RUTHFULLY YOURS

What should a political party that has just lost its white working-class, blue-collar base to a “make America great again” nationalist do to try to regain these voters? Why not appoint as the new head of the party a radical left-wing ideologue who has a long history of supporting an anti-American, anti-white, anti-Semitic Nation of Islam racist? Such an appointment will surely bring back rust-belt voters who have lost their jobs to globalization and free trade! Is this really the thinking of those Democratic leaders who are pushing for Keith Ellison to head the Democratic National Committee?

Keith Ellison is, by all accounts, a decent guy, who is well liked by his congressional colleagues. But it is hard to imagine a worse candidate to take over the DNC at this time. Ellison represents the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party, just when the party — if it is to win again — must move to the center in order to bring back the voters it lost to Trump. The Democrats didn’t lose because their candidates weren’t left enough. They won the votes of liberals. The radical voters they lost to Jill Stein were small in number and are not likely to be influenced by the appointment of Ellison. The centrist voters they lost to Trump will only be further alienated by the appointment of a left-wing ideologue, who seems to care more about global issues than jobs in Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan. Ellison’s selection certainly wouldn’t help among Jewish voters in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania or pro-Israel Christian voters around the country.

Ellison’s sordid past associations with Louis Farrakhan — the long time leader of the Nation of Islam — will hurt him in Middle America, which has little appetite for Farrakhan’s anti-American ravings. Recently, Farrakhan made headlines for visiting Iran on the 35th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution where he berated the United States, while refusing to criticize Iran’s human rights violations. Farrakhan also appeared as a special guest speaker of the Iranian president at a rally, which featured the unveiling of a float reenacting Iran’s detention of 10 U.S. Navy sailors in the Persian Gulf.

In addition to embracing American enemies abroad, Farrakhan has exhibited a penchant for lacing his sermons with anti-Semitic hate speech. Around the time that Ellison was working with the Nation of Islam, for example, Farrakhan was delivering speeches attacking “the synagogue as Satan.” He described Jews as “wicked deceivers of the American people” that have “wrapped [their] tentacles around the U.S. government” and are “deceiving and sending this nation to hell.” Long after Jesse Jackson disavowed Farrakhan in 1984 as “reprehensible and morally indefensible” for describing Judaism as a “gutter religion,” Ellison was defending Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam in 1995 as a role model for African-Americans, calling him “a tireless public servant of Black people, who constantly teaches self-reliance and self-examination to the Black community.”

President Obama, Democrat politicians and the mainstream media are still calling Trump KKK. They’re tarring his team as anti-Semites and racists. The electoral map would stop any normal politicians in their tracks, but Democrat hate speech is only getting louder and more hysterical. A major course correction is not going to happen for three reasons:

1. Democrat leadership;

2. Democrat donors;

3. Democrat voting blocks.

There is no force in the party that wants to change.

Democrats don’t debate Trump on the issues, because their agenda is a turn-off. Under the leadership of Alinskyite Barack Obama, the Democratic Party has degenerated from liberalism to progressivism. It has not been pretty. A focus on preferential treatment for blacks has given way to a war on cops. Caring about Hispanic Americans suddenly means America shouldn’t have borders and should have sanctuary for rapists and killers — as long as they are here illegally.

Browbeating college kids by empowerring feminists and black activists with Title IX money has turned college campuses against freedom of thought and speech. Women’s issues have bizarrely turned into a war on masculinity. Gay rights has morphed into men in women’s bathrooms. Pro-choice turned into third-trimester infanticide and lawsuits against the Little Sisters of the Poor. Physical violence against Republicans is encouraged by President Obama and Clinton under the euphemism ‘protest.’

Democrat progressive politics is weird and ugly and dangerous, and people across the country have recoiled from it. As Marc Thiessen says with his usual eloquence, “You can drive some 3,000 miles across the entire continental United States — from sea to shining sea — without driving through a single county that voted for Hillary Clinton.”

It’s hard to think of Steve Bannon as a low-profile guy. He has garnered about as many headlines over the past week as Donald Trump—no small feat. He is the executive chairman of the hard-right Breitbart News, among the most aggressive voices online, its website an attack machine against Democrats and “establishment” conservatives. President-elect Trump chose Mr. Bannon this week as his chief strategist and senior counselor, a slot usually filed by someone eager to play a presidential surrogate on TV.

Yet Mr. Bannon—who joined the Trump campaign in mid-August to propel its thunderbolt victory—professes no interest in being the story. “It’s not important to be known,” he says in a telephone interview Thursday night, among his first public comments since the election. “It was Lao Tzu who said that with the best leaders, when the work is accomplished, the people will say ‘We have done this ourselves.’ That’s how I’ve led.”

Nor does he profess to care that Democrats and the media are portraying him as a “cloven-hoofed devil,” as he puts it. “I pride myself in doing things that matter. What mattered in the campaign was winning. We did. What matters now is pulling together the single best team we can to implement President-elect Trump’s vision.

He continues: “How can you take anything seriously from a media apparatus—paid the amount of money you people are paid—that systematically missed something that was so obvious, that missed Brexit, that missed the Trump revolution? You’d have thought they’d have learned their lesson on November 8.”

Slight pause. “They clearly haven’t.”

Here are a few things you’ve likely read about Steve Bannon this week: He’s a white supremacist, a bigot and anti-Semite. He’s a self-described Leninist who wants to “destroy the state.” He’s associated with the “alt-right,” a movement that, according to the New York Times, delights in “harassing Jews, Muslims and other vulnerable groups by spewing shocking insults on social media.”

You’ll have seen some of Breitbart’s more offensive headlines, which refer to “renegade” Jews and the “dangerous faggot tour.” You maybe heard that Breitbart is gearing up to be a Pravda-like state organ for the Trump administration.

Mr. Bannon is an aggressive political scrapper, unabashed in his views, but he says those views bear no relation to the media’s description. Over 70 minutes, he describes himself as a “conservative,” a “populist” and an “economic nationalist.” He’s a talker, but unexcitable, speaking in measured tones. A former naval officer, he thinks in military terms and likes to quote philosophers and generals. He’s contemptuous of the media, proud of Breitbart, protective of the “deplorables,” and—at least at the moment—eager to work with everyone from soon-to-be White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to House Speaker Paul Ryan.

At first Mr. Bannon insists that he has no interest in “wasting time” addressing the accusations against him. Yet he’s soon ticking off the reasons they are “just nonsense.”

Anti-Semitic? “Breitbart is the most pro-Israel site in the United States of America. I have Breitbart Jerusalem, which I have Aaron Klein run with about 10 reporters there. We’ve been leaders in stopping this BDS movement”—meaning boycott, divestment and sanctions—“in the United States; we’re a leader in the reporting of young Jewish students being harassed on American campuses; we’ve been a leader on reporting on the terrible plight of the Jews in Europe.” He adds that given his many Jewish partners and writers, “guys like Joel Pollak, these claims of anti-Semitism just aren’t serious. It’s a joke.”

He blames the attacks on a lazy media, noting for instance that the “renegade Jew” line wasn’t Breitbart’s. Conservative activist David Horowitz (also Jewish) has taken responsibility for writing the headline himself, in a piece about Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.

The Lenin anecdote came from an article in the Daily Beast by a writer who claimed to have spoken with Mr. Bannon in 2013: “So a guy I’ve never heard of in my life claims he met me at a party, and then claims I said something about Lenin, and this is taken as gospel truth, with nobody checking it.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The Democratic Party’s move toward antisemitism, a move made apparent through Ellison’s rise, is one movement the Jews mustn’t lead. at a crossroads today. And so do the Jewish Democrats.
Out of power in the White House and both houses of Congress, the Democrats must decide what sort of party they will be in the post-Obama world.
They have two basic options.They can move to the Center and try to rebuild their blue collar voter base that President-elect Donald Trump captivated with his populist message. To do so they will need to loosen the reins of political correctness and weaken their racialism, their radical environmentalism and their support for open borders.

This is the sort of moderate posture that Bill Clinton led with. It is the sort of posture that Clinton tried but failed to convince his wife to adopt in this year’s campaign.

The second option is to go still further along the leftist trajectory that President Barack Obama set the party off on eight years ago. This is the favored option of the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. Sanders’s supporters refer to this option as the populist course.

It is being played out today on the ground by the anti- Trump protesters who refuse to come to terms with the Trump victory and insistently defame Trump as a Nazi or Hitler and his advisers as Goebbels.

For the Democrats, such a populist course will require them to become more racialist, more authoritarian in their political correctness, angrier and more doctrinaire.It will also require them to become an antisemitic party.

Antisemitism, like hatred of police and Christians, is a necessary component of Democratic populism.

This is true first and foremost because they will need scapegoats to blame for all the bad things you can’t solve by demonizing and silencing your political opponents.

Jews, and particularly the Jewish state, along with evangelical Christians and cops are the only groups that you are allowed to hate, discriminate against and scapegoat in the authoritarian PC universe.

While we speak, a jealous age will have fled.
Seize the day! Trust as little as you can in tomorrow.

The Latin poet Horace’s advice of carpe diem— to seize the day and not worry about tomorrow — should be Trump’s transitional guide.

The attacks on Trump won’t even wait until he takes office; they begin now, well apart from rioting in the streets. And they will continue to be of several types.

Of the personal sort, expect more “investigative” reporting and “speaking truth to power” op-eds about his tax returns, his supposed theft of the election, his purported instigation of turbulence and mayhem, his locker-room talks about women, his business conflicts of interests in office, Trump University, and so on — perhaps written from the high moral ground by the WikiLeaks journalists of the Mark Leibovich, Dana Milbank, Glenn Thrush, Wolf Blitzer, or Donna Brazile sort.

The nexus of attack will not be a dramatic scandalous revelation — it will be intended to induce bleeding from a thousand tiny nicks and cuts, all designed to reduce his moral authority and thus his ability to ratchet back the progressive decade.

Another trope, as we are now witnessing, will be of the hysterical policy brand: Trump will cook the planet, put y’all back in chains, conduct war on women, traumatize students, destroy dreamers — all the boilerplate extremism designed to put Trump on the defensive so that he will settle for half an agenda and “reach out” to cement his respectability as a “listener” before the court of D.C. fixtures, the campuses, the foundations, the think tanks, the media, the social circles of Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

The Siren strategy of the Left will also be to point out that his future is already destabilizing America — Trump must therefore reach out right now to the “disaffected” in the streets who are “hurting.” Thereby, he will “heal” the nation, if only he backs off from “right-wing” and “extremist” ideas of selling coal overseas or building a wall and taxing billions of dollars in remittance from illegal aliens to pay for it.

In extremis, the Left will call on its Never Trump counterparts of like class to convince Trump to play by the accustomed Washington rules of decorum and judicious discourse. In carrot-and-stick fashion, they might even begin to talk of Trump’s “surprising flexibility” or his “unexpected reasonableness” in hopes of watering down his agenda and leaving him addicted to more backhanded praises from the cultural elite.

Also expect to hear in the next 90 days that the idea of executive orders (of the Obama type) are in retrospect dangerous to the republic and destabilizing. Filibusters will again become essential, and as hallowed a Senate tradition as Harry Reid’s nuclear option will now be denounced as disruptive and nihilistic.

We will hear that the Supreme Court, after some rethinking, actually works just fine with eight justices for a while. Court nominations will be smeared as extremists and nuts. Frequent Trump press conferences with plenty of back and forth will be demanded as essential to the republic, as will be interviews with opposition networks such as MSNBC or CNN.

Reckless debt limits cannot be raised (as Obama pressured the Congress to do in 2011). There should be no New York Trump cronies in the Oval Office (in the manner of a Valerie Jarrett). If need be, Trump will be trashed as a golf-course junkie, decked out in bright-colored leisure clothes befitting his plutocratic and detached status.