Republicans have a big problem: Their Democratic opponents are so crazy, no one believes it when you tell them what they’re actually doing.
In Tablet Magazine’s sweeping survey of the “Democrats’ insanity defense” this election cycle, one doozy stands out: “[A]spects of Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy.”
As one GOP staffer working on a competitive Congressional race told the magazine, “When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don’t believe it.”
Voters “are critical of things like boys in girls’ sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be,” he concluded.
The Democrats are so crazy that voters don’t believe it pic.twitter.com/GRSpdny4mu
— Kyle Smith (@rkylesmith) October 29, 2024
Another Republican operative echoed this observation. “Phrases like ‘genital mutilation’ are disgusting and viscerally off-putting, even to voters who may be sympathetic to the Republicans’ position but will just write you off as a freak for talking about it that way,” he told Tablet.
Perhaps it’s partly Republicans’ fault. As much as Dems screeched “Nazi” for decades, Republicans have been crying “socialism” at every left-of-center dweeb for generations. But that doesn’t change the fact that what Democrats are doing today is, in fact, crazy — an inevitability that keen observers predicted even back when President Bill Clinton was having his Sista Souljah moment. Even when Republicans exaggerate, they’re still a hell of a lot closer to the truth than their opponents.
Take the disparate impact doctrine: The idea that a neutral law is still unconstitutional if it just happens to lead to different outcomes for a “protected class.” In other words, the legal framework for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. At a gut level, it sounds so insane, so antithetical to the letter of the Constitution and spirit of America that it’s hard to believe it’s real. We instinctively feel that the DEI craze is modern, a product of moral panic, a temporary mass psychosis that will soon fade away — certainly not official policy. It’d be shocking to see how many Americans actually know it’s been the law of the land for over 50 years, thanks to a landmark Supreme Court ruling. The Long March has indeed been long — it took time to bear empirical fruit.
So it’s less of a Boy Who Cried Wolf situation, and more a problem of poorly calibrated messaging. Republicans struck before the iron was hot. They took the easy path of calling their opponents radical socialists rather than develop the public’s understanding of how even the centrist liberal agenda inevitably leads to where we find ourselves today. Now, with radical leftism exploding from the fringe into the mainstream, the layman public has no framework to grasp just how this could all be happening in the America they know and love.
Radical leftists spent the last fifty years subverting American ideals to build a subliminal new consciousness in the public psyche. Decades behind, Republicans are just getting started.
This article was originally published at dailycaller.com
