Like all rational Americans, I was happy with the results of the Virginia gubernatorial election this past Tuesday.  However, I’m not optimistic, one reason being that a photo-finish victory against a sleazy establishment bagman in a state that a decade ago was reliably red is an indication that we dodged a bullet rather than pulled ahead of the pack. 

Youngkin’s surprise comeback can be attributed solely to the freak occurrence of the issue of critical race theory arising at just the right time in just the right place to swing just enough votes his way.  A month, or a county, in either direction might well have nullified this accidental advantage. 

Will Youngkin keep his word and take on critical race theory in schools?  We shall see.  Roughly half of Virginia voters apparently have no problem with their kids’ schools operating as racist indoctrination centers, and who knows how many “Republican” Mitt Romneys and John McCains will sit in this upcoming 51-49 legislative session. Still, I wanted to gauge the reaction of both sides before I offered any commentary.

So it's been a few days.  How are Leftists translating this election? 

• Steve Israel at The Hill alleged that Republicans appealed “more to voters’ emotions than their reason,” and that Democrats weren’t excited about voting for “graying white men.”
• Inversely, Dean Obeidallah at MSNBC countered that while policy is important for Democrat turnout, “so is anger.”
• Gabriel Debenedetti at The Intelligencer thought Democrats didn’t pander enough to “lower-information voters” (I would argue the opposite is true).
• A coalition of progressive groups denounced the Republican victory as the result of "race-baiting bull****."
• Maria Cardona at RealClearPolitics attributed Youngkin’s victory to his messaging of “racial dog whistles” that Trump supporters “needed to hear.” 
• Former ESPN announcer Jemele Hill concluded that America "simply loves white supremacy." 
• Jill Lawrence at USAToday found the election results "beyond comprehension," and offered such remedies such as...stop me if you've heard these...abolishing the Senate filibuster and packing the Supreme Court, which she likens to a "theocracy." 
• Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic laid the loss at the feet of Joe Manchin. 
• Zak Cheney-Rice at The Intelligencer blamed the focus on CRT, a “buzzy non-threat evoked to frighten voters” who think school should be a place “where white children don’t have to encounter too many Black children.”
• Ja'han Jones, another Xeroxed MSN duplicate, jeered at "intellectually lazy people, many of them white." 
• Steve Phillips at the greasy dishrag known as The Guardian, which makes your average ISIS pamphlet sound positively pro-American, maintained that Youngkin "stoked the flames of white racial fear."  Democrats, he argued, should "double down" on issues such as defunding the police and erasing the border. 
• Democrat voters themselves echoed these sentiments, telling reporters Youngkin appealed to his base through deception and "dog whistles."

Do these reactions reflect a party that realized they've overreached and need to rein in the 'crazy'?  Do these reactions expose even a scintilla of humility, reconciliation, or self-reflection?  Nope.  The message of the Left is: Attack on all fronts.  Attack, attack, and attack some more.  Double down.  Triple down.  Attack as hard as you can and don’t ease up.  Don't budge an inch.

To the extent that future elections still have any lingering ramifications for the voters, the Left will use whatever 3 a.m. “wins” to their advantage, but this is mainly for show.  They’ll continue to attribute any loss to racism or voter ignorance, spend a day or two ranting and flapping their arms about it, and then continue to plow full steam ahead with their agenda as if nothing happened.

And they don't need the Virginia statehouse to do it. They have the mainstream media. They have social media.  They have the public schools.  They have the universities.  They have the corporations. They have the federal bureaucracy. They have the district attorneys. They have the Pentagon. They have the FBI. They have most of the judiciary, including those alleged constructionists like John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh.  And they have the street mobs.  The point is, they don't need to win elections to relentlessly enact their agenda.

To prove my case, here are a few more things that won’t be happening anytime soon, despite our 50.8% "historic" "blowout":  Merrick Garland won’t retract his DOJ memo insinuating that concerned, law-abiding parents are domestic terrorists.  “Activists” won’t cease their coercion campaign against moderate Democrat senators by harassing them in bathroom stalls and ruining strangers’ weddings for not signing off on trillion-dollar socialist spending sprees.  The blatant double standard of forcing masks on the peasantry whilst the nobility parties on unmasked will not cease.  And no Biden official will resign, nor will be asked to resign, for any act of corruption, tyrannical overreach, or blatant incompetence. 

As of this writing, congressional Democrats are still burning the midnight oil trying to ram their infrastructure and spending bills through a vote.  "Does [the election] change the agenda for the House?" a naive reporter asked Nancy Pelosi.  "No", she responded. 

And how are conservatives translating this election?

• Buck Sexton at American Consequences claims it will have “enormous ramifications for the Biden White House.” 
• Jim Geraghty at National Review insists that this should quash all the Republican poppycock about Virginia being a blue state.
• Former Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich sees a "growing movement against Big Government Socialism."
• Pollster Sean Trende attributes the win to voter anger over the abysmal economy and dismisses the idea that CRT drove concerned parents to the voting booths (despite polling evidence to the contrary). 

I hate to be the killjoy when my desire is to celebrate with my fellow conservatives, but we simply can't afford to be this unrealistic.  There will be no ramifications whatsoever for the Biden White House. Remember when Massachusetts of all places elected Scott Brown?  A fat lot of good it did us. The Democrats ignored the voters, rammed Obamacare through anyway, and snickered as Massachusetts inevitably reverted back to blue in the next election. 

Regarding McAuliffe’s juvenile campaign antics, Hugo Gordon at the Washington Examiner declared that “Virginia voters were having none of it.”  Really?  Because, at last count, 48.5% of Virginia voters were having plenty of it.  This election wasn't the bloodbath it's being made out to be.  We barely squeaked across the finish line.  We stumbled upon the winning lotto ticket that McAuliffe had carelessly dropped, and nothing more. 

Elaine Godfrey at The Atlantic titled her article, “If Democrats Can Lose in Virginia, They Can Lose Almost Anywhere.”  Alexandra Desanctis at National Review came at it from the other direction with the celebratory, "Virginia Is a Purple State After All."  These takes are stunning, but accurate, revelations about the direction of our country.  Two decades ago, Republicans could count on a reliably-red Virginia.  Last Tuesday notwithstanding, it’s now Democrats who claim Virginia as safe territory.  Remember when New Hampshire, Colorado, Arizona, and Georgia were reliably Republican?  It wasn’t too long ago, was it?  How many elections do we have before a purpling Texas goes full blue?

Looking to other electoral victories on Tuesday, many Republicans gloated that voters in Minneapolis voted 56 to 44 percent against abolishing their police department.  A sane populace would have voted 100 to 0 percent against such a preposterous, suicidal notion.  The fact that 44 percent of Minneapolis voters (and this is after mobs burned down much of their city and crime rates skyrocketed) think abolishing the police is a good idea is certainly not what I would call reason for celebration. 

There is an unhidden willingness on the part of Democratic leadership to sacrifice their pawns for the sake of advancing their broader agenda.  Terry McAuliffe will not be missed.  He was nothing more than one of those Politboro chaps pictured next to Stalin who gets airbrushed out once he's lost his usefulness.  In the span of a couple of days, the national conversation has already moved on from our "historic" "blowout" to the infrastructure bill, global warming, surrounding Joe Manchin's car, etc.  The Democrats retain an impressively callous indifference to jettisoning their own wounded off the side of the battleship in their drive for power in ways we don't yet fathom.  Hence, we are left asking questions like:

Doesn’t CNN and MSNBC know their ratings are abysmal?  Aren’t the Neverland Ranchers over at the Lincoln Project aware that we've figured out they're two-bit grifters?  Doesn't the Democrats' internal polling inform them that their proposed (insert nonsensical legislative bill) is unpopular with voters?  Don't they know pissing off suburban moms isn't the way to win elections?  Don't the mobs understand they're burning down their own neighborhoods, their own futures? 

Their answer to every one of these questions is, “Yes…and we don’t care.”  And why should they?  For all our gloating about our periodic electoral sweeps, we conservatives still don’t grasp the strategic attainment of totalitarian power, at least not in the sense that it’s understood by the Left.  The supposed "wake-up call" we just gave them was also given in 2016.   And in 2010.  And in 1994. 

And...is our nation currently farther to the left or farther to the right than we were after any of those elections?

I'm not proposing a solution to this problem because I don't have a solution.  What I'm saying is that we won't agree on a solution, or even think one necessary, until we fully grasp the nature of the power differentials taking place as we speak.  Last Tuesday's election will not change the leftward trajectory of this nation towards a desolate totalitarianism.  It won't even make a dent.  If anyone needs a wake-up call, it's us. 

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License

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