OPINION:
A version of this story appeared in the On Background newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive On Background delivered directly to your inbox each Friday.
Live by the race sword, die by the race sword.
The Democrat Party has been bankrupt of ideas for a long time. Former President Bill Clinton is the last Democrat politician on the national stage to even pretend to embrace popular, common-sense policy proposals aimed at improving the lives of actual voters. The mythical popularity of former President Barack Obama helped patch together an increasingly splintered confederation of special interest groups that make up the Democrat Party.
As a result, the party today pushes deeply unpopular and radically ideological agendas such as open borders, defunding the police, ninth-month abortion, open drug use and a weird gender ideology that actually defends genital mutilation of children — particularly little girls.
It is strange and creepy. Very few Americans support any of this. And if the media covered these issues and elections with a hint of honesty, Democrats would be finished as a party. President Biden would not be in the White House today except for the profound dishonesty of the political press.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, has suffered through more than a decade of introspection and infighting that began with the so-called “Tea Party” movement and resulted in the election of Donald Trump in 2016. As a result of that civil war and Mr. Trump’s complete takeover of the party, the Republican Party today is far more populist and embraces a platform of practical, popular solutions aimed at improving the lives of voters.
Top among those popular, practical solutions is sealing the border.
This is why Democrats have been forced to return to their long history of stoking racial hatred as a powerful political tool. It’s all they have left.
In the run-up to the 2020 elections, Democrats fanned the flames of the “Black Lives Matter” riots. Vice President Kamala Harris actually raised money on behalf of riot leaders to get rioters bailed out of prison so that they could return to looting and rioting in the streets.
Few Democrats on the national stage have more shamelessly stoked racial fears for partisan purposes than Joe Biden himself. During the 2012 election, he warned a gathering of black voters that Republicans would “put y’all back in chains” if they got elected.
He built his entire 2020 presidential campaign on the perpetual lie that Mr. Trump supported white supremacists who had come to Charlottesville, Virginia, to hijack protests against tearing down historical statues on city property. When Democrats tried smearing then-candidate Glenn Youngkin as a racist, they had to send paid Democrats to dress up as racists to attend a Youngkin rally — and got caught.
But the Democrat Party’s last Big Race Lie appears to be faltering. Increasingly, polling shows African American voters losing faith in Mr. Biden. Last spring, just 17% of African American voters expressed enthusiasm for Mr. Biden’s reelection, according to a poll conducted by the Washington Post.
As Mr. Biden’s inflation continues to gobble up paychecks, black unemployment stands at nearly twice the rate of the overall American population. The frustration is palpable.
The Biden Administration’s last alternative appears to be weaponizing the Department of Justice and allied prosecutors to go after their primary opponent, Mr. Trump. If you can’t beat them, jail them.
It was quite the spectacle last week watching Mr. Trump’s motorcade wind through the streets of Atlanta to be arrested at the jailhouse on charges that he had questioned the outcome of the 2020 election.
The streets were lined with African-American voters cheering Mr. Trump as he passed.
Whether they show up next year to vote for Mr. Trump remains to be seen. But as Mr. Trump spent years telling them: “What have you got to lose?”
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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