The reelection of Mitch McConnell to the Republican Senate leadership is but one more shot in the gut to a good portion of the American people.
That portion includes social conservatives, religious conservatives, old-fashioned patriots, moderates, and independents who cling to traditional notions of masculinity and fatherhood; working-class voters who’ve watched globalization and immigration kill jobs and reduce wages; cultural conservatives who loathe the spread of coarse pop drivel through every public space; parents who’ve had their kids come home from school with tales of CRT and LGBTQ shenanigans; parents of soldiers and soldiers themselves who recoiled at the withdrawal from Afghanistan and fear of what’s coming in Ukraine ... tens of millions of Americans, that is, who are increasingly asking what they’ve been doing with their votes.
For years, they’ve supported McConnell and other D.C. Republicans, and what have they gotten in return?
It may not be possible to explain to those pampered characters in the Capitol exactly what the groups I listed above have experienced in the past half-century at the hands of the opposition. How can a man who moves through the hours of the day ever surrounded by aides, assistants, drivers, bodyguards, schedulers, and colleagues understand the citizen who’s perpetually demoralized by what liberalism has done to his world? An individual besieged by lobbyists and donors who tell him how important he is, how crucial and needed and savvy, can hardly imagine the existence of a person who never hears anything like that said to him ever.
If your decision on an upcoming vote in committee can alter the flow of millions of dollars, you can’t much sympathize with a guy who got laid off because his plant closed and he doesn’t know what else to do.
The respective habitats are too far apart. D.C. is Versailles; the rest of America (outside the megacities and college towns) is the sticks. Distance makes the D.C. fat cats and bigwigs underestimate just how humiliated, disheartened, beaten down, bullied and intimidated, weakened and baffled and dismayed those ordinary and old-school Americans feel. McConnell doesn’t know what it’s like to have a son be told that his manhood is “toxic,” as happens to so many young men in college, and he never will. McConnell and John Cornyn and Lindsey Graham and Lisa Murkowski don’t live in small towns whose Main Street shops, once bustling, have been shuttered by the Walmart a mile off near the highway.
They can’t sympathize with the shock of the Bible-believer who takes her 5-year-old daughter to the public library for some browsing only to be enveloped by Pride banners and books from the moment they enter the lobby.
Daily life has become an onslaught against conservatives. Scroll through the TV channels at any hour of the day and raunchy “reality-acting,” moronic male humor, and tawdry images and music assail you nonstop. Every one of the Ten Commandments gets trashed now and then, America rarely earns praise, and the virtues of prudence, chastity, restraint, civility, good taste, and learning are more often a target than an ideal. The old Moynihan formula of “defining deviancy downward” has lost none of its relevance, as the Super Bowl halftime show and the Academy Awards eagerly prove.
People in elite ranks escape the trends in the usual ways—secluded residences, private schools, expensive vacation spots. ... They don’t take public transport, where one ever senses the approach of chaos. They don’t witness churches in their neighborhoods slide into empty hulks. Neighbors don’t lose their jobs and their houses. When Donald Trump spoke of “carnage” across America, our leaders right and left gazed at each other and muttered, “Huh?”
What they don’t get is that the deterioration of middle- and working-class life, along with the denunciation of those people’s beliefs and mores, isn’t a happenstance thing. Old-school Americans see it much differently. It isn’t an inevitable side of an economy of “creative destruction” or “disruptive innovation,” as free market types would have it, nor is it the advance of social justice, which requires that bigotry and backwardness be rooted out, as identity politicians would have it.
Old Schoolers experience it in darker and more personal terms: It’s a war on them, on their faith, their civics, their heritage, and their ways of life. Pride Month is an aggression, and so is a factory in the Midwest moving to Mexico, Black Lives Matter marches, and every broadcast on NPR. The carnage seems to them all too deliberate.
Liberalism declared war on all that our portion believes, on tradition and custom, on Western Civilization and American Exceptionalism, on God and apple pie, and that meant war on the believers, too. The steady march of liberalism looks like a political contest to Republican senators, but for Ordinary America, it comes off as an invasion of home territory.
Ordinary Americans go through their days under occupation by liberal functionaries who write for local newspapers and anchor news shows, run public school and college classrooms, and control the digital media everyone must use. They can’t escape liberal meddling in their lives; liberal surveillance tracks them and records them and tallies their spending, and will be used against them if the situation calls for it.
It’s exhausting. Their spirits are sapped, their stamina gone; hope is minuscule. Do the D.C.-ers realize how defeated their constituents feel? Do they know that the people regard them as having betrayed the ones they were supposed to represent? The Republican Party has let them down again and again, and voters have stayed true, grumbling all the way into the voting booth and pulling the lever, nevertheless, to the right. The next time, I’m not so sure.
In 2024, the people may have passed their breaking point, which is what leftists have aimed for all along.
