By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--February 20, 2017
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Mr. Medford should be a natural ally for liberals trying to convince the country that Mr. Trump was a bad choice. But it is not working out that way. Every time Mr. Medford dips into the political debate — either with strangers on Facebook or friends in New York and Los Angeles — he comes away feeling battered by contempt and an attitude of moral superiority. “We’re backed into a corner,” said Mr. Medford, 46, whose business teaches people to be filmmakers. “There are at least some things about Trump I find to be defensible. But they are saying: ‘Agree with us 100 percent or you are morally bankrupt. You’re an idiot if you support any part of Trump.’ ” He added: “I didn’t choose a side. They put me on one.”
Protests and righteous indignation on social media and in Hollywood may seem to liberals to be about policy and persuasion. But moderate conservatives say they are having the opposite effect, chipping away at their middle ground and pushing them closer to Mr. Trump. “The name calling from the left is crazy,” said Bryce Youngquist, 34, who works in sales for a tech start-up in Mountain View, Calif., a liberal enclave where admitting you voted for Mr. Trump is a little like saying in the 1950s that you were gay. “They are complaining that Trump calls people names, but they turned into some mean people.” “They were making me want to support him more with how irrational they were being,” Mr. Youngquist said.The fun thing here is that Dems seem to think this is just a by-product of the Trump era. They haven't yet realized that the pattern of condescension is decades old. What they view as "anti-Trump" sentiment is, in reality, a borderline violent contempt that's been festering among Democrats since (and partly because of) the glory days of the 60's. They acted the same way toward Reagan and both Bushes. Nothing about their rage is new, it's just gotten louder and more desperate.
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Mrs. O’Connell is a registered Democrat. She voted for Bill Clinton twice. But she has drifted away from the party over what she said was a move from its middle-class economic roots toward identity politics. She remembers Mr. Clinton giving a speech about the dangers of illegal immigration. Mr. Trump was lambasted for offering some of the same ideas, she said. “The Democratic Party has changed so much that I don’t even recognize it anymore,” she said. “These people are destroying our democracy. They are scarier to me than these Islamic terrorists. I feel absolutely disgusted with them and their antics. It strengthens people’s resolve in wanting to support President Trump. It really does.”...And there it is. The left has been on a 50-year trajectory that ended, with complete predictability, in their status as a coastal party. Their pursuit of hardcore identity politics has driven away the working class, the fiscal conservatives, moderates, and even some sane social liberals. The "blue wall" crumbled because their own party spent decades proudly chipping away at its foundations. Now, clearly, some conservatives are worried they'll figure this out and course-correct. After all, if the Times is admitting it, can the party be far behind? Never fear. As I've argued before, they can acknowledge the problem all they like. They cannot, however, change their ways. They may realize how bad things have gotten. They might even figure out why it's happened. Unfortunately for them, the only real "fix" is to abandon some of their radical sacred cows - something they'll never do. The kind of change that could restore the thousands of positions they lost under Obama would alienate their base and decimate their fundraising. A move - a real move - to the center is absolutely anathema to the core of their party.
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