VDH: The Left Knows Leftism Doesn’t Work.

All of the left’s once-grandiose ideas of packing the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster, admitting two new states to win four more liberal senators, and destroying the Electoral College have little public support and will go nowhere. Corporations like Disney, Target, and Anheuser-Busch have all begun backtracking on their money-losing, market-share-eroding woke/DEI agendas.

Universities are terrified that their endowment income is either static or in decline, given a rising drop-off in public and alumni giving. They know their race-based, non-meritocratic admissions and hiring are increasingly destroying their brand names. To accommodate their new non-meritocratic student bodies, they have variously inflated their grades to the point of parody, watered down work requirements, or introduced gut courses—and as a result, they are quickly losing their once-coveted prestige. Some campuses are already reinstating the SAT and ACT requirements that were thrown out in 2020-21 in the hysteria that followed the death of George Floyd. Harvard and Stanford aren’t boasting that the erasure of the SAT created a more competitive student body and raised standards to new levels.

The twin ideas of foreign-funded Middle-Eastern-studies centers and of admitting tens of thousands of affluent, full-tuition-paying Middle-Eastern students led to institutionalized anti-Semitism on campus and eliminationist rhetoric right out the old Klan playbook. The appeasement by university presidencies only whets the appetites of those who unlawfully occupy, vandalize, deface, and disrupt. Their pro-terrorist chants and emblems are bleeding the universities of billions of dollars in lost donations.

In short, the policies that the left has given us over the last years—hyperinflation, spiking staple and gas prices, racial and tribal chauvinism, dangerous streets, an emasculated and politicized military, and wars abroad—did not work, and are now being masked to retain power, put on hold, or even reversed.

Way back during the 2004 election, Ann Coulter quipped that “both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do.”

In January of 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle’s editors were smart enough (in a Machiavellian sense) to protect Obama when, as a candidate, in order to get to Hillary’s left, he openly proposed bankrupting coal plants. They understood their role as Democratic party activists with bylines meant burying Obama’s Kinsley-style gaffe rather than making it the lead headline on the front page.

But Obama opened the floodgates, and their hatred of Trump gave the left the excuse to really let their freak flags fly during the last eight years. (No wonder they’re hoping we forget the events of 2020.) During the 2020 election cycle, Biden’s handlers simultaneously tried to pose him as the last moderate left in the Democratic party, while allowing him to openly boast of the chaos his administration would cause to energy and immigration if he were elected.

Once that reality ensued, as with the election results in Europe last week, the American left know that the clock may be running down on their current obsessions – but it’s a very long way back these days if they want to rhetorically pivot to the center once again.