OPINION:
Liberals’ confrontation of Trump administration officials is working for Republicans. Their heightened belligerence is not only increasingly occurring, but been called for and applauded. The problem for Democrats is that while they desperately need the left, their tactics are making them look extreme by association and Republicans moderate by comparison.
That the Red Hen’s owner was madder than a wet hen, and shooed out White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, hatched headlines. It was hardly isolated. Since this administration’s beginning, such incidents have occurred. Now they are encouraged and highlighted, as the left declares open season on naming and shaming Trump administration officials.
The danger that escalating incidents of intended public humiliation could light a fuse for far worse, strangely seems to have escaped liberals. This despite the left having frequently used less provocative actions from the right to try and tie them to unrelated criminal actions.
What should not escape liberals is their victimization of their targets. A veritable cult of victimhood, they should be acutely aware that instead of defending victims, they are creating them.
The reason the left misses what is obvious to most people is how far they are from being most people. While their self-described elitist status is inaccurate — objectively, this is hardly America’s elite — they are small and insular. According to 2016’s exit polling, only 26 percent identified themselves as liberals. Conversely, that means 74 percent of Americans are not.
Those embracing extremist confrontation are smaller still. Remember: Trump won 10 percent of liberals in 2016. And probably even more reject such confrontation now. In all, well more than three-quarters of America rejects this extremist approach.
Yet while speaking for a decided minority, these extremists are offering President Trump and Republicans access to a potential political goldmine.
Among this overwhelming majority alienated by extremists’ confrontation tactics are conservatives. Mr. Trump lost 19 percent of them in 2016. Following the adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” nothing could bolster Mr. Trump among conservatives like having the ultra left targeting his administration.
Also in this majority are moderates, who made up 39 percent of 2016 voters. Mr. Trump lost 60 percent of them. Moderates, by definition, should be put-off by such belligerent confrontation’s calculated immoderation. Even if not driven to Mr. Trump by it, they could be driven away from Democrats.
While extremist confrontation offers invaluable opportunity to Mr. Trump with the electorate’s overwhelming majority, it splits Democrats. Establishment Democrats, rightly sensing the danger, must dissociate themselves from it, yet cannot alienate the left doing it. However liberals espousing this extremist confrontation are demanding Democrats endorse it.
The left’s animosity toward the Democratic establishment, which surfaced in its embrace of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 challenge, has only grown. Already promising a 2020 enhancement, 2018 has upped the stakes. The left’s animosity to establishment Democrats threatens their support for precisely those candidates the establishment is counting on — and has worked and spent heavily on to block the left’s challengers — to regain Congress.
The negative effects of extremist confrontation also threaten Democrats in dangerous areas. Further exciting ultra-liberal areas does not Democrats running in rural and suburban areas. Instead, it risks attracting votes where Democrats will already win, and inciting opposition where they hope to.
Mrs. Clinton showed the danger of such a reversal. She racked up big totals in blue states — particularly California — while Mr. Trump strategically placed his smaller numbers to maximum effect. The result: Popular vote victory, but large electoral college defeat. Today’s only difference is: Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 error was oversight; liberals’ 2018 one is premeditated.
The left’s current extremism compounds Mrs. Clinton’s error. If the establishmentarian Clinton was unacceptable to America, liberal extremism is even more so. Simply consider the last time America’s plea was for its politics to be more uncivil.
Uniting your enemy, splitting yourself, and doing both in the worst possible places is not strategy, but insanity. Only the most self-indulgent could not see this. However the left’s thorough self-absorption cannot, because they can see no one else.
Talking only to themselves and down to the rest of America, who should believe as they do. Failure to do so is not simply wrong, but immoral. If the goal is to convert others to your cause — and in a democracy it must be — a surer message for defeat could not be devised.
Republicans should be giving the left a megaphone with which to broadcast their extremist confrontation. Liberals are doing their work for them and doing it far better than Republicans could.
• J.T. Young served in the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget.
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