From Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal:
There is something increasingly unappeasable in the left. … We can’t just have court-ordered legalized abortion across the land, we have to have it up to the point of birth, and taxpayers have to pay for it. It’s not enough to win same-sex marriage, you’ve got to personally approve of it and if you publicly resist you’ll be ruined. It’s not enough that we have publicly funded contraceptives, the nuns have to provide them. …
If progressives were wise they would step back, accept their victories, take a breath and turn to the idea of solidifying gains…. Don’t make them bake the cake. Don’t make them accept the progressive replacement for Scalia. Leave the nuns alone.
Progressives have no idea how fragile it all is. That’s why they feel free to be unappeasable. … They think America has endless give. But America is composed of humans, and they do not have endless give.
Isn’t that what we’re seeing this year in the political realm? That they don’t have endless give? And we’ll be seeing more of it.
It’s a good summation of the present predicament.
Obviously, economic malaise—a decade of slow or no real economic growth—is a driving factor in the angry dissatisfaction among working and middle class voters, fueling the hysteria over immigrants taking American jobs that Trump and others have so effectively exploited. But the cultural factors Noonan points to are real and shouldn’t be dismissed.
More. Also in the WSJ, Gerald F. Seib writes: “Some of these [Trump] voters appear new to the GOP, but many have been bouncing around in the party, lured in over the years by their differences with Democrats on cultural issues. … The voters Mr. Trump has pulled together in winning New Hampshire and South Carolina and coming in second in Iowa is a coalition of the economically and culturally alienated….”
Along similar lines, Brendan O’Neill writes in the U.K.’s The Spectator: “America’s new elites, fancying themselves superior to the rural, the old, the religiously inclined and the rest, have increasingly turned politics into something that is done to people, for their own good, rather than by people according to their moral outlook. And then they wonder why people go looking for something else, something less sneering.”
Rich Tafel tells Harvard Divinity School: “The biggest issues for evangelical voters are economic. … Beyond economic issues, they have a deep-seated fear they are losing their religious liberty and country. … Add to that secular activists who are using their power to force issues on evangelicals, and it makes that narrative very real. Religious liberty is the phrase you are going to hear more of. There will be strong pushback on some social issues, like gay marriage, because of the overreach of the secular left.”
Furthermore. From Tom Nichols at The Daily Beast, How the P.C. Police Propelled Donald Trump:
Gay marriage is a good example. Liberals wanted gay marriage to win in the Supreme Court, and it did. Leftists wanted more: to silence their opponents even after those opponents completely lost on the issue. Ugly language that good liberals would normally deplore emerged not in the wake of defeat, but of victory: actor and gay activist George Takei, for example, actually called Justice Clarence Thomas a “clown in blackface” and said Thomas had “abdicated” his status as an African American. That’s heavy stuff, and it would likely scan better written in Chinese on a paper dunce cap. …
I will vote for a third candidate out of protest—even if it means accepting what I consider the ghastly prospect of a Clinton 45 administration. But I understand the fear of being silenced that’s prompting otherwise decent people to make common cause with racists and modern Know-Nothings, and I blame the American left for creating that fear. …
American liberals, complacently turning away from the excesses of the left and eviscerating their own moderate wing, have damaged the two-party system to the point that an unhinged billionaire demagogue is raking in support from people who are now more afraid of leftists controlling the Justice Department than they are of Putin or ISIS.