MICHAEL ANTON: Fighting the impulse for national divorce with spousal abuse.
Blue America’s message problems don’t stop there. The remainder boil down to the ruling class’s stance on democracy—both with respect to specific issues and to the overarching concept itself.
As to the former, Blues insist that any policy Reds want that Blues don’t is ipso facto illegitimate, or worse. Border wall? Workplace enforcement? Skills-based immigration? All not merely unacceptable, but “racist” and evil. Tariffs or some form of protection for American workers and industries? Unacceptable, unworkable, economically illiterate—and also racist, if only because everything Reds want is. Ditto the Red desire to stop fighting endless, pointless, winless war and to reduce America’s overseas commitments. Strategic folly, a betrayal of allies and of our “core values,” collusion with our enemies, even “treason.” (And, of course, it’s racist to doubt the efficacy or strategic value of democracy wars in the Third World.)
It’s important to understand, lest one fall into a common Blue propaganda trap, that these policy positions favored by millions of Reds are not “conservative” as that term has been understood for at least a generation. The “conservatives” have consistently supported open, or at least lax, borders, rigid free trade, and ground troops wherever a single Islamic extremist might wistfully contemplate striking the West. As for the slander that these positions are somehow “far right,” one need only be over 40 to remember a time when Democrats were the party of protectionism and peace, when even Bill Clinton and the New York Times professed support for limiting immigration.
Suddenly all that is not merely unacceptable; it’s fascism. Blue America makes very clear to Red: you deserve and will get none of this. There will be no compromise. You are evil merely for wanting it, much less voting for it. Should you manage, against our every effort and precaution, to elect people who threaten to enact these things, we will be justified in “resisting”—i.e., blocking implementation by any means necessary—to protect “our democracy.”
On New Year’s Day, the New York Times—arguably the most powerful institution of any kind in America—thundered that all opposition to the Blue agenda is violent insurrection. Hilariously, the Times intones that a “healthy, functioning political party faces its electoral losses by assessing what went wrong and redoubling its efforts to appeal to more voters the next time.” Really? Was that the Democratic response to 2016? Or that of Stacey Abrams and all her supporters—none of whom, including the vice president of the United States—has ever conceded that she lost in 2018?
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