Our political reality is no longer Left versus Right. It is now the Left versus common sense—and that change is changing voting patterns in this country.

The political Left in America has been trending so hard and so fast to the left in recent decades that it raises the question, “What lies beyond the Left on the Left?” Now we know. When you break so hard to the left, you leave behind common sense.

Once upon a time, Left and Right in America had enough common ground to make communication possible and compromise not uncommon. In those days, everybody knew the party of the left was the party of big government and higher taxes. “Tax and spend” was the mantra of the Left in the time of FDR and his protégée LBJ. (JFK was a brief exception. His tax cuts—which Reagan copied—marked him as in some ways a man of the right.)

Columnist Robert Novak wrote that “God put the Republican Party on earth to cut taxes.” The job of the more-or-less hapless opposition to FDR and LBJ was railing against government spending and talking about the need to balance the budget. Although Senator Everett Dirksen evidently did not actually say “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money,” those words attributed to him captured the spirit of the opposition.

Today, the Left has completely abandoned all spending restraint in favor of “free” college and “single payer” healthcare—which means nobody pays which really means everybody pays because costs are abstracted from the beneficiaries of goods and services and seemingly passed on to a third party. News flash: We are the third party!

But the important point to understand is that the party of the Left has moved far beyond mere reckless spending. While LBJ was eager to spend trillions to purchase the votes of inner city blacks in perpetuity with money distributed by welfare bureaucrats, showing no concern for the cost to taxpayers, I believe even LBJ would have drawn the line at welcoming illegal aliens into the country and actively importing Muslims from the Islamist-inflamed Middle East in order to put them on the dole for their votes. To do so defies common sense and evinces a lack of neighborly concern for one’s fellow Americans.

Big spending is no longer the name of the game. Power is. It’s no longer just about spending obscene amounts of money to guarantee votes. Now the Left is willing to sacrifice our national security and the prosperity of their fellow citizens in order to maintain it. The Left has not simply abandoned common sense with regard to spending, it has abandoned common sense altogether.

In fact, it has set itself against common sense. Chromosomes no longer matter to the Left. If a boy “identifies” as a girl, then according to the Left he must be given access to the showers and locker rooms set aside for girls—and in some places you can be fined for calling him a “he” if he objects.

The Left now also rejects the First Amendment—because free speech might upset someone. Consequently, universities must prevent people from lecturing on campus if they might say something upsetting to some students. And people who believe we need to take common-sense steps to protect ourselves from Islamic terrorists are simply victims of a psychological condition, a phobia like claustrophobia or a morbid fear of heights, and we call this “Islamophobia.” The lengths the Left is willing to go along this line are nothing short of astonishing. For example, the San Diego school board has brought in representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas front group, to address Islamophobia among students! No kidding, CAIR representatives are working with the school district to develop social studies lessons and other programs to promote “a more positive image of Islam.” I am confident that during the Hitler years the San Diego school board did not bring in representatives of the German American Bund (an American Nazi organization dedicated to promoting a more positive image of Nazi Germany) to develop school programs to address Naziphobia among students.

These changes on the Left go a long way toward explaining the changes in voting patterns we are witnessing. As the Left moved out into the twilight zone “beyond the Left” and took their party with them, even voters who pay little attention to politics began to notice that something strange was happening. Americans who have always voted for the Democrats are becoming estranged from that party because of its rejection of common sense.

Leftists are no longer the liberal/progressives of old, one side of the traditional American political debate. Their self-proclaimed project is now “fundamentally transforming” America. In the new post-American America they are planning all bets will be off and common sense will have no claims in the public square.

Everyone realizes that Donald Trump’s election was not a victory of the traditional political Right. Too many members of the Republican establishment opposed him for that to be the case. However, a rejection of the strange new Left was an important part of his victory. No doubt many were voting for common sense when they voted for Donald Trump’s “common sense conservatism.”

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