Democrats Must Be Wondering How So Many Americans Could Vote for a Fascist

If you’ve been reading the legacy media over the past few years, you’d know that voting for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump was the no-brainer decision of the century—a decision urgently needed to stop a dangerous fascist from destroying America.

But in pushing this extreme and one-sided scenario that ignored the sentiments of half of the country while also ignoring the weaknesses of their own candidate, the media ended up doing a disservice to Kamala Harris.

For a mainstream media that is used to having major influence, this must be a humbling moment. Especially during the Trump era, outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, the Atlantic, The New Yorker as well as networks like CNN, NBC, CBS, PBS and MSNBC have shared a common agenda of taking down the reviled Trump. This became more than journalism—it became a calling, an obligation to the nation.

It worked in 2020, but failed royally this year. How could that be?

Where did all that media influence go? How could such a concerted media force not be able to take down a convicted felon who they believe led an insurrection and will rule like a dictator?

Many on the left must now be asking themselves: How could so many voters be so stupid?

But if they want to return to power, they’d be better off asking: Where did we go wrong?

Indeed, I hope the Democrats and their media enablers do plenty of soul searching. America needs a strong Democratic party and a media they can trust. In recent years, the party has allowed its hatred of Trump to make them forget the common sense policies that appeal to most Americans.

Start with the idea of merit—pick the best person for the job. The Democratic debacle can be traced directly to Joe Biden’s decision four years ago to pick a weak candidate for vice president. When he announced proudly that he would pick someone based on race and gender, wokeness was on his mind, not merit.

Where’s the common sense in abandoning merit in favor of identity politics, or having open borders that allow millions of illegals to enter at will, or telling the country that inflation was under control when it clearly wasn’t, or hiding for two years that the president was cognitively impaired, and then admitting it only after a disastrous debate made it impossible to hide?

Where’s the common sense of replacing a president who swept the primaries with a candidate who never got one vote in any primary, or using the Department of Justice to go after your political rival with so many indictments that the bias became embarrassing, if not laughable?

Speaking of bias, where’s the common sense in media coverage that the Media Research Center has rated “the most wildly imbalanced in history, favoring Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris over former Republican President Donald Trump by the greatest margin ever recorded?”

This glaring bias did a disservice to Harris by neglecting the candid criticism that makes candidates better. The Democrat-media elites were so panicked at the idea of a declining Biden losing to Trump that they quickly enshrined Harris as a replacement and savior to be treated with kid gloves.

But kid gloves can only work for so long before the truth comes out. And a most lethal truth did come out when Harris said, candidly, that she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently from what Biden did. Given the widespread dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, she never recovered from that admission.

But what if that admission were the simple truth? What if, however much she tried to camouflage her alienating leftist views during her truncated campaign, voters simply didn’t like what she offered?

She wasn’t helped by a new media environment where the pull of the legacy media that supported her has significantly declined. More people today are forming their political views from a Joe Rogan podcast than from anything they might read in The Washington Post or see on CNN.

Will the mainstream media and their joined-at-the-hip Democratic party use this rock-bottom moment for honest soul searching, or will they double down on their Trump destruction syndrome as they did when he first won in 2016?

Real soul searching takes guts, especially if your comfort zone is to go the other way and accelerate your resistance against a man you still associate with Hitler.

As I see it, the great blunder of the Democrats in recent years can be boiled down to this: they hated Trump too much and loved themselves too much. Because they assumed every sane person should share their view of Trump, they isolated themselves in their contempt for the MAGA world while engaging in unlimited hyperbole against the man who represented that world. All along, they were too in love with their own views to ever challenge them.

Trump may well be as horrible as they say, but that won’t help the Democrats build a stronger party not beholden to its leftist fringe.

They’ve invested so much energy and resources going after Trump, a sense of exhaustion and demoralization has probably set in. The Dems must now decide if they’re capable of shining the spotlight on themselves.

Will they have the courage to rebuild their party and forgo identity politics to appeal to the working class and the broader “common-sense majority” that loves this country?

Will the legacy media have the courage to look in the mirror and admit they went way too far in politicizing their journalism?

Will their side listen to the genuine grievances of the 73 million Americans who voted for a man they abhor?

Or will they blame everyone but themselves for this year’s fiasco and hope to regain electoral success by continuing their never-ending war against the fascist who torments them?

We will know in due time.