In the days since the election, I’ve read thousands of words of Democratic introspection. This was the election that repudiated cancel culture, campus protests and identity politics. This was the election that transformed the debate about everything from trans people’s participation in sports to the use of niche ideological words like “Latinx.”
According to this commentary, the lesson is clear: Democratic identity politics and the Democratic Party’s move to the left cost the party working-class voters and alienated the great American middle. If Democrats want to win again, they have to shed their ideological baggage, meet American voters where they are and stop scolding them when they’re puzzled by the ever-shifting ideological demands (and language policing) of the very online left.
I agree with much of this. Cancel culture (properly defined) is toxic. White Democrats, in particular, veered to the left of Black Democrats. There has been an intense amount of intolerance in far-left spaces, and not just on campuses. There is a need for a reckoning.
But let’s be very clear about the course of this election. One candidate leaned away from the extremism of her base, and she lost. The other candidate leaned into the worst excesses of his movement, and he won.
Kamala Harris spent her short campaign running away from the excesses of the left. She abandoned her most left-wing positions. She wasn’t using left-wing buzzwords, and rather than cancel ideological opposition, she tried to create the largest possible tent, stretching from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
Donald Trump’s campaign, by contrast, reveled in its most vicious language. It’s not necessary to recount every outrage, but we can’t forget that Trump and his allies spent days falsely accusing Haitian migrants of eating ducks and pets. My news colleagues accurately described Trump’s election-closing Madison Square Garden rally as a “carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.”
MAGA’s problems extend well beyond the campaign. In fact, every dysfunction you’ve seen on the far left has emerged on the far right, and the far right hasn’t been repudiated; it’s been empowered. Dissenting Americans should brace themselves for an assault on free speech, extreme intolerance and a vicious form of cancel culture that includes an avalanche of threats and intimidation.
And make no mistake, the most intolerant campus activists in America could take notes from MAGA. In the past eight years, we’ve seen MAGA threaten and intimidate election workers and school board members. We’ve seen MAGA engage in its own forms of cancel culture. It targets critics for termination and public humiliation, and when red America became Trumpified, it embarked on crackdown after crackdown on free speech.
In Florida, for example, Ron DeSantis’s administration enacted unconstitutional limitations on the free speech of social media companies, university professors and private corporations. Across the United States, activists initiated a wave of efforts to remove books from school libraries. So-called anti-critical-race-theory bills — which often seek to ban instruction in a set of purportedly divisive concepts regarding race — proliferated in red states, with some so poorly written that teachers would even quote Martin Luther King Jr. at their own risk.
