Elitist Libs Remove the ‘Demo’ From the Democrats – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

The picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sitting in first class en route to a “Fighting Oligarchy” rally hosted by Bernie Sanders tells a thousand words.

A few of those words? People who shout the loudest about fighting for “the people” rarely connect with actual flesh-and-blood individuals. The humanitarians do not mix well with the humans. Basing a political philosophy on abstractions impervious to alteration by real-life experience helps explain this.

As Thomas Fleming wrote in The Morality of Everyday Life: “If moral and social questions are not reducible to logical abstractions — which is my central point — then it is essential for us to learn moral reasoning by considering the nuances and textures of human life.”

Too many politicians fail to do this. On a symbolic level, Donald Trump, whether dressed as a garbage man or working the drive-thru at a McDonald’s, appeals to people rather than people cultishly devoted to abstract ideas. His common touch extends from a long line of populists, right and left (and right and wrong), who knew how to communicate with the common man. (RELATED: Donald Trump: Demolition Man)

Populist Party member “Sockless” Jerry Simpson, referred to by well-wishers as the “Sockless Socrates,” won over the voters of Kansas-7 to win three terms in Congress during the 1890s. His nicknames alone — Have there been better ones in American politics? — generated an intense following.

Biographer Thomas Reeves noted that Joseph McCarthy “pressed his own pants by putting them under the mattress at night.” When a limousine came for the former Marine, he revealed his class by obliviously attempting to get into the front passenger seat. “I wonder what these people would think,” the senator mumbled at a Washington cocktail party, “if they knew I once raised chickens.”

George Wallace, a Golden Gloves champion boxer, attracted 18,000 to a Boston Common rally in 1968 not because of the past racism of his administration as governor of Alabama, but because the working-class saw in him a fighter.

Such figures attracted a massive following among Everyday Americans. Historians reflexively vilify them without pausing to try to understand why they generated a following. One imagines a similar pattern occurs with Donald Trump.

Surely, AOC ranks as a weaker example of the reverse phenomenon than, say, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, or Kamala Harris. The party that they represent lost because they lost touch. This involves substance as well as style and symbolism. (RELATED: Democrats Mistake Their People for ‘The People’)

Last week, nearly the entire Democratic caucus in the Georgia House of Representatives vacated the chamber rather than cast a vote on whether the state’s taxpayers should fund the sex-change treatments for inmates. They still take their stand in Dixieland — for transgender felons.

A few days later, Maryland legislators voted 101–36 to pass a reparations bill that establishes a committee to examine whether the state should compensate the descendants of slaves in the form of “statements of apology, monetary compensation, property tax rebates, social service assistance, licensing and permit fee waivers and reimbursement, down payment assistance for the purchase of residential real property, business incentives, child care, debt forgiveness, and higher education tuition payment waivers and reimbursement.”

In Colorado, state legislators push for in-state tuition for illegals, ban holds on inmates for pickup by immigration authorities, forbid police from “arresting or detaining an individual on the basis of a civil immigration detainer request,” and extend prohibitions on local cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “The bill prohibits a peace officer or employee or agent of a detention facility from allowing federal immigration authorities access to a part of the detention facility that is not accessible to the public,” SB25-276’s summary reads, “unless required by a federal warrant or writ to transfer an inmate to or from federal custody.”

The people have spoken on these issues. They don’t want to pay for sex changes for prison inmates, they don’t want people who never enslaved to pay reparations for people who were never slaves, and they don’t want to hamstring law enforcement from sending illegal aliens arrested for other crimes back home. But the self-proclaimed party of the people refuses to listen. (RELATED: Illegal Immigration Is Down Under Trump — Can It Last?)

Democrats could throw away their socks and fly coach. Such symbolic efforts to connect with Joe and Josephine Six Pack come to naught when they lecture Americans on what decency commands them to believe rather than respond to what, precisely, they do believe.

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