PEGGY NOONAN: Crazy Won’t Beat Trump — Impeachment looks like a victory for Democrats, but their lurch left will prove far more consequential.
From their first debates in June, their major candidates announced themselves to be for sharply higher taxes, banning private health insurance, the Green New Deal, free college, complete student loan forgiveness, free health insurance for illegal aliens, and functionally open borders. They would ban fossil fuels and fracking. At least one candidate said America’s religious institutions should lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage. They are extreme on abortion—no limits, ever—and in their support of identity politics, which sees not a country but a thousand warring tribes endlessly rewarded for being at each other’s throats.
Very much a part of all this, and sworn in just under a year ago, were Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “The Squad,” enthusiastically held up by the Democrats’ friends and operatives in the press as the future of the party. If they are, the future is grim, with their Leninist insistence that you’ll do it their way or be flattened. It is not only policies that count but spirit. Theirs is one of accusation and division. Where they should be ardent they are only arrogant. Their approach speaks of a desire not to make progress but to unsettle and undo.
But the point is most of the most famous public faces in the party spent 2019 essentially supporting a reordering of arrangements that have lasted two centuries and allowed us, for all our mess and chaos, to be great.
Here is how the party’s lurch left has improved the president’s position.
It makes the 2020 race not “Trump vs. the Democrat,” a race he can lose, but “Trump vs. Lefty Madness,” which he can win.
The left is turning Donald Trump into a savior. He was not a savior before AOC. He was not a savior before Elizabeth and Bernie said they’d ban your health insurance.
Well, he was for millions for preventing Hillary from implementing what would have essentially been Obama’s third term, and possibly appointing two or more Supreme Court justices.