Fast Takes: Trump derangement boosts the left, Dems own transgender lunacy and more

Conservative: Trump Derangement Boosts the Left

The “effort by the liberal establishment to undo populism” will gain new life if “Democrats regain control” of Congress,” argues UnHerd’s Alicia Nieves. The “Democratic establishment” is in “panic” that the “MAGA revolution” may “become an enduring force in American politics that could outlast Trump himself.” President Trump’s “personality made it easy to cast him as a villain,” but that “narrative failed to stop his movement” as Trump has “institutionalized his populist revolt.” Now the Dem establishment is so “consumed with recovering its former authority” by killing MAGA that it’s “overlooking the socialist insurgency growing within its own party” — even as the left has “lost its grasp on political reality,” and “become incapable of formulating a convincing strategy for returning to power through democratic means.”

Culture critic: Dems Own Transgender Lunacy

“Transgenderism has become the tar baby for the Democrats: a thing they can’t let go, can’t help promoting and defending even when it costs them dearly,” muses Hadley Arkes at The Wall Street Journal. The Biden administration “sought to sweep away any barriers in federal policy to the promotion of transgenderism,” while the Trump team has worked “to counter and reverse these policies.” “Despite widespread public disapproval” of promoting “transgenderism in all of its forms,” Dems still fight even basic efforts “to scale it back” — so if they gain control of Congress, they’ll surely “move at once against” every Trump move diminishing federal support for transgenderism. “No power will overcome the willingness of the Democrats to fall on their swords on this issue.”

From the right: The Wrong Choice To Fight Inflation

Electing Democrats to tackle affordability “would be like making a pyromaniac fire marshal,” warns The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen, since “most of the higher prices Americans are paying today are a hangover from the last time Democrats controlled the levers of power.” Aiming to “end fossil fuel,” their regulatory assault slashed drilling rigs to “about half the 2018 peak” — an ongoing disruption that means “higher, not lower, prices at the pump.” And trillions in progressive spending served as the “original sin” that “overstimulated this economy” and “poured kerosene on the fire” of inflation. Even now, Dem candidates push a “miasma of spending” on schemes like “Medicare-for-all.” They “still hate fossil fuels and love government spending — which is a sure path to more inflation, not less.” 

Speech patrol: China Bullies Soccer Star

After “French football star Kylian Mbappé” in passing referred to Mao as “a Chinese dictator,” China’s state broadcaster “has ended all broadcasts of [premier Spanish soccer league] La Liga matches and removed all content featuring Mbappé,” citing a “zero-tolerance policy towards any words or actions that hurt the feelings of the Chinese people,” marvels Spiked’s Hugo Timms. As a result, Mbappé has been obliged to “kowtow” and apologize in the mode of a Maoist “struggle session” by “endorsing one of the central mythologies of the CCP — namely, that Mao was some kind of benevolent and progressive leader.” Beware: If we can’t call a dictator a dictator, “then the struggle for liberty is already lost.”

Iconoclast: Hate Drives Progressivism

“Progressivism is not only a set of positions but a mindset,” observes Lionel Shriver at The New Criterion: “A temperament, a disposition. A constellation of dominant emotions.” Progs’ “driving emotions” are “negative,” seeking “less to realize a Shangri-la than to destroy what, and more particularly whom, they revile.” Though “often accused of credulous optimism about human nature,” they operate in a mood that is “typically hostile, resentful, vengeful, accusatory, aggressive if not murderous, vituperative and furious.” “Obsessed with the concept of power, and therefore obsessed with attaining it,” the movement “has a collective case of oppositional-defiance disorder” in which “the indignation, the self-righteousness, the intoxicating rage are the point, in the service of which cause is secondary if not irrelevant.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board