disintegrating since the 1960s."
13. What's he smoking? "Wisdom guarded by Indigenous African communities, and other Indigenous communities around the world, shows that it is possible to live great lives, build great empires and kingdoms, while maintaining peace with nature."
14. Why might that be? "There’s a deep sense in large pockets of the country—by no means confined to Trump cultists—who simply don’t trust our institutions."
15. Advent begins the Sunday after Thanksgiving. "Watching today’s Left self-immolate is the perfect Christmas gift."
16. Unmistakable. "Under the misrule of Old Joe Biden and those who are pulling his strings, America has become a third-rate power." Not irreversible? "The real crisis of Trump’s reelection, after all that came before, is with liberalism itself. And this is Biden’s tragic legacy." Normals saw right through it. "Democrats campaign as liberals, then try to govern as leftists. This façade needs to end."
17. Accomplish more by governing less. "Strengthening, not removing the filibuster is the right move."
18. Real men don't drink Bud Light. "Men clearly preferred the Trump model to that presented by Democratic men, who proudly boasted of being 'less masculine' than their Republican counterparts."
19. Populist tanks on the quad. "Trump’s sudden, jaw-dropping claim to be a great unifier, something implicitly contrasted with progressives’ habit of separating people into demographic islands."
20. That cult of Expertise. "Floating a 'trust the bureaucrats' argument so misreads the current moment in politics that it almost qualifies as satire."
21. So hard to understand. "Expanding third-party coverage is like increasing subsidies; what you subsidize you get more of, so costs rise."
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