What's with the Democrats, cont'd.

Obsession with transgenderism and race-huckstering, served up with a heaping portion of superiority and condescension, isn't going to win many elections.

A couple of days ago, inspired by the Democrats’ pouty, childish performance at Trump’s speech, I asked what’s going on with them. This followed three earlier posts in which I asked what’s going on with Trump, what with his reckless leniency toward criminal defendants, empty ultimatums to Hamas, and worse-than-shabby treatment of Ukraine. Today I want to return to looking at the Democrats with the help of Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal. Ms. Noonan often drives me nuts with her frequent “why-can’t-we-all-get-along” view of the world, but she’s not without insight, either. She also has a gift for language, so swaths of her own look at the Dems are worth repeating.

Democrats looked like fools Tuesday night. We don’t need to dwell on how they sat grim-faced, seething, or walked out while the president spoke. One stood, yelled, brandished his cane and was removed by the sergeant at arms. Others held up little paddles bearing little insults. Some wore special color-coded outfits.

Specifically, they were pink outfits, which couldn’t help bringing to mind the “Pussyhat” Women’s March on Washington in January 2017, in which hundreds of anti-Trump protesters paraded around in knitted, neon-pink vagina hats.

They did this voluntarily and in public. I wish I were making this up but I’m not.

Almost all refused to show normal warmth or engagement. From my notes, as the camera turned and dwelled on the furious faces: “They look like the green room in hell.”

As someone who has been in the green room now and again, I would give good money to have written that line.

Three thoughts. One, these aren’t serious people. Two, their job was to show they are an alternative to Mr. Trump, and instead they showed why he won. Third and most important, they will continue to lose for a long time. I hadn’t known that until Tuesday.

I have some doubts about Ms. Noonan’s prediction about the Democrats losing well into the future. Three generations of our electorate has been smothered with dumbed-down education, chock full of lower standards and, of late, noxious, anti-American indoctrination. For those same three generations, we have seen induced reliance on a bloated, welfare state government — reliance that feels more and more like mass addiction (see, e.g., the furious protests against any savings DOGE tries to implement). Trump’s unforced errors can rain down at any moment. Lastly, the Democrats still own the universities, the media and the culture. Among all those things, I think they have a decently good chance of making a comeback, both in 2026 and 2028.

Still, for all that, Ms. Noonan’s most important observation is spot-on: “…their job was to show they are an alternative to Mr. Trump, and instead they showed why he won.”

What I saw Tuesday night is that the Democratic Party in 2025, as evinced by its leaders on Capitol Hill, is too proud and stupid to change. I saw 1981. The Reagan era had begun, the Democrats had taken quite a drubbing—a landslide loss by a sitting Democratic president, and the loss of the Senate majority they had held since 1955. It was the kind of blow that reorders the mind: Democratic policies weren’t popular!…But the blow didn’t reorder their minds. They kept doing the same thing, as if they had a secret death wish. They lost in another landslide in 1984, and again in ’88. Finally, as 1992 approached, they realized: We need to readjust our policy stands to be more in line with those of the American people. They did, and Bill Clinton squeaked in.

At the risk of seeming crude, the skirt-chasing Bill Clinton could, amazingly, serve as a useful model for today’s Democrats. At least he was normal, more or less. The Democrats’ current table-pounding, snarling embrace of sexual abnormality must strike him as extremely weird — just as it strikes the great majority of us. He might not be able to say so, but the rest of us (still) can.

And no, before the howling begins, this is not an invitation to intolerance. Gay and trans people have the same rights to live in peace and safety that anyone else does. They should be treated with decency and respect, just as anyone else is. They should have the same opportunities to make the most of their lives. But neither they nor any other minority has the right, in a democratic country, to make the rules everyone else has to live by, nor do they have the right to foist off on the culture the idea that there is no identifiable or meaningful difference between men and women — an idea as corrosive as it is preposterous.

As long as Trump knows this and the Democrats don’t, there is only so far they’ll be able to go, all his confounding errors, erratic behavior and — let’s admit it — occasional dishonesty notwithstanding.

The Democrats’ obsession with Woke ideas has cost them and will continue to cost them, not just because the ideas are false and hurtful, but because so arrogantly pushing them infects their public persona in ways they can no longer hide (and, for what seems to me to be an increasing number of them, have no great desire to hide). Ms. Noonan nailed this point from a slightly different perspective in her observations about Tuesday night:

In politics, there is bringing the love and bringing the hate. When the 13-year-old boy who had brain cancer and has always wanted to be a cop is appointed as an honorary Secret Service agent, laminated ID and all, and the child, surprised by the gesture, hugs the normally taciturn head of the Secret Service, the only thing to do, because you are human, is cheer that child. And when the president honors a young man whose late father, a veteran and policeman, had inspired his wish to serve, and dreams of attending West Point, and the president says that he has some sway in the admissions office and young man you are going to West Point—I not only got choked up when it happened I’m choked up as I write.

That moment is “the love.” It was showing love for regular Americans. To cheer them is to cheer us. It shows admiration for and affiliation with normal people who try, get through, endure and hold on to good hopes.

The Democrats brought the hate. They sat stone-faced, joyless and loveless. They don’t show love for Americans anymore. They look down on them, feel distance from them, instruct them, remind them to feel bad that they’re surrounded by injustice because, well, they’re unjust.

There’s the nub of it. I don’t think the Democrats were so uniformly sullen because Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer scripted it that way. Instead, it’s how they genuinely feel. They have no use for America’s history, its culture, its traditional values, or, for the most part, its people. To their credit — after a fashion — they couldn’t bring themselves to fake it otherwise.

Democrats have to understand where they are. They have completely lost their reputation as the party of the workingman. With their bad governance of the major cities and their airy, abstract obsessions with identity politics and gender ideology, they have driven away the working class, for whom life isn’t airy or abstract. Democrats must stop listening to the left of the left of their party. It tugs them too far away from the vast majority of Americans. They have been radical on the border, on crime, on boys in the girls’ locker room. They should take those issues off the table by admitting they got them wrong.

My own view is less optimistic. The Democrats aren’t going to take their radical views off the table because they were never merely “on the table” to begin with. The question is not, as Ms. Noonan says, where they are; it’s who they are. And as long as this is who they are, the rest of us have no choice.