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Americans awoke Wednesday to the sound of chardonnay being poured over Cheerios as a packed classroom clamored for breakfast. It was a natural reaction for many people not just surprised, but disappointed by Donald Trump’s return to the White House — and the ranks of Republicans riding to victory with him. Continuing a campaign theme, some on the losing side immediately blamed voters fascism, sexism, racismand a variety of other very bad isms as the explanation for how they marked their ballots. And therein lies a clue to why this year’s election ended the way it did.

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“I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide but to unite; who doesn’t see the red states and the blue states, sees only the United States,” Joe Biden pledged after winning the White House from Donald Trump in 2020. “We need to stop treating our opponents as enemies.”

Biden’s victory came after four years of harassment and trash talk from President Trump and the chaos of the pandemic. The promise of moderation from a politician who did not pick fights with opponents attracted enough voters looking for calm to change control of the presidency. But that didn’t last. Just months into the Biden presidency, then-CNN editor-in-chief Chris Cilizza he pointed out that under new leadership the federal government was spending trillions of dollars and growing enormously in scope. Biden “may be on the verge of radically changing the relationship between the federal government and the average American,” he added. Moderation was off the table. By the next year, Biden was accusing his political enemies of “semi-fascism” and denouncing them as a “threat to this country”. “Semi” was dropped for the 2024 campaign when both Biden and his designated successor as the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, called Donald Trump a “fascist.” Republican voters were labeled by the incumbent president as “RUBBISH.”

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The problem with bad mouthing your critics is that you lose any advantage you might have claimed over the trash talker you originally sought to differentiate yourself from. And that’s a big loss when your pretense of moderation has been immediately abandoned for an ambitious program of government spending and economic intervention that has made life far more expensive for the average American.

“Our research shows mathematically that the overwhelming driver of that 2022 inflation spike was federal spending, not the supply chain,” Mark Kritzman, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management concluded in a paper published last summer. That “burst” of inflation has lingering effects. According to the US government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, it currently takes $120.54 ($167) to buy what $100 would buy when President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office in January 2021.

With moderation, unification and economic acumen off the table as selling points, Democrats turned to “saving democracy” as their rallying cry. “Fascist” Trump and his supporters threatened our democratic system of government, they insisted.

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But Kamala Harris was anointed as the Democratic candidate after Biden withdrew from the race. No one voted for her in the regular primary system, she was fair handed the job to party insiders. That gave Trump and his supporters reason it points to democrats as threats to democracy.

So, incidentally, has it been the practice of the Biden-Harris administration to lean on social media platforms to suppress inconvenient news and criticism of government policies. During his vice presidential debate with Tim Walz, JD Vance cry Kamala Harris for “saying that instead of debating and persuading her fellow Americans, she would like to censor people who engage in disinformation.”

Through it all, the news media has mostly carried water for Kamala Harris and the Democrats. That’s understandable, given that eleven times more journalists identify as Democrats (36.4 percent) than Republicans (3.4 percent), according to the study. Poll of American Journalists. But that produces record-low confidence in the media among the public, especially non-Democrats.

CNN’s Brian Stelter acknowledged the problem the morning after the election, presumably with a bowlful of cereal and wine, written that “Donald Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris raises questions about the media’s credibility, influence and audience.”

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Such capture of institutions not only by Democrats, but also by their most progressive elements, has become a feature of the culture wars. It’s about finished fights politicized universities and theirs unfriendliness towards divergent opinionsboycotts of businesses considered too “woke”, and the concerns that the banks are refusal of financial services people over their political opinions.

Many Americans feel under siege by a smug establishment of which Democrats are the political face.

Trump and his new populist version of the Republican Party provide a haven for those who believe the system views them with hostility and contempt. Exit the survey this year finder rural residents, lower-income voters, the young, Hispanics, blacks, Asians, and those without college degrees are moving Republican. Hispanic men preferred Trump over Harris by 10 points.

That still leaves plenty of people in favor of Harris and the Democrats, especially among the well-educated and financially comfortable. But that’s exactly the problem for many new Republicans.

The fact that Democrats have been dumb and self-righteous in their dealings with many Americans does not mean that voters’ rejection of elitism is a pure good. An alternative to something awful is not inherently a positive option. President-elect Donald Trump is an authoritarian who has threatened broadcast licenses of unfriendly media operations, Vice President-elect JD Vance favors an activist government that punishes enemies, and today’s republican party has done it it has largely forgotten its free market roots as it embraces populist economic snake oil.

But American voters already knew this about the GOP and its current leader. Democrats had a chance to offer something less destructive in 2020. Instead, they took a bait with contempt for much of the population, destructive spending and regulatory policies, and mild totalitarian intolerance for dissent.

Now it’s up to Donald Trump and the Republican Party he’s remade in his image to keep their promises to be better than the Democrats. If they don’t, the American people can kick them to the curb one by one.

National Post

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