Hunter S. Thompson wrote in his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail:
The "mood of the nation," in 1972, was so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted, and blindly reactionary that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded "typical voters" of the fear & anxiety they'd felt during the constant "social upheavals" of the 1960s had any chance at all of beating Nixon last year--not even Ted Kennedy--because the pendulum "effect" that began with Nixon's slim victory in '68 was totally irreversible by 1972. After a decade of left-bent chaos, the Silent Majority was so deep in a behavorial sink that their only feeling for politics was a powerful sense of revulsion. All they wanted in the White House was a man who would leave them alone and do anything necessary to bring calmness back into their lives.”
It’s hard to believe that the Democrats became so crazy that they made Trump seem like the normal one, the only person who could bring calm back into our lives.
I felt happy the other day and thought, what is this strange feeling? It wasn’t so much that I was happy with all of what Trump was doing, but he did the one thing that had been keeping me up at night - his Executive Order to end “gender-affirming care” for minors.
I’m not foolish enough to think that these big moves Trump and his team are making will bring about permanent change, but he’s shaking the tree, standing up to the most powerful forces in the country, and doing exactly what we, the voters, asked him to do.
Trump isn’t the problem. It’s the crumbling empire that refuses to relinquish power and insists so many of its delusions and narratives must be adhered to, even now. Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren reminded us that they don’t really seem to care about how the election turned out. They didn’t even turn the page.
They don’t seem to have gotten the message that they’re still considered too crazy to govern. It’s the exact kind of crazy that drove Nixon to a landslide victory and eventually put Reagan in power, keeping Democrats out of the White House for the next 12 years. As things look now, that’s exactly how it will play out.
I sometimes peer into the crazy on TikTok. Women wearing red lipstick in silent protest. Young and old alike screeching and caterwauling at Trump supporters, pleading with them, mocking and dehumanizing them, then begging them to see Trump as the embodiment of all of the evil in the world. How frustrating it must be for them to know that the silent majority doesn’t agree.
How frustrating it must be that they keep screaming racists, Nazis, fascists! And still be seen as the crazier side.
With the election of DNC Chair Ken Martin and Vice Chair David Hogg, they seem to be sending a message to their voters that they’re done with the “woke” thing, and maybe now they can un-crazy themselves with two boring “white dudes.”
The last time the Democrats tried to un-crazy themselves, it didn’t go so well. After losing every state except Massachusetts in 1972 and the even worse Jimmy Carter presidency, the Democrats settled on the idea that bland and boring middle manager types were better than chasing the dream.
This “bland and boring” reset doesn’t undo the crazy but disguises it. Look to the future, they say. Gun control, they say. Bring the fight to the Republicans, they say. But they still can’t solve the problem because they are the problem.
The star, their Great White Hope, their version of the “bro-whisperer” to bring in the young people is David Hogg, mass shooting survivor turned activist influencer.
And he’s just Ken:
The worst sign is that nothing much has changed except appearances. The party is still leaning into the establishment of old, which means they aren’t sending a message to voters that they are, in any way, prepared to deal with the mess they made over the past four years.
What should worry the Democrats, not that they will pay any attention, is that there is no plan to clean house, which is what they’d need to do to have any real pitch to win back the voters they lost. They seem to be doing the bare minimum, admitting nothing, with Barack Obama still guiding the ship.
They really do think they can sweep it all under the rug — hiding Joe Biden’s age, the Afghanistan withdrawal, the censorship machine, George Clooney op-ed, how Biden refused to leave, whatever they threatened him with, and the manufactured candidacy of Kamala Harris.
How much better would it be for them if they admitted their party had become too corrupt to function? And too crazy to lead? But they won’t because that other America still exists inside the utopian bunker they’ve been hiding in all this time.
In choosing David Hogg, the Democrats prove they have no plans to roll back the crazy, which, of course, I already knew. This goes deeper for them than politics. This is who they are. This is how they see the world.
With Martin and Hogg (which sounds like a leather boot manufacturer) they’re sending a message to those of us who have defected from the party that nothing has changed. There were no lessons learned, no reckoning to be had.
Says Adam B. Coleman:
When I was a Democrat, we believed in classically liberal principles, like freedom of speech and fairness for all people, not just some people. They elevated serious and, dare I say, likable individuals within the party. At one point, The Democrats seemed like the "cool" party with aspirational and better ideas.
But now, The Democrats are the party of dogma. There is nothing inquisitive or reflective about the party. They are verbal one-trick ponies, twisting their words to validate their end-goal ambition regardless if it works or not.
I’ve seen tweets by people who are hoping their ongoing hysteria about Trump’s first ten days will send people like me running back into their arms. But the problem has never been Trump. The problem has always been them, what they did to this country, what they did to the party, what they did to themselves.
Just like the silent majority ran from them back in 1972 and 1980, so too are we all still okay with Trump, even with the chaos, because he’s not them.
It took me four years to realize that. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and there is no going back, at least not until they clean house and un-crazy themselves.
So we’ll see bland candidates running for president as they attempt to tack to the center, but the crazy will follow them like toilet paper stuck to the bottom of their shoes.
The “Mood of the Nation”
The last time the Democrats scared America, I was just a kid. I grew up in Topanga Canyon around the same time as the Manson family lived there, not to mention it being a hotbed for old-time rock n’ rollers, surfers, and cults. Nothing scared me as much as Charles Manson, whose face stared out at us from the cover of magazines. Those crazy eyes, that “X” scar between his brows.
I was too young to remember the murders themselves, but the scary part of the story wasn’t so much when the murders made the news but the discovery of who did it and why. They looked like your average hippie in Topanga, with their ratty cut-offs and halter tops, slinging dirty-faced children on their hips as they begged for money at the supermarket.
The Manson murders poured cold water over the fever dream of the counterculture revolution in 1969, as did the sharp rise of rapists and serial killers that proliferated in the 1970s.
And then there were the anti-war protests, the Weathermen bombing the Capitol, and a Kent State protest that left four dead in Ohio at the hands of the police.
Leaving all of that craziness behind was something you could just feel. You can see it in movies, too, how the activists are mocked in the film Network:
The Big Chill documents the transformation from the hippies to the yuppies who moved out of their vans and into homes with jobs, kids, and retirement, which, of course, seemed to them then like “selling out.”
The Big Chill is as insufferable today as it was then. Lefty Boomers just thought so highly of themselves, and now, their empire is crumbling. It’s time for a new generation to wipe the slate clean. They don’t call it The Fourth Turning for nothing.
Trump is what Neil Howe would call the Gray Champion of the Fourth Turning because he might be the only person on the planet who has the moxie to challenge the empire, much less defeat it.
Here we are on the brink of what feels like a brand new country and world, and yet all we get from the Democrats is fear. It’s like Galileo trying to explain that the earth revolves around the sun and is put in jail for it.
They see a bright innovator like Elon Musk, and they say, “He did the Nazi salute!” They see these tech bros moving fast and breaking things, and they think, “Billionaire oligarchs.” They can’t even imagine what kind of future awaits because they are so afraid of it; all they can do is close the door tight and hope for a miracle.
The Democrats spent almost a decade focusing on their imaginary war against Trump. It was never a war with Trump. It was a war with a country that was not born to stay in one place for long but one that moves and turns with the generations. Whatever utopia we all built oh so long ago became an unbearable dystopia for millions of Americans.
They’ll have to deal with how their ideology infected so many corners of this country and turned us against each other, against our history, against ourselves. And maybe then they can escape the crazy and make a pitch for a brighter future.
But until then, if they want to keep up, they’ll have to clean house, deconstruct and destroy their utopia, and find their way back to sanity and reality. My guess is they won’t be doing that any time soon. As for the rest of us, to borrow their phrase, we’re not going back.
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