VIDEO: It’s Going To Be A While Before Democrats Fully Digest What Just Happened To Them
Scott Jennings, who was a special assistant to the president under George W. Bush, is probably the sole voice of reason on CNN these days. He’s essentially the pet conservative who appears on prime time on that network, but he doesn’t act like much of a pet – Jennings regularly destroys the left-wing narratives being spewed by the other talking heads on their air.
And it’s interesting that an old Bush Republican like Jennings is able to do such a thorough job of clobbering CNN’s gaggle of leftist “experts.” Bush Republicanism was about losing arguments to those people rather than eviscerating them. Maybe Jennings should have had a larger role in W’s administration.
Anyway, Jennings often says things which are fairly instructive. Just as often, what’s instructive is the reaction he gets when he says them.
Take last night, for example, when this happened…
I can’t say I’ve ever heard of Pete Dominick. They say he’s a comedian, but there isn’t a lot of evidence of that in this clip.
What there is evidence of is something which is everywhere on the internet this week in the wake of Tuesday’s red-wave blowout, which is a shocking-but-not-surprising level of denial on the part of partisan Democrats who are nowhere near ready to let go of all the delusions they’ve concocted for themselves which are now laid bare.
Jennings is trying to explain to Dominick where Joe Biden went wrong, and he notes that Biden’s approval numbers plummeted into the 30’s when the American people saw the utter cockup that was his Afghanistan pullout. As another of the guests notes, there was a consensus among the American people to get out of Afghanistan, but the way it was done was utterly stupid. And in August of 2021 when 13 servicemen were killed by an Al Qaeda bomb amid the chaos at the Kabul airport because Biden idiotically decided to pull the military out before the softer targets, all of America was robbed of the delusion that “the adults” were in charge of our government.
Jennings’ argument is correct. It’s actually pretty unassailable. Afghanistan was when Biden’s approval numbers took a dump, then came inflation and he never really recovered. You could be the most partisan Democrat there is and there’s no point in denying the truth of what he’s saying.
Instead, Dominick refuses to accept the argument and takes the position that Biden was in the right and that everything was fine.
And when Jennings notes that Biden’s approval rating is what it is, Dominick lashes out with personal insults.
That’s somebody who isn’t capable of rationally understanding how reality came to be.
When your party takes an assbeating like the Democrats did on Tuesday, or like the GOP did in 2008, it’s incumbent on you to do the work. You have to become introspective, and to challenge your assumptions in order to better understand the world. Once you’ve lost the election, it does no good to try to spin anything or continue pushing narratives – losing an election in decisive fashion means you’re fundamentally wrong in at least some elements of your understanding of society.
Either your concept of leadership is out of whack with the world, or your policy preferences aren’t mainstream, or your party’s mode of governance is no longer what the people are looking for.
Jennings might tell you that Bush Republicanism had gone septic by 2008 because it was too corporatist (and that didn’t work following the financial collapse), too adventuresome in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and not aggressive enough in defending the interests of its base voters. Or he might not tell you that, but it’s true nonetheless.
We know it’s true, because Donald Trump smashed Bush Republicanism and took over the GOP after the remainder establishment Republican crowd, people like John McCain, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and the other usual suspects, spent eight years getting their asses kicked by Barack Obama. And what did Trump offer? A pretty decisive repudiation of most of the core Bush Republican tenets. He’s against the forever wars. He offers a whole lot more balanced treatment of labor vs. management, which shows up in trade policy with his tariffs against China or his immigration policy which creates more scarcity of labor and thus upward wages. He aggressively engages Democrats rather than just letting them beat on him, and he’s happy to get into the dirt and out-troll them, which is something the patrician Bush establishment was constitutionally incapable of doing.
Ass-kickings lead to change, at least eventually. Bush Republicans, or at least a great many of them, were overly resistant to challenging their own assumptions and they lost their party as a result. When Trump came along and offered a different way, the bulk of the GOP base, which was already dissatisfied with the party’s leadership, was happy to pivot to Trumpism/MAGA politics.
But Dominick and the bulk of the Democrats, who I’ll call Obamunists because since 2008 the smug/superior attitudes you see in this clip, which pervade even in the face of clear evidence that their assumptions are both wrong and repudiated by the facts, have been a main feature of Obama followers, aren’t ready for a pivot.
You have Massachusetts’ governor screeching that she won’t cooperate with any effort the incoming Trump administration might make at mass deportations of Biden’s illegals. You have lunatic women swearing they won’t date or have sex with men because Trump got a huge bulk of the male vote on Tuesday. You have some of them shaving their heads, as though this was post-liberation Holland and they were the collaborators who slept with Nazis. You have talking-head idiots like Jen Rubin at the Washington Post continuing to call Trump Hitler when it’s completely obvious at this point that nobody was persuaded by that.
And the Left’s problem is that the lunatics have an iron grip on the asylum. Their successful march through the institutions means that all of the cultural, economic and political institutions from which Democrat power emanates are controlled by delusional Obamunists who can’t cope with the fact the country has just repudiated them.
The money on the Left is still as radical as it’s been. But money only has so many uses. Kamala Harris raised a billion dollars and spent herself into $20 million of debt and look where she is. Money paying for crap still gets you crap.
There is no corrective mechanism yet evident which would incentivize Pete Dominick to change his thinking. Not even his interaction with Jennings which went so badly. He walked out of that segment thinking he won the day.
And so the asskickings will continue.
This is a hopeful sign, because it holds open the possibility that Trump and the Republicans who have seized the current moment will have time to consolidate power, seize current institutions or build better alternatives from which to project cultural, economic and political power, and stage their own “fundamental transformation” of American society.
We now know that the Left, as currently constituted, isn’t capable of dislodging that control. And until the Pete Dominicks of the world are able to do the work of introspection and revisitation of their non-mainstream beliefs, America won’t put them in charge again.
It could be a while before that happens. Let’s hope it is.
