While liberal America is justifiably triumphant about Tuesday night’s election results, a lot of professionals are quietly worried about extremism infecting the party. Certainly, electing a mayor of New York who’s an unfortunate hellbroth of communism, Islamism, and “defund the police,” is not someone you want defining your party nationally.
And then there’s the problem of Jay Jones, the Attorney General-elect of Virginia, who won handily despite being caught sending text messages wishing death on a Republican colleagues’ kids — and this wasn’t some flippant message. After he did this, he called up his colleague on the phone to further argue his point about needing to watch kids die in order to make political progress. He also appears to have deceived the state and faked community service hours as part of a punishment for being caught driving 116 mph.
Despite this, no notable national Democrat called for Jones to withdraw from the race. Virginia gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger refused withdraw her endorsement of Jones, and Virginia Senator and former vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine also continued to support him.
Further, Northern Virginia, where the bulk of the state’s votes are, is comprised of the Washington, D.C. suburbs. It’s perhaps the most politically attuned area of the country, so it’s nearly impossible to make the case that voters were somehow unaware of Jones’ conduct. Jones was also running against a moderate incumbent Hispanic Republican whose tenure in office was scandal free, so voters really had no excuse to justify voting for Jones.
I live in Northern Virginia, and much to my own discomfort, there’s no way to get around the fact Jones owes his victory to a bunch of my liberal neighbors deciding in the middle of a government shutdown triggered by congressional Democrats that they’re fine with wishing death on children if it helps protect the cushy federal jobs and lucrative government contracts that make Northern Virginia one the wealthiest areas of the country.
So how did we get here? Well, the professional political class has fallen back on the obvious, all-purpose explanation, because forever and always the problem is Donald Trump. Or so says Tré Easton of the Searchlight Institute:
I don’t think VA Dems should seek Jay Jones’s resignation. Voters were fully aware of the facts and elected him. I don’t think you’re about to see a bunch of Dems doing and saying stupid sh-t because they can. I DO think, that thanks to Trump, the bar for disqualifying behavior is now in hell.
With due respect, Easton is simply wrong on one point. Everywhere you look, you see Democrats doing and saying stupid stuff just because they’re angry and feel empowered to do so, and to some extent they are being rewarded for being splenetic and extreme. For instance, meet the brand new mayor of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho who thinks “Christian conservatives are mindless, cult-member morons. They are white, racist supremacists. They can f–k themselves and go to hell.” And I assure you that if you want to go poking around, this guy and his sentiments are not unique.
But I don’t want to beat up too much on Easton, because the Searchlight Institute, founded by Adam Jentleson, a former aide Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, is ostensibly a moderating force pushing back on this nonsense. According to Searchlight’s mission statement, they want to build a “supermajority” around liberal ideas because at the present moment’s liberalism is too insular: “Instead of building new coalitions and ushering in a realignment, we built a system that enforces purity and shrinks our tent.” Per the Idaho example above, I presume Searchlight understands that if they want Democrats to make inroads into conservative electorates, you can’t be electing Democrats at the local level in places such as Idaho who are saying things that make them instantly unpalatable to the broader state electorate.
If Searchlight is serious about this mission, they need to recognize that this is a problem intrinsic to the Democrat Party and deal with that directly. To the extent that this extremism is said to be a reaction to Donald Trump, this is the result of an elaborate mythology that is often repeated but doesn’t align with basic facts.
To start, Donald Trump hasn’t meaningfully radicalized the Republican electorate, much less made them overtly hostile to Democrats the same way that Democrats now speak with poisonous contempt about their fellow citizens who vote differently. And the idea Trump is responsible for the fact “the bar for disqualifying behavior is now in hell” is simply not true.
Last year, it was revealed that North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson had said a bunch of weird sex and race stuff on dodgy internet forums years before he entered public life. It was ugly stuff, but certainly less disqualifying than being a current member of the Virginia legislature and wishing death on your colleague’s children. The result in North Carolina was that Robinson ran 11 points behind Trump, who won the state in the presidential election, and lost his election by 14 points. A significant portion of the Republican electorate simply refused to vote for Robinson.
To cite another Trump era example, there was the infamous 2017 Roy Moore Senate race in Alabama. Moore had a history of controversy to begin with, and after securing the Republican nomination for the state’s open Senate seat, the Washington Post published a story detailing how Moore had allegedly pursued relationships with teenage girls in his 30s and that there were allegations of sexual assault. In spite of Trump endorsing Moore, heavily Republican Alabama, where it’s common for Republicans to win statewide by 10 or more points, elected Democrat Doug Jones to the Senate.
Now you could lament the level of partisanship that still exists when a candidate is engaged in egregious behavior, but it’s simply not true that the bar for disqualifying behavior is in hell, at least as far as Republican electorates are concerned.
The obvious retort at this point from Democrats is, “Ok, fine but how do you explain that Republicans repeatedly voted for someone as manifestly unqualified and immoral as Donald Trump!”
And to that I would tell earnest Democrats, that I am once again begging them to honestly evaluate Donald Trump relative to other Democrat candidates. While initially it may have seemed shocking that Trump was involved in unseemly petty scams such as Trump University and caught on tape talking about grabbing women by their nether regions, Democrats were never honest about the fact that their candidate Hillary Clinton had decades of public scandals that were in many respects far more troubling than anything Trump had been mixed up in, effectively blunting any outrage that might have otherwise stirred the electorate.
After spending decades aggressively defending her husband’s legendary infidelity, which involved gross behavior such as basically using state troopers as pimps, unwantedly exposing himself to women, and sexually exploiting White House interns and lying about it — why would you expect the voting public to be upset by a thrice-married playboy’s behavior, and think that Hillary Clinton has any moral authority to portray Trump as some misogynist sex-fiend?
Similar gross behavior had been aggressively defended, excused, and normalized by the Democrat Party and the media many years before Trump emerged on the political scene. And it all was done very transparently to justify the wielding of naked power. Recall in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal, a Time magazine writer even offered to sexually service Bill Clinton to protect abortion rights. And if you’re wondering why conservatives have never bought the accusations that Clarence Thomas was a sex pest, it might have something to do with the fact that Thomas’ accuser, Anita Hill, just a few years after testifying against Thomas, went on Meet The Press at the height of Bill Clinton’s sex scandal, defended him, and completely reversed herself on the notion that being sexually inappropriate in the workplace was disqualifying for high office.
As for the notion that Trump was involved in petty scams and shady business deals, once again, he was running against Hillary Clinton who had graduated from obviously corrupt land deals back in Arkansas to starting the Clinton Foundation, which was little more than a nine-figure shakedown operation designed to further Hillary’s ambitions. Trump University, his various bankruptcies, and iffy real estate deals just didn’t seem to be troubling alongside the Clintons’ blatant corruption.
And let’s not pretend that Saint Obama was above engaging in some very naked graft for his own personal benefit, hosting fundraisers for mobbed-up bankers, choosing to align with antisemites over his own girlfriend, and palling around with violent domestic terrorists to launch his political career. And then there’s the fact that after years of investigating and attacking Trump over false accusations, the entire establishment once again lied through their teeth about Joe Biden being directly involved in foreign corruption with his crackhead son, who was exploiting his dad’s position to get millions from Moscow politicians and strike lucrative deals with communist China.
If you want to go further back than the last few presidential elections, remember that Democrats never distanced themselves from Ted Kennedy, whose horrific behavior continued well after killing a woman in Chappaquiddick. When Obama was elected, there was still a former Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan serving as a Senate Democrat. Despite Robert Byrd’s reported change of heart on matters of race, something tells me this would have not been tolerated if an elected Republican had this skeleton in his closet.
You can certainly argue Trump is immoral and corrupt. But there is simply no argument that before or after Trump, Democrats ever cared about immorality and corruption in their own ranks enough to be shocked by anything Donald Trump ever did, much less that they hold themselves to a higher standard.
I am more sympathetic to the idea that Trump might be responsible for coarsening the debate, but even then, it seems to me that wishing death on kids and calling everyone you disagree with racist — which has been fairly commonplace Democrat rhetoric for several years now — represent a significant escalation over and above Trump’s insults and name calling, which, while perhaps not always a justifiable excuse for being mean, are often tempered with obvious humor.
Finally, I would note that the election of Jay Jones came less than two months after the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, which is part of a larger rise in left-wing violence. The American right certainly has its own issues, but it is at least debating these problems. Right now a debate about how to handle antisemitism is consuming conservative intelligentsia, a debate that is increasingly settled in the Democrat Party in favor of being pro-terror groups such as Hamas.
I doubt I agree with the Searchlight Institute on much in terms of policy, but for the sake of the country, I generally share their goal of dragging the Democrat Party back to center. But in order to do that, you need to be realistic about the party’s problems and acknowledge that Donald Trump, as he exists in reality, is not the reason Democrats are increasingly accepting of extremism and violence.
There is a concerted effort on the left to portray Trump, who has if anything made the Republican Party more liberal, as more extreme than he is and turn him into a mythic fascist villain to justify dark desires of inflicting literal pain on the political opposition. And whatever problems Republicans have with terminally online extremism in their own coalition, so far there’s little evidence these problems have spilled into the broader electorate the way they have with Democrats.
