The Convergence of Several Issues Gives Republicans a Massive Opportunity to Permanently Cripple the Left
Will They Seize It?
As Napoleon Bonaparte famously said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” The Left, composed of Democrats, their media and entertainment sycophants, and wealthy liberal elites from Los Angeles to New York City, is in the midst of a policy meltdown of their own making. This meltdown is the convergence of several policies championed by the Left that are causing enormous economic harm to a broad swath of voters.
First, in cult-like fashion, the Left has promoted global warming as an immediate existential threat to the world and pushed zealously a Green New Deal that only the wealthy can absorb, including the Obamas who keep buying beachfront properties that should be underwater soon if the Left is to be believed. From replacing 220 million far more affordable and reliable internal combustion engines (ICE) with expensive and unreliable electric vehicles (EV) to moving to ban everything from gas burning stoves to ceiling fans, the Left is seeking to push enormous and unnecessary “transition costs” on Main Street America. Few voters outside of wealthy enclaves support this madness, yet more Blue states are moving to mandate EVs that are forcing automakers to recklessly bankrupt themselves to comply with California.
The strike launched on Friday by the United Auto Workers (UAW) against the Big Three domestic automakers is likely the last gasp of private sector Big Labor. That gasp may take decades to fully be expressed, but, make no mistake, squeezing more blood from a group of automakers already bleeding cash due to the Left’s mandates on EVs will cause the Big Three to be even less competitive than they already are with Honda, Toyota, and Tesla in America. Whatever deal is cut will result in a short-term gain that only accelerates the move of automaking to right-to-work states and job losses in unionized states—83% of EV factories are being built in right-to-work states. Every unionized job loss means one less UAW dues paying member who Big Labor robs to fund the very politicians pushing for their extermination via the Green New Deal. There is a reason Ohio and Michigan represent two of the last three states to have recovered the jobs lost since reaching a peak in private sector employment in March 2000 (West Virginia is the other one, which is dying because of the attack against coal).
Then, because the Left never met a problem it didn’t believe was solved by massive federal deficit spending and expanding entitlement programs to make as many Americans dependent on them as possible, the Left is printing money with reckless abandon and driving the national debt north of $33 trillion dollars. This largess is naturally driving inflation up on everyday items for Main Street America at the same time it is causing wages to stagnate or decline, which ends up causing most Americans to lose even more ground economically. It also is pushing interest rates on credit cards and loans to highs not seen in decades. As always, these skyrocketing interest rates crush the middle and lower classes far more than the upper class who aren’t as dependent on credit cards and loans.
Next, in what can only be described as an irrational unilateral disarmament in the face of a rising and actual existential threat from China, the Left is abandoning the massive natural resource advantage the United States possesses due to its large deposits of natural gas, oil, and coal. Rather than invest in technology to make the use of these resources as clean as possible—natural gas and nuclear already are mostly clean, the Left is working tirelessly to ban the exploration, drilling, production, and transit of these resources in favor of expensive and unreliable wind and solar energy. Unlike most other developed and developing countries, U.S. carbon emissions declined over the last fifteen years because of the increase in natural gas usage spurred by the technological innovations of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling.
It doesn’t matter that the footprint required for enough wind turbines and solar panels to fully replace natural gas, nuclear, oil, and coal would swallow up 100% of the land in several states and drive food prices even higher as those items displace farm and feed land. Nor does it matter to the Left that the environmental destruction and human carnage required to dig, process, ship, and use the precious metals needed for “green energy” batteries and to build the required electrical grid for “green energy” will do greater damage than staying with ICE automobiles and carbon-based energy sources. As long as the Left can virtue signal by driving their Teslas and live and work in LEED-approved structures, who cares what their policies do to folks in flyover country, Africa, Asia, and South America.
Another version of this was ironically coined by Marie-Antoinette during the French Revolution when she said, “Let them eat cake!” She lost her head. Literally.
Add to this already toxic policy mix the opening of our southern border to allow anyone who wants to illegally come to America to come and you place an enormous economic burden on middle and lower class Americans, as these illegal immigrants suppress wages even more. As New York City shows, they also require immense resources to house, feed, and care for, thereby placing large financial burdens on taxpayers already underwater. In many cases, illegal immigrants are getting more generous government support than Americans.
Regardless of whether these illegal immigrants commit crimes at the same or lower rate than Americans, the fact is that ANY crime they commit is a crime that would not have happened but for Joe Biden’s reckless border policies. Even just one American killed by an illegal immigrant is one too many. Of course, with these illegal immigrants comes a greater flow of fentanyl and human trafficking that leaves communities and vulnerable girls (and in some cases boys) ravaged with death and despair. One-year-old New Yorker Nicholas Feliz-Dominici is just the latest death that Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas are responsible for.
With big city district attorneys declining to prosecute many of the crimes committed against middle and lower class Americans stuck in their jurisdictions and the Left’s anti-police policies, many Americans are feeling unsafe and literally under attack in communities they’ve lived in their whole lives. From burnt out Minneapolis to human feces ridden San Francisco and all of the looted stores from coast-to-coast in between, the Left’s accountability-free agenda for criminals is destroying huge swaths of America and the lives of those unable to flee. Many of those victimized by the Left’s Monopoly-like get-out-of-jail card policy are minorities doing everything they can to keep their kids safe and their communities clean.
Lastly, on top of all of these disastrous policies, the Left continues to push a broad education policy aimed at severely restricting parental rights. This policy begins by opposing school choice in every form despite years of data showing that the public school system is producing generations of young adults with third grade reading and math skills. These kids, many from already tough environments, stand little chance of climbing the economic ladder, as America moves towards an economy in which higher reading, writing, and math skills are increasingly necessary. Though it has become a broken record since Al Gore and Bill Clinton sent their kids to uber-elite private schools in the 1980s and 1990s (as the Obamas did in the 2000s and 2010s), leaders from the Left, who fight school choice as if it was the Nazis during World War II, quietly send their kids to private schools as their poorer neighbors’ kids drown in the utter deficiencies of public schools. This one-two punch of being both victims of unpunished criminals and failing public schools rests largely on the shoulders of minorities.
The Left’s anti-parental rights policy then adopts a series of fringe and, frankly, abhorrent policies all aimed at pitting parents against their kids. From inserting woke ideology into the classrooms that already spends too little time on the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic to putting young girls at risk in bathrooms and on the sports pitches, the Left believes catering to transradicalism is more important than listening to the concerns of parents. In what I believe history will judge harshly, this catering includes hiding from parents their children’s mental health issues related to gender confusion and, worse, advocating to physically cut body parts off of kids and inject them with puberty blockers to stop their normal growth. Even Europeans are stepping back from this ledge, as the Left charges forward off the cliff with reckless abandon.
This litany of policy failures by the Left presents a unique opportunity Republicans should seize with both hands from top-to-bottom. They should develop a simple plan for Main Street America that all Republicans can run on in 2024, which highlights how the Left cares far more about virtue signaling and handing America’s future to the most left-wing and morally relativistic elements in our country than they do for the less-educated among us. In 2016, Donald Trump began the process of peeling working class and minority voters away from their long allegiance to the Left. Recent polling shows this movement away from the Left is accelerating. Republicans must stand up and loudly convince these voters they will aggressively fight for them on every front.
By bringing a small, but meaningful number of minority voters with less than college together with the white, working class voters already voting Republican, a strong governing coalition of what I previously called the “Bell Curve Electorate” can give Republicans a majority in both chambers of Congress, the presidency, and a majority of state legislatures and governors. With this governing majority, Republicans can finally drive a stake through the Left’s monstrous policies and allow them to renew America in a manner that creates economic opportunities for all Americans, protects them from criminals and the drug cartels, and strengthens their parental rights once and for all.
This opportunity might not come again. Will Republicans take it?