The few days that have passed since President Trump's speech to a joint session of Congress have yielded ample time to remark on the departure of many congressional Democrats from the realm of reality. Though they make for an an entertaining batch when they're out of power, they are stupendously awful when in power. Their pronouns are "Catastrophic" and "Failure."
Looking beyond the theatrics and the intellectual incongruity of wearing pink to protect women while simultaneously remaining seated in a stone-faced stupor while the rest of the room rises to honor a young lady who nearly got her brains beat in by a male athlete, you get the sense that we're dealing with a stunted capacity for reason and mental rigor. There was a time when I suspected that the left was simply swept away by its fondness for counterintuitive solutions. Now, however, it seems that counter-intuition eventually gave way to counter-reasoning, which has now devolved into anti-thought.
How else to explain a group of people who can't even celebrate a 13-year-old boy who, while battling brain cancer, becomes an honorary secret service agent? Why else would these people refuse to honor a steelworker and volunteer firefighter who is fostering 40 children? What kind of dead soul refuses to rise in respect for the family of a lady who was murdered by an illegal immigrant, or the mother of a young girl who was raped and murdered by another illegal immigrant?
There was a time when the best minds that the left had to offer sparred with William F. Buckley, Jr., on "Firing Line," or when skilled advocates for the left and right locked intellectual horns on "Crossfire," or when Sam Donaldson debated George Will on ABC. There were even occasional "Firing Line" debates in which academics and politicians, scientists and intellectuals from the left and the right submitted themselves to interrogation and debate with each other. This vigorous exploration of issues and a continuing search for the closest approximation to truth continues in various formats on the right, e.g., talk radio, podcasts, blogs and online publications representing various factions of right-of-center thought.
What happened to the left? I think Charlie Kirk put his finger on the problem in his exchange with California Governor Gavin Newsom, when he observed:
I think it's two things. First, your upbringing in college campuses does not foster debate like it used to. It just doesn't. It's about silencing the critic, and the elevation of the victim. You do not have the robust practice of having to defend your position. It's very monolithic. Very centralized, very top-down. It's quasi authoritarian. And then, secondly, I would just say that the philosophy and the world view, as I mentioned earlier, that you guys have adopted, is that, "Thou who is oppressed will get the most points." You guys don't have, "Thou who has the best ideas wins." And because of that you guys have an elevation of, like, "Hey, we're gonna just have a small subset of an authoritarian hectoring, hall monitoring, assistant principle vibe of people tell you that you're not allowed to say these words and you can't say that, etc." And we call that Political Correctness which in and of itself is hyper-authoritarian. So if you seek to understand why young men are rebelling, they're like, "No, I'm not going to go along with this anymore.
In short, having insulated themselves from any serious debate with opposing viewpoints, they find that the intellectual muscle required to defend their positions has atrophied, leaving banal ad hominem attacks as their only remaining defense. For instance, I have an old high school friend, and we've connected again on social media. We are both veterans, and so we have a dual bond as classmates and vets which allows us to keep our political differences civil, for the most part.
He will occasionally challenge me on various subjects, most often on racial issues, as he's a BLM supporter. He once maintained that the systemic oppression of African Americans is simply self-evident, and that black men were being killed en masse by the police, etc. I responded with hard data explaining that we have a situation in which a demographic that constitutes roughly 13 percent of the population commits over half of the homicides nationwide, meaning that when the police respond to 911 calls for help in violent situations, they will most likely be responding to neighborhoods populated by largely by African Americans. So that the truth of the matter is that the last face most African American murder victims see is the face of their African American attacker.
My friend's response? There are lies, damn lies, and statistics, he said, borrowing from Mark Twain. He then compared me with Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. That's it. That's all he had. Possessing neither the skill nor the knowledge to counter a factual presentation, he resorted to dumb slander. Because he's a friend of many years and a veteran, I didn't respond as I could have, and decided to let it go. In the arena of ideas and a robust search for truth, some people are better suited to a circus tent, which, come to think of it, reminds me of another Mark Twain quote: "Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience."
Herein lies the key to the screeching and cursing from the left; the haggard and gawd-awful Peter, Paul and Mary-like singing; the cringe-inducing "fighter" video; the adolescent name-calling and the steadfast refusal to acknowledge and celebrate American success stories if they are narrated by Donald Trump. The cute little paddles with their vapid little words, the faux-support for women that turns a blind eye to their exploitation by men pretending to be women, the clownish antics of Al Green and the tired old resort to racism and identitarianism as a shabby substitute for vigorous debate reveals the intellectual sclerosis that has locked the Democratic Party into uselessness.
They have nothing left to offer except ideas that don't work and disproven slurs that insult Americans' intelligence. A party that cannot soberly address ideas which 76 percent of Americans approve of is in deep trouble. The Democrat party is in a death spiral, from which one hopes eventually will emerge a party of sanity and common decency.
The Democrats are down, but they're by no means out. And their media mouthpieces will continue to lie more than ever as they try to regain hegemony. Become a VIP member now, and you'll get full access to all the facts that we give you here at PJ Media. Click HERE and use the promo code FIGHT, and you’ll get a yuge 60% discount!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member