Donald Trump has frequently behaved badly. Yet, he defeated Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, because Harris’s supporters — both inside and outside the Biden administration — behaved badly and were intolerant toward centrists and swing voters, driving them away. The Democratic base — the people who get appointed to the judiciary and powerful bureaucratic agencies by Democratic presidents — hate not just conservatives, but also centrists who are not woke and disagree with left-wing ideology. On web sites favored by Democrats such as Bluesky, Biden supporters and Never Trumpers rant about how much they hate the “reactionary center” and the “center white-wing,” slurs they use to describe centrists who oppose woke restrictions on speech; woke attacks on merit; and woke demands to give sex changes to minors without proper assessment. Many of the “reactionary centrists” they denounce held their nose and voted for Joe Biden, such as Jesse Singal and Steven Pinker (who are strong supporters of free speech and the rule of law), but the Democratic base hates them anyway.
Confronted with such ideological closed-mindedness from Harris supporters, some centrists voted for Harris nonetheless, but other centrists saw the intolerance toward them and voted for Trump to keep intolerant Harris supporters from being appointed to the judiciary and federal agencies that can harass businesses and schools for not being woke, such as the NLRB, the CFPB, the EEOC, and the Office for Civil Rights. As a Harris-supporting academic lamented on Bluesky, the Democrats lost because people associated the Democratic Party with “the most radical, annoying” people “on the internet,” so “voting Republican” was “a vote against them.” But he himself was intolerant and drove people away, such as supporting the firing of a centrist high-tech employee for expressing views about affirmative action and statistical gender disparities that were echoed in centrist and conservative federal appeals court decisions like this one and this one.
The intolerance of the Democratic base has real world consequences for centrists and conservatives who are censored by leftists with the backing of left-wing judges: “Once appointed to the bench, such radical, annoying people back campus censorship aimed at shutting up normal people and conservative and non-woke faculty and students. As Park MacDougald points out, ‘The Biden administration governed by using Biden as a moderate symbolic figurehead while handing the reins of power to left-wing activists in the bureaucracy & NGO sphere.'” 65% of Americans — including most centrists — believe there are only two genders, yet a progressive federal appeals court ruled that a T-shirt saying “There Are Only Two Genders” could be banned from a school. A progressive judge ruled that two fathers could be banned from school athletic events for wearing pink wristbands opposing biological males in girls’ sports, even though 75% of Americans, and most centrists, agree with the fathers’ position. Under Biden, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) persecuted a loan company, which it accused “of violating the Equal Credit Opportunity Act — which prohibits lenders from discriminating against applicants — by making a handful of statements on a radio show and podcast about crime in Chicago.”
Harris supporters regularly claim Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, but their behavior shows they don’t believe this, at all. If they did, they would build coalitions with anti-Trump centrists to defeat Trump, even centrists who are not woke. When people face a big threat, they ally with even former enemies against the threat, the way America and the United Kingdom allied with Communist Russia in World War II against the threat of Nazi Germany, even though Communist Russia was run by a totalitarian regime that had killed millions of people and had earlier collaborated with Hitler’s Germany in invading Poland.
But Harris supporters have always refused to do that, because they are confident they will eventually win even without the support of non-woke centrists, and they know free elections will be held in the future, contrary to their claims that Trump is a would-be dictator. “The Democrats view Trump’s unpopular policies as an OPPORTUNITY to gain seats in 2026. They don’t view him as a THREAT to democracy (if they did, they would behave totally differently, & drop their left-wing stances to appeal to the center. But they feel no need to, so they haven’t moderated).” That was the observation of a person responding to one of the lefty Bluesky users who frequently rants about the evil of “reactionary centrists” who are not as woke as he is.
Absurdly, Bluesky users blame anti-woke centrists that few voters have even heard of for the rise of Donald Trump, including even centrists who voted for Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, such as Steven Pinker. One of them absurdly claimed, “the Pinker, Dawkins, Haidt, etc. group is the reason the far right and Trump II gained so much political ground and legitimacy (via the ‘anti-wokeness’ narratives).” This was reposted by an especially obnoxious writer for Liberal Currents, which argues that the Democrats should respond to the 2024 election results by becoming more woke. It is simply false that anti-woke centrists paved the way for Trump’s rise — the candidate in 2016 who was most opposed to woke racial preferences was Jeb Bush, who promised to curb affirmative action, not Donald Trump, who didn’t. Bush’s campaign never took off, and Trump, not Bush, became the GOP nominee for president. The anti-woke centrists are almost invariably pro-free-trade (and friendly to legal immigration), while Trump is a protectionist who supports curbs on immigration.
In the media and on the internet, Democrats claim Trump is a threat to democracy, but they plainly don’t believe it. if they did, they would welcome support from non-woke centrists who oppose Trump, but they don’t. The most hated person on the Democratic-leaning social media platform Bluesky is Jesse Singal, a non-woke centrist who has criticized Donald Trump for civil-liberties violations. Jesse Singal is the most blocked person on that web site, for not being woke.
As a news report pointed out, Democratic officials privately admit that Trump, despite being a jerk, is not a threat to democracy:
On a recent episode of the Bulwark Podcast, hosted by never-Trump commentator Tim Miller, New York Times opinion writer Ezra Klein admitted that he has heard from Democrats who admit that they don’t actually believe their hysterical talking point.
“I’ve had top Democrats say to me basically something like, ‘I don’t know why all these Democrats who think Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy are acting the way they are,” Klein said. “But the reason I’m acting the way I am is because I don’t think that.’”
Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME), who represents a House district that overwhelmingly voted for Trump, likewise said in a column published earlier this month that democracy would be just fine [after Trump got elected].
“Unlike Biden and many others, I refuse to participate in a campaign to scare voters with the idea that Trump will end our democratic system,” he wrote.
The truth is that most party-line Democratic Party politicians have never believed that Trump is the threat to democracy they claim he is. Instead, they have parroted this talking point for years to rile up their base and bolster fundraising.
The Democrats have excellent intelligence about what goes on inside the Trump administration, including its future plans. Under Republican administrations, draft regulations and guidance documents are usually leaked by progressive civil servants to the media and Democrats on Capitol Hill, giving Democrats an early warning about whatever it is a Republican administration is doing. The Democrats know what Trump is about to do even before the conservative press does.
So if Trump were actually a threat to democracy, the Democrats would know that, and behave completely differently, seeking to mend fences with centrists rather than continuing to push the elements of their agenda that annoy and anger centrists.
People have long pointed out Democratic politicians and the Democratic base do not act as if Trump actually is a threat to democracy. As one explained:
Congressional Democrats have tended to view Trump as a political opportunity to gain seats in Congress, not a threat to Democracy. With Trump in the White House, Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in 2018, and took control of Congress and the White House in 2020. They don’t like Trump, but they’d rather have him in the White House than Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who has devastated the Democratic Party in Florida, turning what was once a swing state into a solidly Republican state with conservative policies.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton badly wanted Trump as the GOP nominee, reports Politico in the article, “They Always Wanted Trump.” Behind the scenes, Hillary Clinton’s campaign did things to make Trump more likely to win the Republican Primary, in hopes of facing him in November. The inept Clinton managed to lose the November 2016 election, by antagonizing centrist voters in a handful of swing states she paid little attention to, such as Wisconsin. But she never expected to lose the general election, because polls showed her doing better against Trump than against more popular Republicans, like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.
If Clinton had actually viewed Trump as a threat to democracy, she would have welcomed Trump critics with open arms, even if they were conservative, libertarian, or Evangelical Christian. But she didn’t. When one of the billionaire Koch Brothers publicly floated the idea of supporting her, saying some “kind words” about her, she denounced the Koch Brothers for being fiscally conservative. As a result, they stayed neutral in the presidential campaign, and spent millions of dollars to elect Congressional Republicans, even though that money indirectly benefited Trump as well. (When a Koch-backed entity drives an elderly Republican voter to the polls to elect a Republican Senator like Pat Toomey (R-PA), that voter usually votes for the Republican presidential candidate as well, although in some Philadelphia suburbs, upscale voters split ballots, casting votes for Republican congressional candidates but not Trump).
Clinton thought there was no danger to democracy, so she felt no need to build a political coalition with former foes. She showed nothing but contempt for free-market conservatives and religious conservatives who mulled voting for her, welcoming only a handful of neoconservatives (she didn’t even have an outreach coordinator to Evangelical Christians, the way President Obama did, because she didn’t think she needed Evangelical Christian votes, and didn’t really want their votes as a result, viewing them as backward and bigoted). The only kind of conservatism Clinton was willing to tolerate in her supporters was on foreign policy.
By contrast, political candidates who view their opponent as a threat to democracy don’t act that way. They don’t act the way Clinton, Biden, and Harris did, in refusing to build political coalitions with people of different ideologies. They welcome even former enemies.
When French center-right candidate Jacques Chirac went into a presidential run-off election against right-wing nationalist Jean-Marie LePen in 2002, Chirac welcomed all his former political foes on the left, and ran a unity campaign that dropped many of Chirac’s own pet issues. As a result, he won the Presidential run-off election in 2002 with 82% of the vote. Voters believed Chirac when he said his opponent was a threat to democracy, because Chirac acted like it, and did everything he could to mend fences with his left-of-center competitors to build a coalition to defeat Jean-Marie LePen. Chirac acted like there was an emergency, and acted like he believed democracy was in danger. This convinced voters — even some voters who voted for the right-wing nationalist in the first round of the election, to express their frustration with the political establishment, voted for Chirac in the second round (run-off) election.
Neither Clinton nor Biden nor Harris made any meaningful effort to build a cross-ideological coalition in their campaigns against Donald Trump, because none of them actually viewed Trump as a threat to democracy. Since they didn’t view him as a threat to democracy, they weren’t willing to compromise on any of their positions to attract support from across the ideological spectrum.
Instead, Democrats viewed Trump — a relatively unpopular president — as an opportunity to win elections and implement a more left-wing agenda than prior Democratic presidents had pursued. Believing that Trump was no threat to democracy, they felt free to not compromise their positions, and pursue a more left-wing agenda than prior Democratic presidential nominees.
They pursued ever-more-leftist policies. In 2020, Biden proposed $11 trillion in new spending, and $3 trillion in new taxes. That’s much more spending — and deficit spending — than past Democratic nominees had ever proposed. As the progressive Peter Beinart exulted in The Atlantic, Biden embraced “an agenda that is further to the left than that of any Democratic nominee in decades.”
Because the Democrats don’t believe Trump is a threat to democracy, but rather a political opportunity to win general elections, they have routinely funded ad campaigns designed to get Republican primary voters to choose Trumpier Republicans over less Trumpy Republicans in swing districts where it is somewhat more difficult for a more Trumpy Republican to win a general election than a less Trumpy Republican.
For example, Reason Magazine reported that Michigan Republican “Rep. Peter Meijer’s Trump-Backed Primary Challenger Got a $435,000 Gift From Democrats.” As a result, Meijer lost the Republican Primary election, and John Gibbs, the more Trumpy candidate who won the Republican primary, went on to lose the general election to a progressive Democrat. If a very Trumpy Republican has a 60% chance of losing a general election, and a less Trumpy Republican has a 60% chance of winning a general election, the Democrats will help the Trumpy Republican win the primary. If Democrats cared about democracy, and Trumpists were truly a threat to democracy, Democrats wouldn’t do this, and wouldn’t take the risk of electing more Democrats. But the Democrats do it, over and over again, showing they don’t actually view Trump and his followers as threats to democracy.
In 2024, the Democrats spent $2 million to help a pro-Trump Republican try to unseat a Republican Congressman who had voted to impeach Donald Trump over the January 6 riot. The Democrats spent that $2 million in the Republican Congressional primary, in a swing district that has been carried by Clinton, Biden, and Harris. Democrats had a chance of beating the incumbent in the general election, but wanted to increase their chances of winning the general election by getting Republican primary voters to nominate Donald Trump, who was more unpopular in the district than the Republican Congressman (who had a mostly conservative voting record). They were willing risk making Congress Trumpier as part of their electoral strategy. If they really cared about “democracy,” they would not have intervened in the primary to get rid of a Republican incumbent who actually believed what they said about January 6 being awful, and replace him with a candidate who wasn’t bothered by Trump’s behavior on January 6. But the anti-Trump Republican Congressman won that 2024 primary, and went on to win the general election against a progressive, big-government Democrat.
Ironically, Democrats shoot themselves in the foot, by boasting of their radicalism on social media. That puts voters on notice of the radical things Democrats will do in the future if they win the election:
Even when Democratic politicians don’t say woke things themselves, to avoid offending voters, “Voters can tell that Democrats are the Woke party because Dems won’t criticize woke activists. Instead they defer to ‘the [woke] groups’ when they are in power” by adopting woke policies, even when those woke policies are very unpopular with normal voters.
Before the internet, it was hard to see how radical many Democrats were. The smuggest, most annoying progressive student at [my law school] in the early 1990s — David Barron — was later appointed by President Obama to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Social media didn’t exist back then. If it had, he might have posted his smug, radical viewpoints there, and his radical support for various kinds of censorship might later have been discovered by a large number of people (Barron was a big supporter of restricting politically-incorrect speech and enforcing restrictions on broadcast speech that would both chill discussion of controversial issues and result in “nut-picking” by broadcasters that leaves viewers even more misinformed. But the smug, pompous Barron was confirmed by a Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate, despite his insufferable arrogance and condescending nature, on a party-line vote, with no Republican support. As a result of his appointment to the bench, he was able to rule in favor of censorship in case after case.
Democrats impose these woke policies of censorship and social engineering once in office, even though doing so is unpopular and they sometimes hide it during political campaigns. As Wes Yang explains, “Wokeness is a non-electoral politics of institutional capture aimed at bending left-leaning institutions to an identitarian agenda. It has been hugely successful in its goals. That it may alienate the majority and occasionally find itself rebuked at the polls is of little concern or consequence to [its supporters].”
