MARY KATHARINE HAM: Dems Keep Putting Themselves On The Wrong Side Of Popular Issues In Trump Era.
The idea of keeping girls’ sports for girls, protecting them from male competitors in their events and their locker rooms, is an 80 percent issue in America.
“You rarely get 79 percent of the country to agree on anything,” Enten said, terming it a “ginormous majority,” which includes almost 70 percent of Democratic voters.
A hubristic left, culturally dominant for decades and backed by Hollywood, academia, and the media, thought it could take an 80-percent issue and force it into a cultural and political win. It was wrong about that. Convincing people to shut up is not the same as convincing them.
The wisdom of former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s shorthand for political success remains applicable: Find an 80-percent issue and stand next to it.
How a movement convinced itself to flip this admonition on its head and jump on the 20-percent side is one for the history and political science books. Yet, here we are, another Republican president— this one regarded by institutional feminists as nothing short of an abomination—signing a landmark protection for women in sports. Nixon famously signed Title XI in the White House in 1972.
This is a serious issue, but liberals are willing to do it on smaller issues, too.
Friday, Trump announced that he is signing another executive order getting the federal government out of the business of pushing paper straws. The Biden administration had made it a mission via Executive Order to force the country into a future of disintegrating utensils by 2032. But the thing is, they don’t work and they annoy people. Our friends on the left will now spend time crowing about the indispensable nature of mandated, subsidized paper straws, whose banning was built on dubious data from a 9-year-old’s school project, as a pillar of American democracy. Regular voters will enjoy plastic straws that work. If Trump fixes the gas cans next, he may be president forever.
In ways both big and small, the progressive hubris of the last decade has made life uncomfortable for many Americans, and Democrats have gotten very out of practice taking their concerns seriously.
Led by an activist class, exemplified by the newly elected DNC Chair David Hogg, the party seems intent on finding an 80-percent issue and standing on the wrong side of it.
As Abe Greenwald wrote in the Commentary newsletter last week:
If you want to know why, for the first time in 30 years, more Americans identify as Republican than Democrat, it’s because Republicans have been given the easy task of asserting intuitive common sense in a country whose leaders got high on reality-altering theories. It’s now liberals who have to explain why, even though every instinct tells you its monstrous, its ultimately good to toy with children’s gender. Why your daughter should face-off against a boy on the playing field. Why, even though, we have a massive illegal-immigration crisis, it’s ultimately good to keep criminals in the country that they entered illegally. Why, it’s ultimately good to spend your money on a Peruvian transgender comic book.
If it was hard for conservatives to argue for worthy counterintuitive ideas, think how hard it is for liberals to argue for ruinous ones. Watching them try is as fun as discovering conservatism all over again.
Compounded with the fun of watching wanna radical chic leftists self-identify as stodgy reactionaries desperately trying to preserve the old system:
