Wither Democrats?

Mark Steyn is loaded for bear–well, donkey actually–in his latest Chicago Sun-Times essay. He mentions the London Daily Mirror’s infamous post-American election headline, “How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?”:

Well, they’re British lefties: They can do without Americans. Whether an American political party can do without Americans is more doubtful. Nonetheless, MSNBC.com’s Eric Alterman was mirroring the Mirror’s sentiments: “Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the ‘reality-based community’ say or believe about anything.” Over at Slate, Jane Smiley’s analysis was headlined, “The Unteachable Ignorance Of The Red States.” If you don’t want to bother plowing your way through Alterman and Smiley, a placard prominently displayed by a fetching young lad at the post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco cut to the chase: “F— MIDDLE AMERICA.”

Almost right, man. It would be more accurate to say that “MIDDLE AMERICA” has “F—ed” you, and it will continue to do so every two years as long as Democrats insist that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a simpleton — or “Neanderthal,” as Teresa Heinz Kerry described those unimpressed by her husband’s foreign policy. In my time, I’ve known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain’s House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America’s coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn’t.

More to the point, nobody who campaigns with Ben Affleck at his side has the right to call anybody an idiot. H. L. Mencken said that no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Well, George Soros, Barbra Streisand and a lot of their friends just did: The Kerry campaign and its supporters — MoveOn.org, Rock The Vote, etc. — were awash in bazillions of dollars, and what have they got to show for it? In this election, the plebs were more mature than the elites: They understood that war is never cost-free and that you don’t run away because of a couple of setbacks; they did not accept that one jailhouse scandal should determine America’s national security interest; they rejected the childish caricature of their president and paranoid ravings about Halliburton; they declined to have their vote rocked by Bruce Springsteen or any other pop culture poser.

Steyn writes, “All the above is unworthy of a serious political party”. It also helps to illustrate just how far liberalism has travelled in the days since 1972, when they abandoned moderate positions for those increasingly further leftward.

Since November, they’ve been given lots of free advice, which all boil down to,
move back to the center, folks. But as Steyn writes, the odds of that happening are slim and none–and Slim just left Berkeley.