There’s almost nothing worse than getting dumped. You’ve done everything right. You had all the money in the world — a billion dollars! You had all the celebrities — Harrison Ford, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand! Who could ask for anything more? Well, it turns out 76 million people.
This wasn’t just a “don’t call me, I’ll call you” or “we can still be friends” or “maybe someday in the future we could…” No, this was a “get lost, lose my number, forget you ever knew me” kind of break-up. The Democrats aren’t handling it well, to put it mildly.
They’re shaving their heads. They’re uninviting family members to Thanksgiving. They’re obsessing over everything Trump is doing and saying, refusing to go quietly. In other words, they’re turning into Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.
It isn’t enough to blame the “woke” and the crazies for the collapse of the empire. It goes much deeper than that. Yes, they’ve lost their minds, and Americans are fleeing faster than rats off a sinking ship, but the truth is the Democrats orchestrated their own demise. Even those who think they get it, don’t really.
Bill Maher, for instance, is given pats on the back for kind of, sort of getting it but if you listen really close, you’ll hear the tell-tale TDS worming its way in. Trump is crazy, his voters are dumb.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Democrats, but this isn’t 2004, as Nate Silver has proclaimed. It isn’t 1988 or 2000, either. No, you must go much further to find a period like the one we’re living through now. You have to go back to 1972.
More specifically, the swing between 1968 and 1980, as Ben Shapiro has often discussed in books and on his podcast. His comment was one of the things that drew me to the Right because, finally, someone said something that made sense. He tweeted this in the Summer of 2020, though it would be four more years before 1980 actually arrived.
And 1980 has arrived right on time. That makes me think it’s not about just four more years of Trump. This is the long game. This is probably 12 years of Republican rule.
Navigating a moment like this depends on confronting the truth, not the preferred truth, not the denial, but the real reason why Trump won such a massive victory after the Democrats spent almost ten years trying to destroy him. The answer isn’t to double down on Trump being a “monster” or a “fascist” or a “sociopath.” All that will do is postpone the inevitable, and it will only make Trump more popular.
No, this is a moment to allow the empire to collapse completely and rebuild from scratch, to think about what the party stands for and what direction they wish to take this country. They’ve lost their way and lost their purpose. Even if someone isn’t exactly thrilled with voting for Trump, the thought of handing power to the Democrats remains the more risky option.
Listen to this speaker on the 2Way platform describe the phenomenon of transforming Trump into someone he is not and why he had to abandon the Democrats:
This is a big swing election, and those elections don’t happen very often. Democrats should understand where we are in history and why it will be a while before they have another chance to rise to power.
What happened in 1972
I was just a kid in 1972, a hippie living on a mountain in Topanga Canyon with my brother and sisters. I remember that Nixon was the guy we were all supposed to hate. I remember Watergate because when Halloween came along, everyone was wearing a Nixon mask and saying, “I’m not a crook.” Nixon wasn’t cool; we all knew that.
Yet Nixon had won a historic landslide victory in 1972, an election that revealed a hidden vote: the silent majority. They were fleeing the Left in droves just like they are now.
They were sick of the chaos from the counterculture revolution of the 1960s. By 1969, the Manson girls creepy-crawled through the Hollywood Hills to butcher the rich; there were four dead students at an anti-war protest at Kent State, and the Weathermen emerged as a new movement to, as they said, “disrupt the empire ... to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks.”
The Left wasn’t ready to give up power in 1972, despite the historic beatdown. It was too easy to write it off as ratf*cking by Nixon. The Canuck Letter destroyed Edmund Muskie’s career as Nixon helped elevate George McGovern.
McGovern was aligned with the Hollywood elite. Or, as Nixon called them, “do-gooders and eggheads.” Warren Beatty was the George Clooney of his time, and just as disconnected from the silent majority.
Nixon was smart to knock out Muskie and allow the elites to elevate McGovern. He knew the American people, and the Democrats did not.
The Democrats had been demoralized after 1972, so much so that Beatty made the film Shampoo about how they’d all been fiddling while Rome burned. To them, Nixon winning really was the end of the world, and worse, they could not understand how so many Americans wanted nothing to do with any of them.
When Nixon resigned after Watergate, it was one last chance for the Democrats to convince Americans that they should be trusted to lead, just like Joe Biden had in 2020. The problem? They had nowhere to go but farther to the Left, exactly where the country did not want to go, then and now.
The Democrats will need to learn some hard lessons to rebuild their party and offer the American people a vision for the future, one they actually want. Or, as people who have been dumped are always advised, it’s time to work on yourself.
First Lesson - It should have been Joe Biden in 2016, not Hillary Clinton.
The Democrats had only one play in 2016. For the Obama administration to hold onto a third term, they’d have to convince the public that they had been great for America, so let’s have four more years. They would have had to run on the previous administration's success, which is almost always the Vice President, like GHW Bush or Truman.
But instead, they decided to make history with the first female, leapfrogging over Joe Biden. That mistake would cost the Democrats dearly, not just because Biden carried that resentment with him until 2024, when he refused to step aside once again and give up his right to try for a second term, but also because it opened the door for Bernie Sanders to launch a campaign to challenge Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, exactly the thing they did not need.
Second Lesson - Ignoring the Populist Surge
The Democrats were given a gift in 2016 with Bernie Sanders. Oh I know, I was one of the Hillarycrats who hated him and fought viciously with his supporters for an entire year. I also blamed him for her loss, at least at first. But his popularity tapped into something unseen in American politics for a long time: a genuine grassroots movement for change.
Bernie’s challenge to the Democratic Party, to the Obama coalition, and to the establishment was a revelation for many forgotten Americans and young people, who had finally heard someone say things they’d never heard a politician say. He was pointing out corruption. He was talking about a revolution.
To win, the Democrats would have to crush Bernie like a bug, to kill his movement, to tell his millions of newly energized supporters to sit down and shut up and vote blue no matter who. Their anger at the party was then turned back on them when Trump won, “you see what you did,” said the Democrats.
But they’d have been better off allowing the Bernie movement to play out on its own and not forcing Hillary as the nominee. Even if they had lost to Trump, they would have instilled more faith in the American people that they really cared about democracy.
That populist energy was there for the taking. Either side could have grabbed it and run with it, but the Democrats handed it to Trump on a silver platter. They just said, "Take it and make fools of us for the next almost ten years." Trump did just that. He took it, and he thoroughly and completely humiliated the Democrats by stealing their base and becoming a man of the people and a hero for the working class.
After Hillary’s hard fall, the Democrats doubled down. They would remove the need for voter enthusiasm at all. The system could do the work for them. Ballot harvesting! A billion dollars in dark money! Mark Zuckerberg, Google, and Twitter — all doing their bidding so that in 2020, they could drag Joe Biden over the finish line.
Third Lesson - Going to War on Trump and MAGA
By now, they must realize that their lawfare against Trump backfired, and will go down in history as that time the Democrats lost their minds and couldn’t be reigned in. It should, anyway, if the people writing that history are not insane. The American people were smart enough to see the escalation on the Left that the Democrats could not. They knew who Trump was. They knew he was the guy on Celebrity Apprentice who said things to shock people.
Yet, the Democrat's unending persecution of him, with impeachments, indictments, mass hysteria, and eventually a felony conviction and a mug shot - they wrote themselves into the script as the bad guys. Now you have these insane women sobbing on TikTok, blathering about a “convicted felon” as though any of it was ever real or valid or necessary.
Lawfare was a big mistake, the biggest, because it sent the message to us, the voters, that the Democrats couldn’t earn our votes on their own. They could only win if they put Trump in jail.
Nothing did more to turn the Trump story into the Hero’s Journey than that. By the end of it, a growing number of Americans hated them and couldn’t wait to see them voted out of power, myself included.
Final Lesson - Not accepting reality.
The worst thing anyone can do after being dumped is to refuse to accept reality. The stalking of Instagram, the calls and hang-ups, the obsession, the tears, the gallons of ice cream, the laying on the couch with unbrushed hair, and MSNBC droning on in the background.
Right now, the Democrats are slowly becoming the stalker ex, obsessing over everything Trump says and does, but it will get them nowhere. Who will want to vote for someone like Glenn Close, listening to Madame Butterfly and turning the lamp on and off in Fatal Attraction?
The Democrats have their work cut out for them. Who knows, maybe they’ll catch a lucky break, and the Republicans will do something stupid like get rid of Social Security.
Otherwise, if history is any indication, they’ll be out of power for a generation. They’ve scared America, just as they did in 1972. They will have to change everything about themselves before Americans will trust them in leadership ever again.
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