I do get outside of the conservative blogosphere.  Take, for example, this article in Slate by its chief political blogger, Ben Mathis-Lilley, entitled “Why Do So Many Regular Heartland Voters Live in a Bubble?”  https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/democrats-stop-pandering-to-voters-in-the-heartland-bubble.html

It reminds me why I don’t get outside the conservative blogosphere more often.  For smug, sanctimonious, arrogant twaddle, it’s hard to beat, and awfully hard to read all the way through.  But don’t take my word for it, try it yourself.

Mathis-Lilley’s thesis is that the center-left presidential candidates like Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar are barking up the wrong tree, trying to promote themselves as candidates who can bring the country together, because all those racist, misogynist, white-supremacist, MAGA-hat-wearing rubes in the heartland aren’t the least bit interested in bringing the country together.  They just want to whomp them arugula-eating snowflake commie elitists, not that they know what arugula is.  But I exaggerate.  They do know what arugula is, but figure it’s part of a commie plot to make us eat bitter green vegetables rather than steak, and like it.

What the country really needs is a real Progressive like Sanders or Warren, someone with guts, who’s going to speak truth to power, who’s going to quit playing games with the gutless moderates and execrable racist, misogynist conservatives (puke!) and finally put this country on the path of free Medicare for all, free college for all, free immigration for all, free everything for everybody except those weird Christians with their unfathomable beliefs.  And the Jews, who need to leave Palestine to its rightful owners and deserve what they get.  And the rich are going to pay for it!  Yes!

I’m sorry, this article and its author are just too rich a target not to make fun.  His accusation that we conservatives and heartland dwellers are the ones living in a fantastic bubble while he and his Progressive buddies live in the really real world is a head-shaker.  I can’t figure out how anyone can be that far off course – that lost – and not realize it.

Perhaps he would like to re-evaluate his position now that, in Great Britain, Boris Johnson led the Conservatives to victory over Labour and a gaggle of smaller parties with the simple and direct slogan “Get Brexit Done”.  Not just victory, though; the vote was a devastating, comprehensive repudiation of Labour, and has reduced the party to its lowest point since the 1930s.  Post-vote polling has shown that anger over Labour’s ambivalence about Brexit did play a major role, but even more important was rejection of the party’s hard-left/socialist “manifesto” (what we call a party platform) that would nationalize much of the economy, and of its leader Jeremy Corbyn, who, the voters decided, is, in addition to being an anti-Semite, flamingly anti-British.  Districts that had voted Labour at every election since their formation in the 1800s abandoned that party for the Conservatives. People who had voted Labour all their lives, and whose fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers had voted Labour all their lives, turned against them.  As with so many Trump voters, they voted not for Boris Johnson, who many find distasteful if not downright clownish, but against a party that finally went too far.  A bargain with the devil, perhaps, but better than a bargain with worse devils.

One parody website lampooned the clueless leftists in an article entitled “Labour ‘pretty sure’ they lost because they didn’t call enough people racist”, in which the defeated party leaders pledged to up their game next time and “call people racist 50 percent more”.  Another site declared “Dems Vow To Learn From Labour Party’s Mistake Of Not Going Far Enough Left”.  Blogger Rod Dreher – no fan of Trump, whom he considers “an ineffective and polarizing nutjob” – wrote “Boris Johnson is not a cultural conservative in any meaningful sense that I can see, but he’s not that lunatic Jo Swinson, and he’s not like these militant cultural Jacobins of the left-liberal elites that despise as bigots anyone and everyone who doesn’t affirm their rancid orthodoxies, and who want to persecute all dissenters.”  (Jo Swinson is, or was, leader of the Liberal Democrats, who swallowed “wokeness” whole.  The LDs not only lost big-time, Swinson lost her own election.)

From Rod Dreher’s keyboard to Ben Mathis-Lilley’s ears.  But the signs aren’t very hopeful.  Someone who thinks that Obama was a moderate and can write about conservatives and heartlanders, apparently with a straight face, “But that doesn’t mean they don’t live in a bubble, too.” shows no signs of learning the lessons of the electoral collapse of fellow travelers elsewhere.  Being a “militant cultural Jacobin” is just too addictive; the sanctimonious moral certainty removes all doubt, or the need to consider the opinions of others or the inconvenient facts that contradict one’s world view.  Rancid, indeed.

On one point, though, I think, Mathis-Lilley is spot-on: Very few Republicans or right-leaning independents could bring themselves to support the Democratic agenda as it currently stands, or even a watered-down version of it, or a President who advocated it.  In part that’s because an opposition party is, well, supposed to be in opposition, preferably of the loyal sort.  The competition of ideas and the compromise our political system makes necessary will almost always result in better policy.

But the more important reason is the understanding that the Progressives now controlling the Democratic Party really have gone too far.  This was the biggest lesson of Trump’s election, but one which the Progressives have steadfastly refused to learn, perhaps because militant cultural Jacobins have nothing to learn from anyone.  Additionally, there can be little doubt that burning hatred of election-thief Trump has blinded them to their own shortcomings and failures.  Obsession will do that.

That’s also the lesson of Boris Johnson’s triumph in Great Britain.  Not that it will make a bit of difference to true believers like Mathis-Lilley, who will continue to insist that only a true, fully-woke Progressive presidential candidate will do.  Well, third time’s charm.  Another fully-woke drubbing is probably going to be needed to convince the Democratic Party in the U.S. and the Labour Party in Great Britain that they have been bullied into a political dead end by cultural revolutionaries who have abandoned the best of Western thought and tradition in favor of a bloodless and irrational ideology that has only ever led to tragedy.

Kenneth D. Gough  © 2019