[Peace-discuss] Liberals Need to Take Their Fingers Out of Their Ears

[Szoke, Ron]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/opinion/liberals-conservatives-trump.html?ribbon-ad-idx=9&rref=opinion&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=article

Liberals Need to Take Their Fingers Out of Their Ears
Thomas B. Edsall<https://www.nytimes.com/column/thomas-b-edsall>DEC. 7, 2017
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/12/07/opinion/07EDSALL/07EDSALL-superJumbo.jpg]

Trump supporters on a bridge near the Mar-a-Lago Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., last month. Al Drago for The New York Times

Given the triumph of contemporary conservatism, it may be time for liberals to take a look at the vulnerabilities of their own orthodoxies.

Democrats who yearn for President Trump to be taken down should examine this list of Republican strengths: victories in all three contested special<https://ballotpedia.org/Special_elections_to_the_115th_United_States_Congress_(2017-2018)> elections for the House of Representatives this year; Trump’s 82 percent approval rating<https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/8hs5rikuhd/econTabReport.pdf> among Republican voters; his success with the current tax bill<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/us/politics/senate-tax-bill.html>; his swift evisceration of key regulatory policies<https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/donald-trump-obama-legacy-215009>; the Gorsuch appointment<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/us/politics/neil-gorsuch-supreme-court.html> to the Supreme Court; economic growth of over 3 percent<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-gdp/u-s-third-quarter-economic-growth-fastest-in-three-years-idUSKBN1DT1W7> in the last two quarters; the Dow Jones topping 24,000<http://money.cnn.com/data/markets/dow/>; and the unemployment rate dropping to 4.1 percent<https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf>.

For the moment, the left is both stunned and infuriated by the vehement animosity it faces from red America<http://uk.businessinsider.com/maps-red-america-vs-blue-america-2017-1/?r=US&IR=T#red-counties-are-84-less-populous-1>, which is made up of counties that are 84 percent less dense than blue America, 37 percent less racially and ethnically diverse, and 34 percent more white.

Voters in red America are 44 percent less likely to be college graduates and 22 percent more likely to have served in the armed forces. Geographically speaking, red counties are virtually nonexistent on the West Coast and on the East Coast north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Many Democrats continue to have little understanding of their own role — often inadvertent, an unintended consequence of well-meaning behavior — in creating the conditions that make conservatives willing to support Trump and the party he is leading.
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