What's Tony Thinking

The Other Side of the Coin

On Thursday I wrote on the critical problem at the heart of Trumpism. Trump and MAGA propagate a distorted, alternate reality which rests on lies, half-truths and “bully lies.” A “bully lie,” (I can’t remember who gave us this apt description) is when the bully on the playground takes your hat and dances around with it on his head. When you say, “Give it back,” he says, “I didn’t take your hat,” and laughs, as do his pack of followers. The “bully lie” is an obvious lie that says, “I know I am lying, what are you gonna do about it!”

All that was on display on Tuesday night when Trump addressed the joint session of Congress. But something else was also on display that night, the hapless opposition party, the Democrats. This, to me, is as serious a concern as Trump. We need the Democrats to be a strong, credible and savvy opposition. (Just this week I wrote to all the Dem’s in our congressional delegation urging them to make job one getting strong candidates who can win in the 2026 election.) But in order to become a credible opposition, the Democrats need to take a hard look in the mirror and soon.

Along this line, I have found that when I am critical of the Democrats or of the liberal/ progressive left, people conclude that, well, you must be pro-Trump. Hardly. But I guess we’ve become so accustomed to “choosing sides” that if you criticize their side that must mean you are all in on the other one. Nooooo!

In his immediate post-election column, last November, David Brooks wrote, “There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again.” (emphasis added) And, sure enough, that has been the response of many Dem’s and people on the left, e.g. “Harris lost because of racism and misogyny.”

Today in her regular column at the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan, extended this analysis while offering some urgent advice to the Dem’s. Why? Because America really needs a serious and effective opposition party. And right now we don’t have it. While I don’t agree with everything Noonan said, the main points are on target.

Observing the Dem’s furious faces on Tuesday night, she said it looked like, “the green room in hell.” Noonan continues, “All the while Trump romped. Three thoughts. One, these are not serious people. Two, their job was to show they were an alternative to Mr. Trump, and instead they showed why he won (waving silly signs and dressing in coded colors). Third, and most important, they will continue to lose for a long time. I hadn’t know that until Tuesday.”

Note the echo of Brooks’s earlier ironic comment, “Apparently these are people who love losing and want to do it again and again and again.” The Democrats, and many of the left-leaning, seem to be able to manage but one thought  to which they hold tenaciously. That idee fixe is, “Trump is awful, terrible, and really disgusting. Everything he does is wrong, evil and outrageous. And we can’t say this too often or with too much venom or self-righteousness.”

Long ago a wise person told me people care a lot less about what you’re against than they do about what you are for.

Noonan continues: “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.”

While there must be a few working class Democrats left, I don’t really know any. Our District 3 Congresswoman, Marie Glusenkamp Perez, comes closest (she and her husband own an auto repair shop). MGP makes it a priority to stay connected to that constituency. Another who does is Ruben Gallego of Arizona. But most of left-liberals I know are a long ways from working class or anything that looks like economic or status insecurity. Most of us are pretty well cushioned. We are protected from the realities of life that the now pro-Trump working class and non-college educated, who often live in regions of desperate decline, have been facing for decades.

The Democrats, and much of my own political and economic class, seem unable to consider their own part in “the evils we deplore,” to quote an old hymn. Are we so fixated on Trump’s malice because it allows us to feel good about ourselves, i.e. “We are the right-thinking, the superior Americans? Thank God, we’re not like ‘them.'”

The Democrats and the progressives seem unable to take a hard look at the fact that they have lost meaningful connection with much of the American public outside our own, generally affluent, enclaves and bubbles. That’s is a very big problem because America needs a vigorous and confident opposition to Trump, one that is capable of fresh thinking and of questioning of its own dogmas and orthodoxy.