Politics Promises An Interesting Year In Store

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

It’s going to be a long year.
Most Americans today are working hard to recover from the China Virus and bring our resilient country back to its full potential.
Unfortunately, some folks have other plans.
A long time ago, a fellow named Rahm Emanuel, a senior adviser to Bill Clinton, laid down the law for the next generation of Democrat politicians:
“Never let a crisis go to waste.”
And for the past two years, the American Left has done everything it can to create an Emanuel-style “Crisis Syndrome,” and to perpetuate it as long as possible.
Yes, it started with the virus, but they don’t want it to end there. The year 2020 was full of mandates “to keep us safe” while Democrats fomented a summer of chaos, riots, and destruction that endangered the safety of millions. Radical district attorneys in Democrat-governed cities fanned the flames of chaos, looting, carjacking, crime — and even murders like those in Waukesha last November.
Democrats observed our reactions carefully. They discovered that millions of normally freedom-loving Americans were willing to obey almost any mandate if it was issued to “keep us safe.”
It worked! They watched us act like a defeated people.
Who but a nation of powerless losers would allow politicians to close our churches (but leave abortion mills open) for months in the name of “safety”?
Well, we allowed them, and we allowed everything else, and Democrats noticed. So for the past twelve months, Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats have done everything they could to make our lives more miserable.
A year ago, America was energy independent for the first time. Once in the White House, Joe Biden immediately shut down the Keystone pipeline and instituted a couple of dozen other policies that have raised energy prices by over thirty percent, exacerbating supply chain problems that affect every American family.
Millions of Americans lost their jobs during the 2020 lockdowns, but Biden’s vaccination mandates and those imposed by governors and private employers have required the firing of millions more. Even those in the Federal Civil Service, who are notoriously impossible to fire, are sent home if their vaccination cards are not up to date.
Putin and the Chicoms make their moves while our military throws in the towel in Afghanistan and searches for White Supremacists in the ranks. And Kamala’s border policy is continual chaos.
No, the Left doesn’t want America to recover. They want America to change. But this isn’t Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In” — quite the contrary. It isn’t just Biden’s approval ratings that have tanked, America’s economy is tanking too. That’s according to plan — loyal to Marx and Lenin, the Left wants to destroy America in order to save “democracy.”
There’s only one problem. There’s an election next November. How are they going to win it?

Happy Talk And Hard Truths

The 2022 campaign is well under way, and Republicans are feeling good about their chances. My old sidekick David Bossie writes on Fox that “Biden’s first year has been the worst since Carter — midterms will be the cure for buyer’s remorse.” “Dems Face a Brutal Reckoning With Hispanic Voters,” writes A.B. Stoddard. A popular Tweet reports that “Biden White House Collapses, GOP 2022 Gains Likely.”
Democrats, however, aren’t overflowing with happy-talk. They’re full of hard-nosed advice, though — and all of it is telling Biden how to change.
“Democrats can win in 2022 — here’s how,” writes The Hill, an influential DC website. The leftish Salon says, “Regroup! 6 Reasons Dems Should Be Hopeful About 2022 Midterms.” Microsoft’s msn.com tells us “How Democrats can win in 2022 and beyond.” MSNBC confidently reports “How Democrats can win the Senate in 2020.”
CNN is dire but maybe not: “How Democrats can avert disaster in 2022,” says one story, while another tries to cheer us up: “Democrats may defy history and win the 2022 midterms!” The Nation tells us, “Here’s How the Democrats Can Win Back Rural Voters,” while Medium says, “Democrats Need to Go More Left!”
None of that is enough for the Guardian. It’s time to take the gloves off, the socialist standard-bearer insists. “Joe Biden needs to stand up and fight (West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe) Manchin like our lives depend on it,” it writes. Manchin is “a mulish egotist: a man who sticks to his guns, even when his guns are firing blanks.”
The response? Biden has to fire away with real ammo.
And those Democrats have a point. In our “divided nation,” why would any intelligent politician intentionally alienate millions of voters who had supported him in 2020? It’s pretty clear that Biden’s administration is intentionally impoverishing millions of Americans and needlessly harassing millions more. This is not the way that elections are won.
So what’s going on? Why are Democrats pursuing such counterintuitive policies?
First of all, they think they can rely on false narratives, and they are depending on their media and cultural allies to resonate them.
A minor but revealing example occurred earlier this week, when a Virginia snowstorm that would be considered modest anywhere else completely shut down traffic on a twenty-mile stretch of Interstate 95 between Richmond to Washington, D.C. Thousands of motorists were trapped in their vehicles for up to nineteen hours.
Immediately, the echo chamber went into action, blaming Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who shocked the Left by winning last November’s election for governor.
After the first barrage of complaints and finger-pointing, sensible people finally realized that Youngkin isn’t governor yet (he will be sworn in on January 15). But the repetition — “Impression Impression Impression” – set the tone for how his administration will be treated by the usual suspects.
That narrative of deflection also works in reverse. For the past year, many celebrated media and political critics have routinely blamed former President Trump for the mishaps that Joe Biden has visited on the country. It’s fake news, but the Left is counting on the expectation that the drumbeat will sound so familiar, a key portion of the electorate that Rush Limbaugh used to call the “low information voters” would believe it anyway.
Condescending? Absolutely. But the hubris of the elites seems to inspire this perpetual prevarication among the professionals. It calls to mind the motto of Monica Lewinsky, the former intern in Bill Clinton’s White House: “I’ve lied all my life.” And they share such a contemptuous view of the Deporables that they expect us to believe them.
Democrats must make things happen — or at least make us believe that they happened. Moreover, and equally important, there are things that have happened that they must make us believe didn’t really happen. Even with their mammoth advantage in messaging, they do not face an easy task.
False narratives are indeed effective, especially when they are delivered with the favorite slogan of the marketers — “Impression, impression, impression!” And that mantra works in both the positive and the negative directions.

So Will 2022 Be Business As Usual?

Democrats know they’re in trouble, and they know that crisis and chaos have always worked to their advantage. And, while “there is no such thing as the foreseeable future,” as historian Charles Burton Marshall said in 1980, history does tend to rhyme.
In April, Joe Biden can merely issue an executive order declaring Nancy Pelosi’s federal takeover of state and local elections to be law.
In July, Biden can issue massive restrictions — all to “keep us safe,” of course — that will create a public response of outrage similar to that which we have already seen in Canada, Europe, and Australia.
Then Attorney General Garland can send the FBI into the streets to arrest all those White Supremacists by the thousands.
In late September, Joe Biden can announce that he is permanently forgiving all student loans.
And of course, Big Biz Billionaires can pour another few hundred million in dark money to grease the skids in November’s vote counting.
Happy New Year!