Keep on shrieking until November 6th! Please don't stop!
‘You Cannot Be Civil’
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton agree on the current state of the Democratic party.
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By Daniel Henninger
Oct. 10, 2018 6:39 p.m. ET
At a time when it’s said that anything is possible in American politics, the impossible just happened.
Hillary Clinton has aligned herself with Donald Trump’s view of the Democratic Party.
Mr. Trump has been using his political rallies to denounce “the radical Democrats” as “an angry mob.” On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton told CNN: “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.”
You cannot be civil. Behold the Trump sun and the Clinton moon in a moment of political eclipse.
It’s hard to pick out exactly when in the past month the Democrats shifted the national focus away from Mr. Trump and onto their own behavior. I’d say it was the Senate’s final vote Saturday on Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
Democrats had thrown everything at Judge Kavanaugh, and it was over. But not in the Senate gallery. On cue, literally, spectators started shrieking at the senators on the floor. Guards moved toward the chamber’s doors, and the vote stopped while the screamers were removed.
During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was Jeane Kirkpatrick, who in some ways was a template for Nikki Haley’s U.N. tenure as an unapologetic defender of America’s interests. At the Republicans’ 1984 national convention, Kirkpatrick delivered a speech memorable for one phrase - “the San Francisco Democrats.”
The idea behind “the San Francisco Democrats” has never died. It stands for a party of the unelectable left. That year, Reagan defeated Walter Mondale by 525 to 13 electoral votes.
Democrats will complain it is beyond chutzpah for Donald Trump to brand them as divisive or radical after he has spent his presidency polarizing the electorate with his rhetoric and Twitter account. Maybe, but that was then. Whatever else was at issue in the midterm elections, it has been overtaken by the Kavanaugh nomination, which transfixed the nation for weeks.
The Democrats were in OK shape through phase one of the Kavanaugh hearings, a sometimes intense back-and-forth about his judicial beliefs. But it was phase two - the Christine Blasey Ford weeks, brought forth by Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Democratic Party activists - that defined the battle lines for the November elections.
The hearings began as a familiar narrative - Republicans are hostile to women. But that spun out of control into broader issues of fundamental fairness and due process.
In conversations I’ve had recently with Democrats, once past the Kavanaugh arguments, most express a desire for more political civility. This is wishful thinking. The party has a problem: The San Francisco Democrats are back.
There are policy types on the left who would rather contest campaigns over health care and income disparities. But the Kavanaugh episode shows that the party is being taken over by what I would call the Code Pink Left.
The professional network of the Code Pink Left, typified by the George Soros-funded woman who trapped Sen. Jeff Flake in an elevator, has virtually no interest in substantive policy goals.
The Code Pink Left specializes in creating political story lines or “frames” - such as that conservatives are weak on sexual abuse - which it promotes with theatrical protests, distributes on social media, and depends on mainstream media for constant repetition. This is something familiar. It is called agitprop.
The goal is to make the broader electorate nervous and doubtful. It worked. Many voters are now nervous about the Democrats’ street-fighting men and women.
Every Republican from Donald Trump down to dogcatcher is running against the Democrats’ “angry mob” of Senate screamers and restaurant marauders.
What about the alt-right’s role in the new incivility? Good question. The answer is, they’re gone. The most visible face of conservatism through the Kavanaugh fight was... Sen. Chuck Grassley.
A valid criticism of Donald Trump is that he hasn’t expanded his base into a broader coalition. But his luck in attracting self-destructive opponents is astonishing.
The Democrats are contracting whatever coalition Barack Obama left them into a delimited activist resistance, whose “rage” is mostly a practiced act.
Democrats are becoming too taken with their own tactics. They’ve turned Twitter into basically a 24/7 open-mic night. Look how cool and clever we are. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker are mostly milking this niche audience for applause. It’s all so rote and theatrical.
Here’s Eric Holder at a campaign event in Georgia: “Michelle [Obama] always says, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ No. No. When they go low, we kick them.”
Maybe it’s historical determinism. The constant-protest left captured the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and frightened the country into Richard Nixon’s overwhelming win against George McGovern in 1972. Four-and-a-half decades later, another generation of Democratic politicians is answering the same old radical siren song, “You can’t be civil.”
For a time, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, governors from the American South, taught them that won’t win.
One thing never changes with the American left: It always goes too far.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-can...vil-1539211192
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