“Fight,” which liberals found so distasteful when shouted by Donald Trump right after he survived an assassination attempt, now acts as the constant progressive watchword.
Pramila Jayapal, in a short interview with the Nation, used it five times. Philip Bump, as though conveying marching orders, wrote an article in the Washington Post titled: “Voters love a fighter. So why won’t the Democratic Party fight?” A town hall crowd in Stratham, New Hampshire, urged Democratic Representative Chris Pappas to “fight, fight, fight.” (RELATED: Democrats Embarrass Themselves Imitating Trump)
Does Donald Trump receive residuals for that?
The truth about “fight” is that it tells a lie. Ostensibly, it indicates an active, aggressive tact. In reality, it indicates passivity.
Democrats lost badly in 2024. An active response to that defeat would include a change in the policies that resulted in voter turn-off. Instead, Democrats turtled up and went passive. They refuse to alter their policy stances. This means Democrats submissively wait until the other party screws up so badly (or voter familiarity eventually breeds contempt for Republicans) that the electorate finally gives them another shot. They do nothing to affect the desired outcome. (RELATED: The Democratic Party Is Collapsing)
Democrats have not reoriented their course at all on issues since the election.
Take transgender men competing in women’s sports. According to a New York Times poll, four in five respondents oppose this. Among Democrats, two in three oppose. Rather than conform to political reality, Senate Democrats earlier this month unanimously blocked a bill that sought to ban biological males from competing in women’s sports.
Rather than acknowledge that waste, fraud, and corruption exist in government, and form an alliance with Elon Musk on parts of the budget (defense?) that Democrats want cut, progressives instead exhibited a kneejerk hostility to the Department of Government Efficiency’s mission from Day One.
The Laken Riley Act, a political no-brainer, received support from just 12 Democrats in the U.S. Senate.
After 10 senators on the left side of the aisle voted to advance a vote on keeping the government open, one Democrat in the Senate, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, and an independent, Angus King, who caucuses with the Democrats, voted for the final bill to keep the government open. Government, typically presented as the alpha and omega to solving our problems by Democrats, they voted to shut down. Hmmm.
An alternative template for regaining power exists. In 1992, Bill Clinton ran as a “New Democrat.” He supported the death penalty, free trade, and welfare reform. He presided over a balanced budget. On several occasions, he stood up to the party’s left wing. Ask Gerry Brown and Sister Souljah.
The most important thing he did? He won. After looking from the outside of the White House for 20 of the previous 24 years, Democrats regained the presidency in 1992.
Sometimes it takes that long of a political exile for a party to get smart. After eight years of GOP banishment from the Oval Office, Donald Trump engineered major shifts in the Republican vision on trade, immigration, and foreign policy. This proved a winning formula.
Ironically, the party of “change” operates as a rigid, sclerotic clique afraid to question any of its shopworn ideas. At the same time, Democrats demand that everyone embrace such massive changes as calling men women and turning us all into immigrants in the country of our birth by opening the borders.
In that interview, Jayapal insisted that “we have to actually redo this system, because it’s rigged. The Democratic Party is rigged against itself, but Jayapal and friends refuse to redo it.
Inflexible ideologues unable to even tweak their own platforms should understand the difficulty of convincing the rest of society to turn itself on its head. But they don’t. They’re inflexible ideologues, after all.
And that’s why they lose.
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