On the response to the election.
When a political party loses an election, its supporters typically respond in one of two ways. There is, first, a constructive response: let’s figure out what went wrong and try to fix it so that the next time around we can win back the voters we lost in this election. There is an alternative response—that is, to blame the voters for “letting us down” and for lacking the good sense to elect our team. That is a childish response, thoroughly unhelpful, but it is one that many in the celebrity and journalistic wings of the Democratic Party have embraced.
For the celebrity wing of the party, the journalists at The New York Times, and those who pay attention to them: We are wise, virtuous, and compassionate; the voters are dumb, uninformed, and racists. For the never-Trumpers: This is 1933; Hitler is on the ballot; and we are Winston Churchill. Do these folks seem a bit unhinged, much too convinced of their own importance, and disassociated from the world in which most voters live? The question answers itself.
Here are some examples of these reactions.
Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker: “It [Trump’s election] is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at The New Criterion
_____________________
James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of No Way to Treat a Child.
Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images