Democrat reset? Not yet!

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

...Trump essentially ran against a united Democratic party, the Republican establishment, the mainstream media (both liberal and conservative) — and won.

...The twin agents of progressive dogma, the media and the university, are themselves under financial duress, must recalibrate, and have lost support from half the country.

...What the media and Democrats see as Trump’s outrageous extremism now looks, to more than half the country, like a tardy return to normalcy: employing the words “radical Islamic terror,” or asking cities to follow federal law rather than go full Confederate, or deporting illegal aliens who have committed crimes, or building a wall to stop easy illegal entry across the U.S. border, or putting a temporary hold on unvetted refugees from war-torn states in the Middle East. In the eyes of many Middle Americans, all these measures, even if sometimes hastily and sloppily embraced, are not acts of revolution; they are common-sense corrections of what were themselves extremist acts, or they are simply continuances of presidential executive-order power as enshrined by Obama and sanctified by the media.

...Instead of seeing Barack Obama (both his successful two elections and his failed two terms) as the wave of the future, Democrats would be wise to reassess his electoral legacy as a unique phenomenon. In truth, Obama’s legacy is twofold: He took the party hard left, and he downsized it to a minority party of the two coasts and big cities. And then he faded off into the sunset to a multimillionaire retirement of golf and homilies.

The progressive movement, the Democratic party and its cultural appendages in entertainment and the media seem to be doubling down on a failed electoral strategy. Instead, they all hope that either Donald Trump will crack and spontaneously implode after some new sort of Access Hollywood disclosure, or that their own unrelenting invective will eventually grind him down, as it did with Richard Nixon.

In sum, the architects of Democratic-party reform are themselves the problem, not the solution. On key issues, they represent a minority opinion, one confined to the entertainment industry, academia, race/class/gender elite activists, and the wealthy scions of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street. In addition, minority activists themselves do not get out in the heartland and mistakenly believe that the demeanor, mindset, and, yes, guilt of white urban liberal elites in their midst characterize the white working and middle classes in general. And they mistakenly assume they themselves cannot be out-of-touch elites, given their ethnic and racial heritage, when in fact many most certainly are. Do Eric Holder and Colin Kaepernick know more about poverty and hardship than a West Virginian miner or an out-of-work fabricator in southern Ohio? Does an affluent Van Jones visit depressed rural Michigan to lecture out-of-work plant workers and welders about their endemic white privilege?​

The current Democratic reset plan certainly does not resemble the 1976 strategy of nominating a governor from the South in order to avoid another 1972 McGovern catastrophe; nor does it share the 1992 wisdom of nominating Bill Clinton to fend off a second Dukakis disaster. For now, the Democratic-party strategists are doubling down on boutique environmentalism and race/gender victimhood, while hoping that Donald Trump implodes in scandal, war, or depression. They are clueless that their present rabid frenzy is doing as much political damage to their cause as is the object of their outrage.

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