The contempt party

The central problem of the Republican Party is that too many Republicans remain loyal to a man most Americans dislike, many intensely so.

The central problem of the Democratic Party is that too many Democrats don’t much like America or their fellow Americans, and it increasingly shows.

With respect to the latter, it seems that with each election cycle Democrats go more out of their way to tell us how racist, sexist and homophobic we are, while still asking for our votes.

We despise you because you are bigots, so vote for us to prove you’re not; a novel campaign strategy indeed.

We have long been accustomed to candidates telling us how terrible their opponents are, but now Democrats insult the people who vote for those opponents too, culminating in Joe Biden labeling the more than 74 million who supported Donald Trump in 2020 (“MAGA Republicans”) as “semi-fascists.”

This tendency to express contempt for anyone who isn’t already firmly within the Democratic camp, even to depict them as enemies of the republic, runs counter to traditional campaign strategy (which includes attracting as many as possible from their side to yours), but almost certainly reflects the increasing inability of Democrats, smug inside their impenetrable bubble, to keep their hostile feelings for so much of the nation they want to govern from escaping into the open.

It also, ironically, comes at a time when Republicans are seeking to expand, apparently with some success, their outreach to groups (Blacks, Hispanics) historically aligned with and crucial to the Democrats.

What has been called the “politics of contempt” is now seeping into state-level races as well, to wit, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul recently telling Trump supporters to “just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong.” They need to “get out of town” because they “don’t represent our values” and “are not New Yorkers” (mailing addresses notwithstanding).

A glance at Census Bureau data suggests that plenty of New Yorkers were leaving even before Hochul encouraged it, as the state lost nearly 320,000 residents between July 2020 and July 2021 (while Florida gained some 211,000).

Based on Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles records, Florida also appears to be an especially favored New Yorker destination; in August of this year alone, nearly 6,000 switched their driver’s licenses from New York to the Sunshine State, a record for any single month.

In addition to rather presumptuously deciding which of her constituents are real New Yorkers and which are not, and who should stay and who should go, Hochul ignored the diversity of her own state, wherein Trump won nearly twice as many counties as Biden — take away New York City and immediate environs and the rest of New York wouldn’t look politically much different than Indiana or Oklahoma (upstate being quite conservative terrain).

Meanwhile, in Florida, the Harold Stassen of that state’s politics and Democratic nominee for governor, Charlie Crist, adopted a variation of the Hochul approach when he told supporters of Gov. Ron DeSantis that he didn’t want their votes because they had “hate in their hearts.”

For Hochul, people with the wrong political values should hit the road; for Crist, those who support his opponent are as morally deficient as to be unworthy of supporting him.

If nothing else, Hochul’s rhetoric contains within it a kernel of electoral logic, in the sense that if all the Republicans left, her party would win all the elections and acquire a status in New York roughly akin to that once enjoyed by the Communist Party in the Soviet Union (where those holding power were quite effective at dealing with political disagreement and enforcing an official ideology; i.e. “our values” indeed).

Crist’s strategy, though, is more confounding. Since all of the available polling tells us that DeSantis has favorable ratings well above 50% in Florida, it suggests a disavowal of majority support that cedes the election before it actually takes place (unless, that is, Crist believes telling people they have hate in their hearts will make them like him more; a rather implausible scenario but one still consistent with the “you’re awful, vote for us” stratagem).

Thus, we have the governor of New York telling New Yorkers who disagree with her politics to not let the door hit them on their way out. And in Florida a Democrat who wants to be governor (again) essentially saying that he doesn’t want the votes of people who are morally inferior to himself (that he is trailing by double digits in the polls suggests that many have taken his advice to their hateful hearts).

Political parties usually seek to attract as many votes as possible in order to win as many elections as possible, but the Democrats might be morphing into something else, an increasingly exclusive club of mutual admiration and moral superiority.

Just as the only democratic elections are the ones Democrats win and the only legitimate institutions the ones that do what Democrats want, the only decent people are the ones who vote Democrat.

So do you have what it takes to be one of the few and the proud, to be a Democrat?