RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump’s victory is already inspiring reflection about the future of the Republican Party, and rightly so, but Democrats don’t seem to be undertaking any similar introspection. This is a mistake, because they wouldn’t have been ushered out of power up and down the ballot if the American public wasn’t rejecting the results and methods of the last eight years.

Liberals are attributing Hillary Clinton’s loss to FBI Director Jim Comey, while the more honest admit her email scandal and Clinton Foundation ethics were problems. Others note she was a less than inspiring campaigner. The left’s all-purpose answer seems to be that the same American people who elected President Obama twice have defaulted to their traditional sexism, racism and xenophobia.

Blaming “white-lash” is silly—of the roughly 700 U.S. counties that Mr. Obama won twice, about one-third broke this time for Mr. Trump—but these cultural rationalizations are lamentable and instructive. Too many liberals, and some conservatives, simply cannot imagine how great numbers of Americans think and perceive their own interests. Thus wrong opinions must be the result of cognitive limitations or character flaws. Mrs. Clinton called Trump supporters “deplorables,” “irredeemable” and “not America,” as if there could be no other explanation.

These failures of empathy are also a staple of Mr. Obama’s rhetoric, with his moral lectures about who we are as Americans and the arc of history always bending toward—well, his point of view. For the President, and most prominent Democrats these days, opponents who debate policies and principles never do so in good faith.

For eight long years Mr. Obama’s belief that he holds the mandate of heaven has guided how he has used and abused presidential power. He was elected in 2008 on a message of hope and centrist unity, but he was soon ramming through 40 years of pent-up progressive priorities. Recall his famous 2009 brush-off of Republican Eric Cantor, who had proposed some bipartisan ideas for the stimulus: “Eric, I won.”

Democrats imposed ObamaCare on a straight partisan majority, though the polls showed there was no political consensus about a new entitlement among the oft-invoked, rarely consulted American people. National health care is no more popular today and is now misfiring in all the ways the critics predicted. The GOP was frozen out of all major economic decisions in 2009-10, and one price was the weak recovery that persists to this day.

Democrats did have a historic supermajority, but that wasn’t a mandate to do whatever they could get away with, and they lost a record 63 House seats in the midterms as punishment. Mr. Obama then feinted toward a grand bargain with John Boehner, only to ambush the then Speaker with politically impossible tax-increase demands at the 11th hour.

The President won re-election in 2012 by converting a decent man like Mitt Romney into a monster who would prosecute a “war on women.” He also weaponized identity politics to polarize voters for his own purposes.

How a President Donald Trump will change the Republican party isn’t obvious, amid countless media predictions of doom. But one under-reported story of Tuesday’s election is that reform-minded Republicans continued their march in the states, and the party controls a record 69 of 99 legislative majorities across the country.

Republicans flipped three state legislative chambers, including the Iowa senate and Kentucky house, which turned for the GOP for the first time in almost 100 years. Bluegrass State Republicans defeated the house speaker, who was first elected in 1980, and the GOP controls both legislative houses and the governorship. Watch for right-to-work legislation, pension reform and school choice.

Republicans defended majorities in states such as West Virginia, Michigan and Maine, where Democrats dropped $2 million on some senate seats. The GOP held on to supermajorities in the North Carolina house and senate, and it added to majorities in the Wisconsin assembly and senate. The Ohio house supermajority reached an new high. These gains will allow for more innovative ideas from state laboratories.
The GOP also cleaned up in a few Democratic strongholds: Republicans gained four seats in the Illinois house, ending a Democratic supermajority. Great news for Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, who has been held hostage on public pensions, education and even passing a budget. The party of Lincoln took the Minnesota senate, and the Connecticut senate is now an 18-18 tie, a result that may save the state from more progressive taxation and spending.

Republicans lost the house and senate in Nevada, a defeat driven by Sen. Harry Reid’s turnout machine and a poor Trump performance in the state. The latter also hurt Republican candidates for the New Mexico house, which Democrats took. Republicans now hold the governorship and both chambers in some 25 states. The number for Democrats? Four. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Obama and Hillary Clinton struck positive notes of healing and reconciliation in their public remarks following President-elect Donald Trump’s stunning victory. However, the elite liberal media establishment, which had largely served as a propaganda arm of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, continues to lash out at the president-elect as if the campaign were still in full swing.

The New York Times’ lead editorial on November 9th, entitled “The Trump Revolt,” regurgitated the charges the Times’ editors and columnists have leveled at Trump so frequently during the last year. Trump “has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people,” the post-election editorial proclaimed. “We know he lies without compunction,” intoned the Times’ editors, who seem to have forgotten the description by the Times’ late columnist William Safire of Hillary Clinton as a “congenital liar.” Using typical left-wing race-baiting tactics, the editors wrote that Trump “has recruited as his allies a dark combination of racists, white supremacists and anti-Semites,” citing a celebratory tweet by David Duke, whom Trump and his campaign have repeatedly disavowed.

To top it off, the Times’ editors darkly warned that the change Trump’s supporters had voted for risks placing the United States “on a precipice.”

One of the New York Times’ lead op-ed writers, Thomas Friedman, wailed that “at the moment I am in anguish, frightened for my country and for our unity. And for the first time, I feel homeless in America.”

The leftist Huffington Post’s senior politics editor, Sam Stein, wrote that Americans “chose to jump into the abyss” by electing Trump. Mirroring the Times’ race-baiting, Stein wrote that Trump “is a nativist, and one who has brought in his wake a scary thread of anti-Semitism and racism that has marred the entire 16-month presidential campaign.”

Slate featured articles with such outrageous headlines as “White Women Sold Out the Sisterhood and the World by Voting for Trump” and “White Won.” The latter article’s sub-heading was “We are still the country that produced George Wallace. We are still the country that killed Emmett Till.” One headline Slate did probably get right was “Donald Trump Will Erase the Obama Era.” Obama had made the election a referendum on his own legacy and the voters gave him their verdict.

David Corn wrote in Mother Jones that “America is broken.” Trying to be too clever by half, Corn added that “Hate did trump.”

The striking thing about the series of American Muslim viewpoint articles published recently is that we see Muslims complaining vociferously about the election of Donald Trump while at the same time being completely silent about the dangers of radical Islam. It causes me to think that too many American Muslims have a bigger problem with Donald Trump than they do with radicalized Islam.

On Slate, one Muslim proudly announces that he is not shaving his beard and that his hijabi wife will continue to comply with sharia law, even though Donald Trump has never asked him to shave anything.

Tuesday was a slow-dawning personalization of the election for me. First came a wave of anxiety at the thought of Trump in the Oval Office. Then came the nausea, realizing what it means for our nation’s moral compass.

What about the moral compass of Islam? The writer talks about fictionally being forced to shave his beard and remove the hijab. Does he realize that in many Muslim countries, people are killed for not wearing a beard, for not wearing a hijab? Does he realize how he sounds?

… we have someone who has made it abundantly clear that he believes Islam is at war with the United States and that regarding your neighbor with suspicion (and perhaps even hostility) is not just a protected right but a moral imperative. Why wouldn’t his supporters lash out at us? Who is protecting us?

Radical Islamists are massacring Americans, and this arrogant, self-absorbed Muslim is worried about himself. Last I checked, no Muslims were being killed in America for being Muslim.

You can read the same thing in the New York Times, where another Muslim fears for his safety now that Trump has been elected president.

As Mr. Trump’s base rejoices, American Muslim parents are furiously WhatsApping and texting one another about how they’re terrified for their children’s safety. Does my 2-year-old son, Ibrahim, and 3-month-old baby girl, Nusayba, deserve to be bullied at school for simply having a Muslim name? Do their mosques deserves to be vandalized?

Now what?

Nothing will be more important to getting that answer right in the Trump victory period than separating fact from abundant fiction.

The 2016 presidential campaign was a magic mushroom tour through the American psyche—its voters, its politicians and not least the exotic varieties of people who populate what we call “the media.”

For all of them, the Trump candidacy seemed to be a national Rorschach inkblot. Everyone looked at the same Trump events, Trump speeches and Trump polls and interpreted them as individual political biases and desires.

There was one exception to this mania: the collective wisdom of the American voter.

In normal times—and these are not normal times—it would have been impossible for a candidate outputting Donald Trump’s chamber of spoken and personal horrors to win. (Sometime in the next year, John McCain deserves an apology.)

What we learned on Nov. 8, 2016, was that voters looked past or through all the atmospheric debris of this campaign and focused on what mattered—the direction of their country. Its economy, its politics and the state of the culture.

One stunning example. White evangelical Christians voted by 81% for the nation’s leading proponent of the Playboy philosophy. They blew past that because they knew that Mr. Trump’s personal life would not bring into the Oval Office the Democratic Party’s triumphant secularism. That is the philosophy that sued Hobby Lobby and the Little Sisters of the Poor into religious obeisance and elevated transgender bathrooms to a litmus test. Thus, their vote.

Another fable propagated everywhere during the campaign, and especially in the time since the Trump victory is that he had unearthed some unknown catacomb of lower-middle-class anger . . . at everything. Mr. Trump himself tagged “globalization” with the blame.

Let us be clear about the economic status of the American middle class, and indeed of the middle-class people in low-growth Europe responding to populist appeals there. Economic life isn’t bad weather. It is the result of politics. Wrong political decisions have economic consequences.

We didn’t have this sense of ennui or dissatisfaction during the growth years of the Reagan presidency in the 1980s or the Clinton presidency in the 1990s. CONTINUE AT SITE