American liberals are, for the most part, completely unfamiliar with self-awareness and honesty. That's what makes the late New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael's somewhat infamous — and often misquoted — response to Richard Nixon's landslide victory in 1972 all the more stunning. In a speech shortly after the '72 election, Kael said, "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are, I don't know. They're outside my ken." When I was just a lad, Kael perfectly described what I would begin referring to as the Coastal Media Bubble™ more than half a century later.
A common social media refrain among leftists in response to all that President Trump and his administration are doing is, "Did you vote for this?" They are, of course, particularly upset about the work that Elon Musk (Have you heard that he wasn't elected?) and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are doing. People in search of love should find someone who looks at them the way Democrats look at the federal bureaucracy.
The people who are asking "Did you vote for this?" are, like Ms. Kael lo those many decades earlier, living "in a rather special world."
Not the good kind of special, either.
They have to hit social media to pose the question, because the odds on any of them entering into a meaningful dialogue with someone who has different political views than they do are worse than lottery odds. Most of real America is outside their ken. It's a desperate push to get the newer, not-so-MAGA Trump voters to feel bad about the "bull in a China shop" approach that the Trump 47 crew is taking to fix the bloated nightmare that is the federal behemoth.
On Wednesday, The Free Press Substack posted an article titled, "Is This What America Voted For?" It was written by the American Enterprise Institute's Ruy Teixeira, a veteran progressive author and think tank guy. Here's the crux of his post:
Is that true, though? The 77,284,118 people who voted for Trump, 49.8 percent of the total, wanted a change from the Biden administration. But did they want all of this?
Maybe not. Early data suggest that voters certainly approve of many of his policies, like his crackdown on illegal immigration and getting biological boys and men out of girls’ and women’s sports, as well as restricting the medicalized treatment for “gender dysphoria” in minors. Also popular: ditching DEI in favor of a color-blind meritocracy and pursuing an “all-of-the-above” energy policy.
DOGE, however, is another story.
Teixeira then goes on to say that Musk and DOGE are "asking for trouble" because of the way they're going about things, using "blunt tools."
It's the boilerplate Dem garbage about Trump and Musk being heartless, but delivered with less vitriol than the little proggies on X spew. And, like all of the other leftist media complaints about Trump 47 so far, it's mostly about what might happen. If I worked in an office, I would start a pool betting on exactly when each of these doomsayers will be proven wrong.
Related: The Morning Briefing: Can We Send DOGE to Deal With the 'Free-Palestine' Brats?
Teixeira cherry picks a couple of polls (CNN and WaPo...puh-leeze) to come to this conclusion:
This is the data’s message: Trump was elected to shake up the system, but in the service of specific popular priorities that Democrats ignored, especially cutting illegal immigration and improving living standards. He was not elected to do what excites the most online segment of his GOP base or what suits his personal priorities, such as across-the-board government cuts and pardoning the January 6 defendants.
Well, everyone can play the polling game. This is from something that Sarah wrote at the beginning of the week:
NEW Harvard-Harris Poll:
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 24, 2025
🟢 Trump approval: 52% (+9)
🔴 Trump disapproval: 43%
58% say he is doing better than Biden
81% support deporting criminal aliens
76% support eliminating fraud, waste
76% support closing the U.S. border
70% support merit-based hiring
61% support…
The line about "the most online segment" of Trump's base is classic liberal condescension from someone who isn't in a position to be condescending. That Teixeira is still J6ing shows that he's hitting Ideological Cocoon Town with the ghost of Pauline Kael.
I can assure you that I am in touch with more conservative Trump voters in one week than Teixeira and the CNN and WaPo pollsters will be in their lifetimes. We're not a niche base anymore, either. Nobody in my "ken" is complaining about the pace of things.
This forced attrition in the federal bureaucracy is desperately needed. Contrary to what the Left believes, federal employees are not "public servants," nor are they a protected class. This sums it up pretty well:
It's natural to sympathize with those who’ve been let go by the government, some who are hard-working public servants.
— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) February 28, 2025
But this doesn't entitle them to a job. They must live in the real world where productivity is a nonnegotiable fact of life. https://t.co/FfKE8qdJ3R
The simple fact of the matter is that the federal bureaucracy has grown so large and untenable that some delicate scalpel work isn't going to get rid of the toxic bloat. Blunt tools are all that work at the moment. If there are useful, good people who are losing their jobs (I remain skeptical about all things federal), that's on the politicians and the bureaucratic overlords who let things get this way, not on President Trump and Elon Musk. There's also nothing in DOGE's mandate from the president that prevents government agencies from rehiring qualified, truly dedicated people once all of the overhaul dust has cleared.
Or we might find that the federal government runs even better once it's dropped several pants sizes.
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