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It amazes me that the NYT publishes drivel like that from Bret Stephens as if it is contributing to the discourse. He just discovered liberal hypocrisy!
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The critique is far more expansive than that, but you'll frame it as you like, as that's your favorite form of response.
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A wiser editor would have said to Bret Stephens, cut everything and start with the last two sentences, which are interesting questions on which many people are actually engaging. Do you have any ideas to add to that conversation? Maybe he didn't, so they just went with this to troll the libs.
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I agree those are the most important questions. How did Trump get so close? Well, a lot of it is what Stephens cites. People really, really dislike a lot of the preachiness and know-it-all-ism of Democrats, particularly given it's matched almost always with incompetent policies and is later discovered to have been based on bad data analyses. Democrats never leave anything alone. There's always an urge to tell everyone what their analysis of an issue is, and then insist on a policy prescription to react to it. Later, they admit they tackled a problem that didn't need to be tackled and in doing so caused another worse problem. From Clinton-era silliness about everyone needing to own a house (followed by the feckless W administration) to Covid over-reaction, they think they're the smart set, with the answers... and they fuck it up. Over and over and over. The law of unintended consequences bites Ds in the ass every time and their response? "Let's pass another law!"
On the second question, Liberalism doesn't turn off anyone. And I don't think liberals turn off anyone. Liberals are open minded. Classical liberals don't want to tell anyone what to do. They venerate tolerance and live and let live attitudes.
It's MAGA and Progressives that want to tell everyone what to do. Stephens' question should have been, "How do both parties rid themselves of extreme right wingers and progressives?"
We classical liberals and conservatives can get along just fine, horse trading our way to sane compromises. But these right wingers, these MAGA people? And these wingnut progressives? You can't deal with these groups. They're cancers - founts of dysfunction.
YMMV, but IMO, moderate Ds hate progressives. They think they're nuts. And moderate Rs hate MAGA and right-wingers. They think they're nuts and ruining the party. There's a whole lot of overlap for the sane of us in the middle to cut deals. We just have to eliminate the extremists from the conversations.
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P.S. It's not the hypocrisy. Bret Stephens has never, ever, ever written a column about how conservative hypocrisy costs them anything. The question is, why do the Bret Stephens of the world -- and I think you can count yourself among them, unless you disagree -- get bothered by liberal hypocrisy, but not by conservative hyprocrisy? What is really going on with that double standard?
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Conservative hypocrisy is so overt, there's nothing revelatory in a column calling it out. They're openly full of shit. It's like Trump. Try keeping a list of all his lies and contradictions. You'll run out of space in the spreadsheet by noon.
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Who, specifically, are the Progressives in the tent, what, specifically, have they done that moves the needle? And how do Democrats win elections by alienating a non-trivial fraction of their coalition?
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1. The Woke. They're political toxic waste. They're fading, but not fast enough.
2. The corporate classes that support woke narratives. These people aren't really woke. They use the woke as useful idiots, to divert the conversation from one about class, wealth inequality, and (gasp) anti-competitive monopolistic consolidation in numerous industries to one about race, gender, and trans issues.
3. The legacy media. Again, fading fast, but just irritating enough to alienate a ton of people.
How does getting rid of them help the Democrats? Well, because a whole lot of moderate ex-Republicans are now looking for a home. They have more money and power than progressives, they outnumber progressives 50 to 1, and they desperately want Normalcy. It's not naive to suggest the silent majority wants to go back to the days of Reagan and O'Neill cutting deals. Unless one has shit for brains, he realizes (unless he's MAGA or progressive) by age 27 that this country doesn't work without compromise. That no one wins in zero sum games.
The Democratic Party is, I think, on the verge of scooping up roughly 1/4 of the Republican party. Give them a space in the tent. Make MAGA and Progressivism Fringe Again and let the rest of us sail into a future of Sane Compromise.
