Democrats' Diminishing Brand

Donald Trump has record disapproval ratings for a president early in his first term. Congressional Democrats and mainstream media tell us so repeatedly, reporting little else but alleged collusion with Russians. Yet his congressional candidates keep winning special elections despite being vastly outspent.

They cannot understand it. Trump is their antithesis. He enrages both, fears neither, but voters like that. Do Congress and mainstream media not realize they have approval ratings lower than Trump’s?

Trump can be crude, egotistical. He bragged about grabbing women. He stretches truth to look good, yet voters accept him warts and all. They know a lot of guys just like him. Every corner bar has them. They can be tiresome but they’re harmless, and deep down most are nice guys. Tell them they’re full of sh** and they laugh, because they know they often are. They don’t take themselves too seriously, unlike hysterical Democrats and solemn talking heads who claim leaving the Paris climate change treaty will destroy the world and repealing Obamacare will kill thousands of Americans.

Voters detest Congress and loathe mainstream media. It’s the pomposity, the political correctness, the condescension to anyone who doesn’t think as they do. Voters don’t believe a man is a woman just because he says he is. They don’t want to call him “her” or her “him” as media do, and they don’t want to be forced to by government either. New York City has a civil statute requiring it. Last week, Canada passed a law making it a “hate crime” to refuse. And they don’t like their kids learning about transgenders in kindergarten.

Voters like borders around their country and they want them enforced. They don’t like being called bigots because they want American citizenship to mean something. They want people to work for a living if they’re able and they resent supporting deadbeats. Despite Democrat media denials, they know they’re paying for lots of them because some are neighbors and relatives. They know many illegal immigrants are on welfare and working under the table too. They know this pushes their wages down and their taxes up no matter what Democrats media claim.

When the majority of the FBI’s most wanted terrorist are Muslim, they know there’s a connection with Islam. They don’t like Democrat media calling them racist for saying it. They don’t understand why, but they detect some kind of solicitous interdependence between radical Islam and Democrat media. When someone shouts “Allahu Akbar!” while killing people here or in Europe, voters know immediately it’s a Muslim terrorist — even though media claim for days or weeks — or even years to be puzzled about motive.

They know it can be a sacrifice to raise children but it’s wrong to kill them in the womb. They know that’s what abortion does no matter what Democrat media claim. They don’t like being accused of a “war on women” for saying it either. They know Planned Parenthood is all about abortion (330,000 per year) and doing pap tests (380,000 a year) helps mask that. They don’t believe Democrat media insistence their tax money isn’t spent on abortions.

They know being called “non-college-educated-white-men” is a put down. They believe Hillary spoke for most Democrats and media when she called them “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.” They believe media think them deplorable, bitterly clinging to guns and religion as Barack Obama claimed. They’re not fooled when racism is called Affirmative Action. When blacks, Hispanics, and women are given preference, they know it’s white men who are sent to the back of the bus. It’s especially galling when after nearly three generations of “Affirmative Action,” they’re called “privileged” and told to “renounce” it.

They know women vastly outnumber men in colleges and universities, which are almost all controlled by the leftists who support Democrats and media. They know professors teach that dead white men are responsible for bad things in history. They see white men habitually depicted as dumb, oafish, nasty, or cruel by television and Hollywood. It’s almost a hate crime when any other group is thus portrayed, but not when it’s white men — the universal scapegoats of our age.

When Democrats and media hit Trump he hits back — and voters love that. Some Democrats like Ohio Representative Tim Ryan are starting to get it: “I think, in part, we try to slice the electorate up. And we try to say, ‘You’re black, you’re brown, you’re gay, you’re straight, you’re a woman, you’re a man.’ The reality of it is there’s no juice in that kind of campaign,” he said.

Will Democrat leaders listen? Will their media partners? Maybe they will if they keep losing.

Lacking Common Sense

The young woman looked nervous as she knocked on the window of my classroom door. “Excuse me, class,” I said as I stepped out to speak. She was a former student and substituting in the next classroom.

“A boy is throwing things at other students. He won’t stop, and he refuses to go to the principal’s office. Can you help me?”

“Sure,” I said. The boy wouldn’t make eye contact when I entered the room. Every other student did though, waiting to see what would happen.

“Bobby,” I said (not his real name). “Miss Fellows told you to go to the principal’s office and now I’m telling you.” He just sat there, still not making eye contact. “Bobby,” I repeated, “Maine law say that if a student is a danger to others and refuses to leave the classroom, the teacher can use the necessary force to remove him. Now I’m telling you again to go down to the principal’s office.”

That got no response either.

“I’m going to count to three. If you’re not moving at three, I’ll move you. One, two, th…”

He got up, went out the door, and headed for the stairs. I picked up the wall phone and called down to say Bobby was on his way. “Thank you,” said Miss Fellows.

“You’re welcome,” I said, then returned to my classroom and forgot about it.

The following Monday, Jim Underwood, the principal, came into my room during my free period. I liked Jim. He was a very effective administrator. “Tell me what happened with Bobby,” he said, because he’d been out of town when I dealt with the incident and had appointed another teacher as acting principal. I filled him in.

“If you had removed him,” Jim said, “I would not have backed you up.”

That surprised me. Like I said, Jim was a good principal, one of the best I ever worked with. “Jim,” I said. “That is state law. I have a copy in my briefcase.”

“I know it is,” he said, “but the courts are interpreting it differently now.”

“So, if I wasn’t to remove him, what was I supposed to do?”

“Call the police.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“Nope.”

“That’s crazy. I’m supposed to leave two classrooms full of students sitting on their hands and wait for the cops because of one disruptive student?”

“Yup. That’s what they’re telling us now.”

Bobby went to the office on his own because he knew I wasn’t bluffing. Calling the police would ruin half a day for about fifty students and at least two teachers. Clearly, things were getting much too complicated and I wondered how long I could continue in the teaching profession.

In July of last year a similar case came before our newest Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, when he was on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. A middle school boy in New Mexico had disrupted class by generating fake burps. He wouldn’t stop and was sent into the hall, but he kept opening the door to “let out a giggling belch” as the Daily Signal described it. Then:

“a school resource police officer placed the student under arrest ‘for interfering with the educational process.’ The 13-year-old then spent approximately one hour locked in a juvenile detention facility before he was released to the custody of his mother. He was never charged for his misbehavior.”

The boy’s mother filed suit claiming her son’s civil rights had been violated. This was an even less serious case than the one I dealt with because there was no danger from flying objects, yet the student had been arrested and incarcerated, however briefly. Ten years had passed and the teaching profession had continued its decline. A minor incident became a federal case and made it to a high court, which, in a 94-page ruling decided in the school’s favor. 

Gorsuch wrote only four pages in dissent. According to the Daily Signal again: “Gorsuch . . . explain[ed] that a reasonable police officer should have understood that arresting a ‘class clown for burping was going a step too far.’”

Indeed.

Gorsuch concluded that: “the statutory language on which the officer relied for the arrest in this case does not criminalize ‘noise[s] or diversion[s]’ that merely ‘disturb the peace or good order’ of individual classes.”

Referring to his colleagues on the 10th Circuit, he said: “Often enough the law can be ‘a ass—a idiot,’” quoting Charles Dickens, “and there is little we judges can do about it, for it is (or should be) emphatically our job to apply, not rewrite, the law enacted by the people’s representatives. In this particular case, I don’t believe the law happens to be quite as much of a ass as they do.”

Ouch.

Common sense is often a misnomer when applied to educational and judicial practice these days, and it’s refreshing to have a Supreme Court justice willing to point that out.

Leaning Windward

What the old man said about me was accurate. He’s been dead a while now and I’d forgotten about it, but his words have been popping back into my head a lot lately. “You have the character of the tiller,” he told me.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“You know when someone stretches way out over the windward gunnel when a sailboat leans too far? He’s trying to bring the mast upright lest the boat capsize.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve seen that.”

“That’s what you try to do in your writing.” 

He was a liberal, but more of a classical liberal than a leftist or a “progressive” as they call themselves today. He was willing to consider any idea on its merit and wasn’t dubious because it might be conservative. If he didn’t agree he would argue logically, not acrimoniously. Together we formed a political discussion group, an old-fashioned salon. For the first few years it was all men, many of them WWII vets and all somewhat left of center, I was too — then. I was the youngest member at a time when my own perspective started moving right. We met every two weeks in a library the old man had built in part of his barn.

The old man

During the ten or so years of my involvement I was still a Democrat, but the party’s movement left was accelerating. The old man saw me trying to counteract that in my writing even before I did. I had voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, but was dismayed by what he was doing and considered resigning from the Democrat Party, but the old man urged me to work from within. Our group started moving left also as new members came in and railed against Clinton’s impeachment. I began to skip meetings and eventually stopped attending altogether. Not long after, the group disbanded.

My movement right continued. I registered Republican but I was still feeling isolated as the education establishment was moving harder left along with all of New England, including Maine’s Republican Party. Some in the community began assuming that I was inculcating students with the same conservative views I expressed in my columns. I was “poisoning young minds,” they claimed. They pressured my district’s administrators, the school board, and Maine’s teacher licensing agency to discipline me and worse. My administrators knew their charges were baseless but had to respond to their complaints with an investigation. I was cleared, but being an out-of-the-closet conservative in public schools got increasingly difficult. Other leftists came after me too, which is the subject of a book I’m still working on.

Antifa

Nationwide now, acrimony dominates left-right debate and is increasing to dangerous levels — even to violent attacks by far-left "Antifa" goons on college campuses and in the streets. That’s bad enough, but what is perhaps worst of all is something The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol wrote last week:

For young Americans today, Donald Trump is the face of Republicanism and conservatism.

They don't like that face. And the danger, of course, is that they'll decide their judgment of Trump should carry over to the Republican party that nominated him and the conservative movement that mostly supports him. If he is indeed permitted to embody the party and the movement without challenge, the fortunes of both will be at the mercy of President Trump's own fortunes.

Trump’s fortunes are tanking. That scares me because I think Kristol’s analysis is on the mark. At the 41st annual convention of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists last weekend, I sat in the audience as Maureen Dowd delivered a devastatingly effective diatribe against Trump. The smart-ass Irish wit in her DNA was on full display. On Ms. Dowd’s bad side isn’t a safe place for anyone to be. Earlier that day, Manchester Union Leader publisher Joe McQuaid, a conservative, also displayed his disdain for Trump in just a couple of short remarks.

Trump and McQuaid

With majorities in the House and Senate, Republicans cannot unite behind Trump and, so far, Trump isn’t a good enough leader to bring them together. Has he got it in him to become one? I hope so, but I’m not optimistic. At this point, I’m afraid of how much more damage he’ll do to the conservative movement if he doesn’t.

In Bill Kristol, I see myself as the old man saw me thirty years ago. He’s been leaning far out over the gunnel too, trying to steer his party away from Trump. He has a bigger megaphone and might persuade more people to join him.

I’m a small-time columnist and he’s the founder and editor of a widely respected, national, conservative magazine. Can he prevent the conservative Republican ship of state from capsizing? Can he bring the mast up straight? I don't know. We’ll see.