by Peter Pavarini
The American political landscape has begun to shift. Since November 2, 2021, the mainstream media have grudgingly acknowledged what many of us have seen for months. But it took Joe Biden’s plummeting poll numbers and Glenn Youngkin’s come-from-behind gubernatorial victory to impose some honesty on the pundits.
Leave it to Real Time host Bill Maher to say what over half the country has been thinking since the start of Biden’s dysfunctional presidency. Average Americans simply aren’t swallowing the woke ideology Democrats have attempted to cram down our throats. As Maher has pointed out – to the disdain of the Progressive mob – Democrats have come across as cringey, “out of touch” “snobs”[i]. Definitely not the kind of people who win elections.
Although I’ve never been a big fan of Bill Maher, I must admit he seems to be the only left-of-center celebrity with the intellectual honesty and guts to warn Democrats they are headed toward an electoral Armageddon. Other than a few veteran Democratic strategists like James Carville (who has been saying much the same thing), the loudest voices on the Left have dismissed Maher as just another “angry white man” who has gone off the rails because of his white privilege.[ii]
Democrats Are Dug In
How can the Nation’s so-called “elite” remain so impervious to constructive criticism in the face of such a collapse in popular support?
History will remember 2020 and 2021 not only for the COVID pandemic, but also for the plague of wokeism infecting our schools, our corporate boardrooms and almost every other facet of American life. Because of the wholesale disruptions we have experienced, we came to realize that a formerly free people had unwittingly traded their freedom for political correctness. Among other things, we learned that the definition of “hate speech” had been broadened to cover just about anything the Left disagreed with.[iii] We learned that our high-priced universities were really no more than indoctrination camps intended to churn out ill-educated[iv] Progressives bent on subverting America’s values, traditions and the Rule of Law. We learned that – at least in Oregon – eliminating English and math proficiency standards is thought to be the best way to ensure minorities feel equal to their peers.
As Victor Davis Hanson explains in his new book, The Dying Citizen[v], few nations have been so eager as the United States to degrade the value of its citizenship and national traditions. Multiculturalism -once the source of our Nation’s strength – has been converted into an archaic form of tribalism that eventually will destroy us.
Liberalism and Leftism Are Not the Same
Whether intended or not, Bill Maher’s recent monologues have illustrated the clear difference between liberalism and Leftism. What he calls “wokeism” is nothing more than a 21st century version of Leftism. While that strain of mental illness has persisted in our country for over 100 years among a small number of malcontents, it thankfully never gained much traction in mainstream America until the dawning of the Age of Obama.
In its classical form, liberalism was the foundation of all free societies. The Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the works of John Locke and Thomas Paine laid the groundwork for what became known as liberalism in the 19th century. At first, “liberal”[vi] only referred to the kind of education that made someone truly free – the liberal arts, the liberal sciences, and the liberal professions. Its other meaning related to the act of being generous, that is giving liberally. Generosity is characteristic of a free people, so this meaning relates to the first.
However, the word “liberal” was appropriated by collectivists between 1880 and 1940, and thus arose the political term “liberalism”.
Liberals are not necessarily Leftists, although many have morphed into being so. In some respects, they want the same things: reduced income inequality, better working conditions, more affordable housing and healthcare. But there the similarities end. Liberals want the gap between rich and poor to shrink; Leftists want no class differences at all. Liberals believe in free speech; Leftists believe speech – especially political speech – can be violence and must be suppressed. Liberals believe a person’s character is what matters most; Leftists believe a person’s immutable characteristics (especially race) are what matters most. Liberals believe individual and civil liberties are paramount; Leftists believe conformity and submission to the approved collective is essential to a stable society. Liberals believe true diversity includes the diversity of thought; Leftists believe diversity of thought, especially in matters of faith and religion, is a genuine threat to society.
In short, liberals generally adhere to the principle that people have a right to live freely so long as their choices and actions do not prevent others from doing the same (they share this view with libertarians). Leftists, on the other hand, believe that the government – not individuals – has the right to dictate how people must live and what they should say and believe.[vii]
Do Liberals Have More in Common with Conservatives Than with Leftists?
The more you know about Leftism aka “wokeism”, the more you realize that the values of liberals often overlap with those of conservatives more than they do with Leftists. In their own way, true liberals love America as much as conservatives do. That cannot be said of Leftists. Their greatest wish is to extinguish the American Experiment and replace it with a monolithic global state.
If I were an “old school liberal” as Bill Maher calls himself, I too would be ticked that the views of the Squad, Bernie Sanders and approximately 45% of the Democratic Congressional Caucus (who certainly do not represent the interests of most Americans) have threatened the very future of the Democratic Party. Because I am not, there’s a part of me that wants to see a great Red Wave sweep across the US in 2022 and 2024 and confine DNC ideology to a few urban hellholes I no longer have any interest in visiting. On the other hand, we need a robust two-party system to function as a constitutional republic, so I would be satisfied with a return to the political balance of power we had before the rise of wokeism.
The Collapse of the Obama Coalition
Evidence of the disconnect between Leftism and mainstream America was revealed by the 2020 exit polls. Even though Democrats claim to have won both houses of Congress as well as the White House, they achieved these ephemeral victories at the expense of dismantling the coalition that swept Obama to power in 2008 and 2012. In a swing state like Wisconsin, 24% of young voters (ages 18-29) moved their votes from the D to the R column between 2016 and 2020. A 18% shift from D to R was also seen among Latinos in Nevada, another state Biden supposedly won. And most incredibly, 18% of Nevada Blacks left the Democrat camp for the Republican camp between 2016 and 2020, despite a summer of BLM riots and non-stop media coverage of supposed police misconduct. These patterns were repeated in many other states – both battleground and non-battleground.[viii] The data is not yet in, but there’s no reason to think the trend did not continue in 2021 off-year elections.
As Clarice Feldman said in her recent American Thinker blog, “[Some citizens] may choose to live in a post-legal, post-rational world where ill-educated mobs rule, but the rest of us do not.”[ix] Likewise, some hardcore Democrats may decide to go for broke and try to remake America into a socialist dystopia before the voters turn them out. But most true liberals – if they honestly believe in the tenets of liberalism – won’t want to become the Whigs of this century. They will take heed of voices like Bill Maher and survive to fight another day.
[i] Real Time monologue, November 19, 2021.
[ii] See. E.g., David Brooks, “Joe Biden Is Succeeding”, New York Times, November 18, 2021.
[iii] 80% of college students say they self-censor in their interactions with peer and professors. 85% say the feel pressure to answer questions on a test in such a way that will please their teachers.
[iv] Today’s average college student puts in 60% less study time than a college student in 1961.
[v] Basic Books, 2021.
[vi] From the Latin root “liber” which means both “free” and “book”.
[vii] Jason Paluch, “Liberalism vs. Leftism”, White Rose Magazine. See also, Ted Rall, “The Difference Between Liberals and Leftists”, www.rasmussenreports.com July 13, 2019. Dennis Prager also has a nice expose on this subject entitled “Left or Liberal” in which he explores six dimensions of thought that are dramatically different among liberals and Leftists: race, capitalism, nationalism, view of America, free speech, and Western civilization. www.PragerU.com
[viii] Ruy Teixiera, “Ten Things We Know About That Went Right (and Wrong) for Democrats in 2020”, The Optimistic Left, October 28, 2021.
[ix] C. Feldman, “Heroes and Zeroes: The Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict”, American Thinker, November 21, 2021:
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