Since Donald Trump’s shocking victory, America has been engulfed in a conversation about race and identity that has been both constructive and schizophrenic. Any constructive dialogue requires “active listening”—telling the other side that you hear and understand their concerns. I posted a piece at Forbes recently that, in part, attempts to tell liberals that conservatives hear what they’re saying about the implications of appointing someone like former Breitbart CEO and alt-right panderer Steve Bannon to a senior position in the White House.
President-elect Trump’s decision to appoint former Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus rather than Bannon as chief of staff is, on a balance, a good sign. But conservatives should trust but verify Trump’s intentions. I have personally dedicated myself to the eradication of the alt-right as an idea. The alt-right is a political death cult that is virulently anti-American and incompatible with conservative ideas about human dignity. In other words, I would say to my liberal friends, I get it. We may not agree about Trump’s intentions or the threat Bannon poses to freedom and decency, but I understand your concerns. I hear you.
To my honest liberals friends—and I have many I dearly love and don’t merely tolerate or put up with—I would suggest the key to understanding the conservative perspective post-Trump is to study the rhetoric of outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
From the perspective of many conservatives, Reid is a textbook bigot. According to the textbook, the full definition of a bigot is “a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially: one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance.”
Reid is not a racial bigot per se, but he’s a bigot in every other sense of the word. He embodies what is essentially an alt-left blue state nationalism that treats non-members as subhuman and morally inferior. To be a conservative in Reid’s alt-left reality is to be guilty of racism, misogyny and indifference to poverty until proven innocent.
This latent bigotry is pervasive on the Left. It is a perspective that has fused with the corneas of many liberals. They’re stuck viewing the world a certain way. This attitude is part of what voters rejected on Election Day. For decades, Democrats deposited counterfeit compassion in the hearts and minds of voters. In 2016, the check finally bounced. Liberals are in shock because “they care” and are blind to the possibility the election outcome may, in part, be a consequence of their failed policies. Reid has been the leading enabler of this mindset.
A few case studies:
Framing the election as a victory for racism instead of a failure of liberalism
After the election, Reid issued a characteristically self-righteous, overwrought and vindictive statement declaring Trump’s election has “emboldened the forces of hate and bigotry in America.”
“Watching white nationalists celebrate while innocent Americans cry tears of fear does not feel like America,” Reid intoned.
An aide said Reid was “appalled by the rush to normalize Trump.” Yet, Reid’s statement merely illustrated how he has normalized bigotry and elitism on the Left.
As Opportunity Lives and many outlets including the Wall Street Journal noted, Trump won about one-third of counties like Erie, Pennsylvania that Obama won twice. Reid’s suggestion that these places became havens for white nationalists is absurd. In fact, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) called Reid’s statement “an absolute embarrassment to the Senate as an institution, our Democratic party, and the nation.”
Even Michael Moore said it’s ridiculous to explain Trump’s victory as a victory for racism. During an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Moore said, “They’re not racist. They twice voted for a man whose middle name is Hussein.”
Reid’s statement shows he’s more alt-left than Michael Moore. He’s the Steve Bannon of the Left.
The Trent Lott vs. Harry Reid double standard —ideology trumps race
In 2002, during a celebration for U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday, then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said of the South Carolina Republican, “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.”
Lott’s comments set a firestorm of criticism from the Right and the Left. Even though Lott issued heartfelt apologies, Republicans knew they had to hold him accountable and forced him to resign.
In 2010, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann quoted Reid making racist comments about Barack Obama in this passage of their book “Game Change”: “He [Reid] was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama—a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.’”
Reid apologized but was allowed to retain his position by his party, normalizing the Left’s tendency to put ideology and party over race.
Describing opponents with epithets such as “evil”
Reid has a long history of expressing intolerance toward anyone who disagrees with his views. He described people protesting Obamacare as “evil-mongers” and dismissed Tea Party members as “anarchists” who “hate government” even though he knows full well that the Tea Party is a movement of constitutional conservatives.
If Reid had spent as much time improving the quality of his party’s ideas and solutions as he did belittling and misrepresenting his opponents, 2016 may have turned out differently for Democrats.
Rigging the system in his favor
Reid was devoted religiously to the message that Republicans were the “Party of No,” but no other Senate majority leader in history was less tolerant of dissent and debate. Reid used a tactic calling “filling the tree” to prevent the Republican minority from even offering amendments more than any other majority leader. Reid was unwilling even to debate competing ideas in many instances.
Reid also changed the rules to indulge his intolerance of dissent, even though he spoke against identical rules changes when he was in the minority.
In 2005, Republicans were considering using the “nuclear option”—changing Senate rules that require 60 votes to proceed with a simple majority vote—to push through President Bush’s judicial nominees.
Joe Biden, who was still a U.S. senator from Delaware at the time, said, “The nuclear option abandons America’s sense of fair play. It’s the one thing this country stands for: not tilting the playing field on the side of those who control and own the field.”
Reid wholeheartedly agreed. At that time Reid said, “The threat to change Senate rules is a raw abuse of power and will destroy the very checks and balances our founding fathers put in place to prevent absolute power by any one branch of government.”
Yet in 2013, Majority Leader Reid decided the rules didn’t apply to his team and he invoked the nuclear option to push through President Obama’s nominees, further normalizing liberal elitism.
There are other instances of nastiness and corruption too numerous to list—dismissing bipartisan compromise as “happy talk,” using land deals to help his friends and family, calling tourists “smelly,” and lying about his relationship with organized crime, and more.
Republicans are right to be on guard against the influence Steve Bannon may exercise in the White House. Thanks to Harry Reid, we’ve seen what happens when bigotry corrupts our democratic institutions.
John Hart is the Editor-in-Chief of Opportunity Lives. You can follow him on Twitter @johnhart333.
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