“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” Ronald Reagan famously said, “the Democratic Party left me.”
The Republican coalition that won 49-state landslides in 1972 and again in 1984 was as much a reflection of the Democrats as it was of Richard Nixon’s and Reagan’s GOP. In the 1960s, the hard left took over the Democratic Party...and ran it into the ground. They mocked Americans’ commitment to defeating communism in the Cold War while romanticizing socialist tyrants. They embraced draft dodgers and spat on American soldiers returning home from war. They supported violent rioters over the police and National Guardsman trying to protect their cities.
For decades, the Democratic Party has been turning their backs on working Americans – their values, their neighborhoods, their families – and emerging as the political home of the elite. They took over college campuses, government bureaucracies, public sector unions, the news and entertainment media, and – in recent years – corporate board rooms. These elites had no time for the “deplorables” “clinging to their guns and religion” in “flyover country.”
They saw themselves as hip and cool and “woke,” when they were really just rich and out of touch. They used their cultural power to masquerade their class’s remorseless pursuit of economic self-interest as “compassionate”:
-Open borders for cheap illegal immigrant labor;
-Abortion-on-demand to keep down, as liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, the “growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of;"
-Huge federal tax deductions for seven-figure mortgages and deep-blue state and local taxes;
-Locking poor families out of their neighborhoods to protect their gilded school districts;
-Locking competitors out of the higher education system to protect their monopolistic privilege over prestigious academic credentials;
-Stoking racial resentment to conceal the fact that it is big money progressive politics, not conservative policies, that trap poor minority communities on welfare and in substandard housing, lousy schools, and fatherless neighborhoods.
For far too long, the Republican Party was blind to this reality. Its well-heeled leaders thought the solution was to become more like the elitist Democrats, when all along what the American people wanted was a party that represented and fought for them.
It took a political outsider - Donald Trump – to finally understand. Ever since he first rode down that escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, Trump has been rebuilding the Republican Party into the new home of the hard-working “Forgotten Americans” who under his leadership are forgotten no more.
Trump understood what Washington didn’t. For all their rhetoric about democracy and equality, woke socialism is an elitist ideology. That’s why people suffering in socialist countries around the world want to emigrate here, and why Americans don’t pick up and leave for Venezuela or Cuba. That’s why working families by the millions abandoned woke asylums like New York and California to find better lives in growing states like Utah, South Carolina, and Texas.
They know that nonsense like defunding the police doesn’t help actual low-income communities. They need more police, and fewer affluent, white Antifa rioters. Lower income workers can’t work from home the way journalists and academics and bureaucrats can – that’s why the Left is fine with the COVID shutdowns despite the millions of lost jobs.
Americans want to restore order to our southern border and help legal immigrants assimilate, not change sports nicknames and pull down statues. They want access to better wages and education, not to hear lectures about tolerance from pundits and politicians who can barely contain their contempt for anyone who owns a gun, goes to church, or posts a dissenting opinion on social media.
Those are all the pet issues of affluent elites with privileged pedigrees in the Democrat Party donor class. Donald Trump, on the other hand, took on illegal immigration and the lawless rioters and the politicized public health officials. He protected working families’ jobs and communities, lifted their wages, and most of all, he showed them the respect they deserved for making this America what it is. Citizens from all races and walks of life gravitate to his unapologetic love for America with our independent and hard working culture. They cheer his courage to fight the elitist left attempts to censor and shame Americans who put more faith in God than in government, and more hope in American values than leftist lies.
President Trump is showing a new generation of Republicans how to build a successful, new majority coalition as the Party of Workers. That’s just one more reason why the Left hates him: because he is teaching conservatives how to beat them.
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