Michael Jordan hated to lose more than he loved to win. He’s a reminder that hate can be more powerful than love.
The same can hold true in politics: Lots of voters hated Donald Trump more than they loved Joe Biden, which helped give Scranton Joe his victory.
Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia, tried to ride that Trump-hatred to victory in yesterday’s election. The problem is that Trump is no longer in the White House, which helps explain McAuliffe’s stunning loss to Glenn Youngkin, a Republican political newcomer. It also helps explain President Biden’s sharp decline in popularity: He can’t blame his failures on Trump.
“There’s no way to sugarcoat this: This was a shellacking on a thumping” Steve Israel, a former New York congressman said to The New York Times of Tuesday’s results for the Democratic party in New York and across the country.
Throughout the Trump years, the Democrats were spoiled by a man widely reviled who couldn’t stop spewing self-destructive missives on Twitter. They never had to be too competent or reasonable, because Trump’s divisive antics sucked up all the negative attention. Biden’s victory made them even more cocky. They forgot that it was the anti-Trump vote that gave them the power they craved.
So they overreached, and are now facing a painful reckoning.
“For five years, the party rode record-breaking turnouts to victory, fueled by voters with a passion for ousting a president they viewed as incompetent, divisive or worse,” Lisa Lerer wrote in The New York Times. “Tuesday’s results showed the limitations of such resistance politics when the object of resistance is out of power.”
Resistance is a sugar high that can make you sloppy. You feel like a revolutionary, but you lose all sense of perspective. The resistance to Trump was so deep, the haters overlooked the genuine grievances of Trump’s middle-class voters. If these people voted for Trump, they must all be racists.
Resistance is a sugar high that can make you sloppy. You feel like a revolutionary, but you lose all sense of perspective…Democrats are learning that hubris makes you lose your edge.
As Holman Jenkins wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “Virginia’s contest was a test of whether Americans like being called racists. It turns out they don’t.” It turns out millions of Americans also want a say in what their kids learn in school and aren’t crazy about defunding the police.
Democrats are learning that hubris makes you lose your edge. You can feel that hubris in Congress. The progressive wing of the Democratic party has been oblivious to its razor-thin majority in the House and its 50-50 tie in the Senate. In their view, spending $5 trillion to enact their socialist vision of America should be a slam dunk because it’s “good for America.”
But in a free democracy that values dissent, nothing is a slam dunk. If you want to get legislation enacted, you measure your leverage, you sit down, you negotiate, you compromise. Of course, you’re also free to be cocky and uncompromising, but at the risk of being punished by voters.
Yesterday, the voters sent a message to the Democrats, especially its progressive wing: Don’t be so cocky. Don’t be so sloppy. You’re not the only voices that matter in this country. There are other voices, there are other views, and we matter, too.
Regardless of which political side you’re on, there’s always something healthy about getting a dose of humility. We’re living at a time when a virus 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt has killed more than 5 million people and has devastated a planet. One would think that would humble us. Instead, it seems to have made us angrier, more polarized, more sure of ourselves.
Regardless of which political side you’re on, there’s always something healthy about getting a dose of humility.
Luckily, fear is the deepest emotion.
If the Democrats come to realize that resistance to Trump is no longer a winning ticket, if yesterday’s stinging defeat humbles them into becoming more reasonable and cognizant of other views, it won’t be because they want to. It will be because they’re terrified of getting trounced in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential elections.
That fear is democracy at work, and it’s stronger than both hate and love.
