Democrats face a blizzard of concerns coming into the midterms.  Principal among these would be party identity.  It's pretty much accepted anymore that Democrats are "the left," but what does that mean?  What does the left believe?  What are its policy prescriptions?

And who's pulling this train, anyhow?

The left doesn't know just how loony it wants to go behind a phalanx of fighting feministic females.  There's the Establishment Left of near-octogenarian Nancy Pelosi; there's the Wannabe Establishment Left of Lizzy Warren; there's the Outright Racist Left of Maxine Waters; there's the Deep State Left of Hillary Clinton; and then there's the newcomer warming up in the bullpen, the What-Me-Worry Left of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Bernie Sanders hasn't abandoned the field of combat, but he has clearly lost traction.  We see his name less and less in the headlines, and, ever since that messiness with his wife at that private college that got him a third really nice house, The Bern's brand ain't all that shiny anymore.

Then there's the matter of turned off voters.  We Trumpkins had wondered if anybody on the left had even noticed how vicious such lefty go-to outfits as Antifa and BLM had become.  It's one thing to march and shout and demonstrate – quite another to seriously hurt people, as these groups had taken to doing.  Spearheaded by one Brandon Straka in the #WalkAway movement, many Dems decided they wanted nothing to do with thugs.  Not only are many WalkAways not Democrats anymore; they're not even liberals.

All this turmoil is causing serious concern on the serious left, who can be defined as the relatively few lefties who care about appearances anymore.  They are hemorrhaging support among a once key constituency that used to be called young upwardly mobile something or others, aka yuppies.  Potentially, this is millions of voters.

What to do?

It's no secret that the left favors immigration by the truckload from anywhere.  Teddy Kennedy (who else?) got this ball rolling back in the sixties with legislation that basically threw open America's borders.  The idea was to turn immigrants into instant Democrats upon arrival.  I saw this in practice when my Salvadoran wife was naturalized in 2009.  The scene swarmed with Democrat activists signing up the new Americans.

No Republican counterweight was in evidence.

It's gotten worse just since 2009.  A Brooklyn judge, one LaShann DeArcy Hall, swore in a batch of new citizens and then promptly advised them to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech by "taking a knee."  These people had just become Americans, and already a leftist fanatic was drenching them in loony left politics.

Well.  Democrats have their problems, and they are welcome to them.  Unfortunately, what's a problem for them becomes a problem for America because the left always, without exception, talks the high road but takes the low road in resolving issues.  Therein lies our response.

The first step, obviously, is to close the borders.  President Trump is hot on that trail, and we need to back him by voting in House members who support him.  A wall is necessary to send the right message.  Michael Kinsley, oddly enough, rightly said that if you're afraid of going too far (with a wall, for example), you risk not going far enough.

Voting in representatives of this kind will in time change Washington's rules and kill the Washington influence-peddling racket.  Jailing high-ranking lawbreakers would be key in that particular message.  Voting Trump in was a major part of the task, but he needs the tools to do the job, and personnel equals policy.

The second step is to strengthen our credibility by aligning policy with our philosophical roots.  In this way, we attract the #WalkAways, whose naïveté and idealism made them vulnerable to liberal lies in the first place.  We need to show them policy consistent with principles – the principles of the Constitution, in fact.

A third step is the need for a national megaphone of our own to counter the mainstream media.  Though fairer than the alphabet media, Fox News is neither conservative nor classically liberal – a powerful media megaphone is needed to do what the MSM do for the communists.  Any billionaires reading this?

Tactically, a fourth step is simply to follow the president and call the opposition by its proper name.  Names are labels, and labels identify or classify.  A lefty tactic is to sow confusion among us, and the left's war on labels does just that by blurring important distinctions.  Here we have to distinguish the vicious progressives from the milder liberals, sort of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks of our day.  Progs are fascists/communists (same thing), and we need to quit pretending they aren't.  Liberals range from the #WalkAway people to soft socialists.

Some of these steps are for our elected representatives, while others are for you and me where we live.  Some are for both.  That's as it should be.  It is, after all, a government of, by, and for the people.

That's we.