Today’s paragraphs come to us from Ian Tuttle, writing for National Review, who has titled his latest commentary, none to subtlely, “American Needs a Sane Left”
Here are the first four paragraphs…after which you would do well to use the link I’ve provided and read the rest:
The Left is not going to learn any lessons from 2016, apparently.
Democrats in the House just crushed an upstart challenge to Nancy Pelosi’s decade-long leadership, rejecting Tim Ryan, a 43-year-old congressman who represents a swath of post-industrial Ohio from Youngstown to Akron and co-chairs the Congressional Manufacturing Caucus, for the 76-year-old San Francisco congresswoman who has presided over the largest House losses in modern memory, and who famously said that the House had to pass the Affordable Care Act “so you can find out what is in it.” As for leadership outside the halls of Congress, the favorite to head the Democratic National Committee has been Keith Ellison, a Muslim congressman from Minnesota who has extensive ties to the Nation of Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood, and who has compared the September 11 attacks to the burning of the Reichstag.
Much left-wing punditry is similarly oblivious. Writing at Slate shortly after the election, Jamelle Bouie declared that “there is no such thing as a good Trump voter,” dismissing the notion that a “good person” could have cast a vote for Donald Trump. In the New York Times, Columbia humanities professor Mark Lilla wrote a searching piece, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” suggesting that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” His Columbia colleague, Katherine Franke, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, declared Lilla a fellow traveler of David Duke, and that his essay aimed to “make white supremacy respectable.”
And, of course, the “leaders of tomorrow” populating the nation’s dormitories have been engaged in a public display of mass neurosis. Students at St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y., claimed that a “Trump/Pence” flag in a campus window constituted “harassment,” while several student groups at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., declared that employing police on campus was an “act of violence” because the Fraternal Order of Police had endorsed Donald Trump.
Mr. Tuttle cannot, for the life of him figure out what these people are thinking (assuming they think at all).
I have a lot of trouble with it too.
But I have no problem understanding that if the country’s left wing continues to behave this way, they heighten the prospects for staying a fragmented minority party for a long time. And the longer they stay that way, the more of an opportunity the middle and the right has to demonstrate to voters – very much including groups the left has placed all their bets on – that there are better answers than increasing government dependency and race/sex identity excuses.
Ian Tuttle wins Paragraphs Of The Day honors for laying their political myopia out so well.
