Once upon a time, in the far off year of 2022, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thought she learned a valuable lesson while watching the political landscape over the past few presidencies. She came to the conclusion that the Democrat Party wasn’t strong enough because it wasn’t radical enough.
As Politico reported at the time in an AOC puff piece at the time, the Democrats were still playing ball with people who have racist and wealthy agendas, and that if the Democrats stopped doing that and became even more leftist, the Democrats would have a healthy majority in the country:
The lesson many Democrats have learned from watching two previous Republican presidents — Donald Trump and George W. Bush, both of whom took office under disputed circumstances with a minority of the popular vote — is that political realities can be shaped by self-confident proclamation. Power can be seized by equally self-confident assertion. They did it on behalf of what the left saw as a benighted agenda that favored racists and the wealthy. No reason progressives can’t do it on behalf of an enlightened agenda — and awaken a robust majority that would be there if only people were presented sharp choices rather than blurry ones.
Meanwhile, these same people see the last two Democratic presidents — Obama and Bill Clinton — squandering their opportunities and disappointing natural supporters through constant calibration and by pretending that it is still the 1970s, and that the political game as the establishment plays it is still somehow on the level.
As usual, AOC is dead wrong. So wrong, in fact, that a Trump rally packed to overflowing happened in her own backyard with many attendees identifying as Democrats and cursing her name.
Over the course of the past few years, one of the lessons Democrats seem to not be learning is that the more radical they become, the less interested America gets.
Virginia’s Governor Terry McAuliffe is a perfect example of the radical left being so costly to the Democrat Party that it actually allowed Glenn Youngkin to walk through the door. Virginia’s Democrats had threatened the safety and well-being of Virginia’s children on the hubristic idea that it should spend more time and effort indoctrinating them than teaching them, resulting in the cover-up of a sexual assault by a student who identified as “non-binary.”
As I write this, the left’s radicalism is costing them in the polls as their agendas have collapsed the economy, caused crime to spike, and left the border wide open. Even mainstay voting blocs are bleeding out.
Meanwhile, Republicans only becoming more conservative has benefited them. Texas Governor Greg Abbott had largely upset Texas Republicans during the pandemic, but has won back quite a bit of support from the Republican base by embracing border policies and even defying Democrat Party attempts to stop him from protecting the border.
Governor Ron DeSantis turned Florida from a swing state to a Republican stronghold by fighting Democrats on almost every radical front they had in Florida, including taking on Disney over a parental rights issue.
Donald Trump is currently gaining a stronger lead over Joe Biden by promising conservative solutions to Democrat-caused problems.
I don’t know how to make this more obvious to Republicans in office.
The more conservative you behave, govern, or legislate, the more support you get.
This might be because the spite that America is feeling against the Democrat Party right now is so thick you’d have to use an axe to hack through it, but the play right now isn’t to be moderate, it’s to ride the pendulum swing that the left had built so far up to the other side.
America wants conservatism with a little bit of libertarianism for spice. Especially after what the Democrats pulled in New York, it’s pretty clear that the middle ground is somewhere far to the right of where the Democrats currently are, and Republicans need to start pulling further right…to make it right.
(READ: Now Is Not the Time to Be Centrist)
America is not a left-leaning country. I think it was convinced it was at one point, but now that America has gotten a taste of what the left truly is, many have realized it’s a horrible flavor.