America's left feels it may be headed for an historic 1972 McGovern-like or 1980 Carteresque presidential election blowout. And it is terrified
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Editor's note: The following column was first published on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The media is afire with warnings of the impending Donald Trump "dictatorship." Celebrities, the Squad, and Biden administration grandees vie to conjure up the most nightmarish things that Trump might do to them.
What drives their current mounting hysteria?
1. The left feels it may be heading for an historic 1972 McGovern-like or 1980 Carteresque blowout. And it is terrified at this late date that it cannot do anything either about the escalating dementia of Joe Biden, or the terror instilled by the specter of either a president or continued Vice President Kamala Harris.
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2. It knows that a first-term novice Trump had a successful four years, and that he now is savvier four years later—and far more likely and able to overturn the entire four-year Biden catastrophe and thus enjoy an even more successful second term.
3. It fears that all it did to destroy democracy—the Russia collusion hoax, the Russian disinformation laptop farce, the two first-term impeachments the moment the Republicans lost the House, the Senate trial of ex-President Trump as a private citizen, the effort to remove Trump from state ballots, and the five criminal and civil show trials designed to bankrupt the leading presidential candidate and keep him off the campaign trail—might boomerang on the Left.
So, it is in full panic that its unconstitutional efforts to destroy Trump will obviously be used against itself—given it knows that if it returned to power it would go after its enemies in precisely the same, any-means-necessary ways that it had sought to destroy Trump.
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That is, they have destroyed norms and have established dangerous new precedents that they just assume, given their Jacobin nature, must rebound against themselves.
4. The left is terrified that growing voter repugnance now extends even to traditional Democratic constituencies—Latinos, Blacks, Asians, Jews, the young, and even the college educated. And the left privately grasps that these defections are fueled not just by the obnoxiousness and dementia of Joe Biden, but due to his far-left agendas that left us with abhorrent inflation, wild unsustainable federal deficits, a lethal open border, 10-million unaudited and often dangerous illegal aliens, foreign policy catastrophes, woke racial and tribal disunity, spiraling urban crime, and cultural extremism.
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Leftists accept that while in secret they blame the cognitively challenged Joe for their dilemmas, deep-down they know that "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves"—that is, in their own failed revolution that has utterly repulsed Americans and nearly destroyed the country.
5. In the next five months, the left and Democrats know that they must pander to try to save themselves. But the more Biden panders, the more obvious, repugnant, and counterproductive the pandering becomes.
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The public is growing sick of Biden’s 11th-hour groveling to save himself from his self-created oblivion. And the more, in his last days as president, he drains even more from the strategic petroleum reserve, the more he cancels student loan debt, the more he abandons Israel to win a few thousand votes in Michigan, the more he pressures the Fed to lower interest rates, the more he flips on tariffs, and the more he grants blanket amnesties to illegal aliens—all the more the country at large becomes disgusted at the low effort to temporarily appease particular voting blocs at the expense of the general interest of the country.
6. As we watch the left go through the proverbial cycles of "denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance," it will increasingly deny the accuracy of supposedly inaccurate swing state polls, then angrily damn the supposedly clueless, deplorable electorate.
Then the left will turn to all sorts of dreams of remedies (changing or violating more voting laws being the most prominent), then get sullen about the entire American project, and only finally accept the inevitable of what likely lies ahead.
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Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of "The Dying Citizen."
