CNN host Fareed Zakaria said Sunday on his show “Fareed Zakaria GPS” that the Democratic Party and Vice President Kamala Harris lost because of their “lawfare” against President-elect Donald Trump and a “deeply illiberal” cultural war.
Zakaria said, “The New York Times estimates that Harris will lose the national popular vote by about a point and a half, a first for Democrats since 2004.”
He continued, “The first big error was the Biden administration’s blindness to the collapse of the immigration system and the chaos at the border. An asylum system that was meant for a small number of persecuted individuals was being used by millions to gain legal entry. Instead of shutting it down, liberals branded anyone protesting as heartless and racist. They missed a massive shift in American public opinion in just a few years. In 2020, the percentage of Americans who wanted to decrease immigration was just 28%. By this year, it was 55%. When Kamala Harris went on The View and was asked how she would have differed from Biden, instead of basically saying nothing different, she should have said, I would have shut down the border early and hard.”
He said, “The second error was an overzealous misuse of law to punish Trump. The most egregious of the cases pursued was Alvin Bragg’s one in New York, one that even he was once skeptical of, but was reportedly pressured by some on the left into pursuing. Some cases, like the Georgia one, were legitimate. But the host of them piled on in rapid succession, gave the impression that the legal system was being weaponized to get Trump. It confirmed to his base what it had always believed – That over-educated urban liberals were hypocrites, happy to bend rules and norms when it suited their purposes.”
Zakaria added, “Lawfare turned Trump from being a loser into a victor.”
He concluded, “The final error, identity politics on the left, which made it push for all kinds of DEI policies that largely came out of the urban academic bubble, but alienated many mainstream voters. There is an irony in claiming to be pro-Latino by insisting that people use the term LatinX when Latinos themselves think the word is weird. This kind of obsession may Democrats view people too much through their ethnic or racial or gender identity and made them miss that working-class Latinos were moving toward Trump, perhaps, because they were socially conservative or liked his macho rhetoric or even agreed with his hard-line stance on immigration. One of Trump’s most effective as on trans issues had a tagline, ‘Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.’ The problem is deeper than one about nouns and pronouns. The entire focus on identity has morphed into something deeply illiberal, judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. Similarly, universities with cancel culture and speech codes have become the way they censor the most cherished of liberal ideas, freedom of speech. One simple way to think about the lessons of this election is that liberals cannot achieve liberal goals, however virtuous by illiberal means.”
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