Republicans may have their leadership woes, but Democrats have Hillary Clinton — even now.
She holds no office, but the former first lady, senator, secretary of state, and presidential nominee still holds court on CNN, where she reminds millions of Americans why they vote Republican.
Clinton still sees the other side as deplorables.
“Maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members,” she cracked to Christiane Amanpour on Thursday.
Non-Democrats know that for all Clinton’s attempts to draw a distinction between Trump supporters and “sane” Republicans, she and her confreres have a low regard for anyone who doesn’t share their progressive politics.
In 2008, Barack Obama characterized voters in small-town Pennsylvania who “cling to guns or religion” as “bitter” and harboring “antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Obama was charming enough to get away with it. Clinton wasn’t — and Pennsylvania let her know it in 2016.
Nothing has changed since The Washington Post caricatured conservative Christians in 1993 as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.”
Tellingly, a year later those voters came out in droves to help end four decades of Democratic dominance in the US House of Representatives.
Bill Clinton was president in 1994, but his wife didn’t learn the lesson.
Self-interest, if nothing else, ought to give progressives an education in taking other people’s beliefs and concerns seriously.
The “bitter clingers” saw firsthand what was happening in their towns as the jobs left while increasing numbers of immigrants arrived.
They also knew what was happening to their culture as trust evaporated along with religious commitments and stable employment.
Their pain was a warning of the opioid epidemic to come.
In an earlier era, liberals saw themselves as champions of the everyman.
Now they shun populism — and are appalled when it finds a new home in the GOP.
The likes of Hillary Clinton respond not by wondering how they can win back the voters they’ve lost but by demonizing them and dismissing any alternative to the elite liberal point of view.
If your opponents are cultists or a “basket of deplorables,” you don’t have to take them or their ideas seriously.
All they need is therapeutic help to overcome their authoritarian personalities — “deprogramming.”
And cultists can’t be trusted to choose their own sources of news, can they? They have to be told what constitutes “disinformation” and kept away from it.
Anyone who knows anything about cults would recognize that liberals’ attempts to manage and control the flow of information and limit its sources are, in fact, typical of what happens in actual cults.
Hillary Clinton, know thyself.
If Clinton and Obama, or for that matter CNN and The Washington Post, are so concerned about the rise of extremism in American politics, they should pause to examine their thinking about their fellow Americans.
They don’t have to agree with or even like the deplorable.
But they have to debate them and allow their ideas to be debated, and they have to recognize the good reasons why populism is rising.
But that kind of introspection is hard for the self-righteous, even if there’s an excellent chance that 2024 will turn out like 1994 and 2016 if liberals don’t fix their attitude.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
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