Think Conservatives Have It Bad with Trump?

While many on the Right continue their foot-stamping poo-flinging at the mere thought of Donald Trump, our friends on the Left are having a similar meltdown over the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua:

The governing narrative of the 2016 Presidential campaign so far has been that GOP is imploding. All it took was the adolescent agitprop of Donald Trump to lay bare the rift between the Party Establishment (i.e. corporate donors) and the Party Base, whose anxieties and prejudices they have been manipulating for decades.

There’s been a gleeful sense of schadenfreude in the coverage churned out by left-leaning outlets in particular. How lovely it has been to watch the conservative movement’s house of cards fall into shambles!

The problem, of course, is that Republicans aren’t the only party facing an historic rift. Over the past two weeks, it’s become increasingly obvious that grassroots liberals are thoroughly disgusted by their own party establishment.

The Republicans no doubt face a brutal convention, in which they must either nominate an unpopular candidate or incur the wrath of the masses by handpicking an establishment figure. But the Democrats already face a kind of inverse dilemma. Barring a miracle, they will nominate an establishment candidate who is at best tepidly supported, and at worst reviled, by those who have rallied behind her insurgent foe, Bernie Sanders.

Conservatives generally pay little attention to the internecine battles among the progs, but it’s hard to underestimate the depths of revulsion many on the hard Left feel for Hillary Clinton. Like us, they see her hideous, blatant, arrogant corruption for what it is — and despair for the future of their party.

Hillary Clinton will probably be the Democratic nominee for president, and will in all likelihood beat Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, if either one is her opponent. But beating an unpopular right-wing lunatic will not mend the rift among Democrats. It will only forestall a broader and more divisive fight for the soul of the party.

The center cannot hold. A growing plurality of democratic voters wants a true progressive agenda. If Clinton and party insiders ignore this reality, such voters will begin to look elsewhere. They will not view themselves as having left the Party. The Party will have left them.

Sweet music indeed.