I sincerely hope the left isn’t too astonished at the success currently being enjoyed by the Republican party in terms of support after their success with appointing Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Attacking a man with horrid accusations with little to no proof is not a good look, and trying to sell it with hysterics makes you look even worse. Furthermore, when you have a media attempting to ram the narrative down your throat that Kavanaugh is indeed guilty despite the massive flaws in testimonies, a collapse of support is imminent.

But proof and bad testimonies aside, the attacks on Kavanaugh were driven by more than just Democrats attempting to keep some semblance of power in the Supreme Court. While it may have been the driver, the vehicle they used was identity politics, which the hard left and the Democratic party have wholly embraced.

And that was their first mistake.

Despite the left’s leaning so hard on identity politics as its main strategy to obtain and keep power, America has consistently resisted it. It’s a divisive strategy that involves creating winners and losers based on things that no one can help, such as ethnicity and sex. It punishes and rewards people simply for existing in a certain way.

Thinking this way creates villains out of innocent people. Social justice adherents tilt at windmills thinking they’re monsters, and harmless people get hurt in the process. To live that kind of lifestyle, it requires living with a large amount of unhappiness and finding enemies in every aspect of our society. Can’t find one? Create one. Your created foe and resulting problem might be a complete fabrication on your part, but at least you “started an important conversation.”

Defiance of this narrative, even if it’s civil debate, is equatable to actual violence, and thus any kind of opposition must be handled with the utmost intensity. This can include attacking people physically, or destroying their property if need be. While this may look heroic to politicians, members of the media, activists, professors, and any student unfortunate enough to fall into their webs, for the rest of us it looks incredibly ugly.

This ugliness is what we saw when activists claiming to represent women screeched out unintelligible nonsense during Kavanaugh’s hearings. We saw it when the mob charged the doors of the Supreme Court and began trying to bang it down like a scene out of World War Z. We saw it as Twitter lit up with threats calling for the assassination or assault of Republican members. All of it driven by the idea that Kavanaugh was going to send America spiraling into a place that punishes people on the basis of sexuality, skin color, sex, and more.

Ya know…the kind of place the social justice adherent parts of the left are already trying to do…and we noticed the hypocrisy. So America has turned away from it. Republicans are seeing a massive boost to their numbers.

If the left is surprised by this, then they aren’t paying attention to their recent history.

Hillary Clinton also fueled her campaign with identity politics. The main theme of her campaign seemed to be that she deserved it because she was a woman, and it was about time. She claimed that a lot of the heat coming her way wasn’t due to her horrid past of bad decisions and lack of real accomplishments, but because of sexism.

“The future is female!” we’d hear from her supporters, who vocally called for the rejection of another “old, white man” in the White House. Celebrities championing feminism like Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham were put front and center, parading Clinton’s care for women around as her main selling point.

If Clinton had other things to talk about, we didn’t hear much about it. They were continuously overshadowed by the identity politics working its way from her campaign and into the media.

Meanwhile, Trump was talking to people about jobs, foreign policy, media malpractice, and expanding the success of America. Team Clinton’s response was to label him every “ist” and “phobe” they could find in the dictionary. All outrage, little substance.

When election time came, the media — admittedly including yours truly — that had pegged Clinton to win by a landslide found themselves completely broadsided as Trump walked away with the victory.

Identity politics didn’t win the day. In fact, as many examined the scene after the dust cleared, it was the catalyst that led to her failure.

As Alyssa Bornhorst wrote at The Federalist:

Most women are not so simply deceived by such opportunistic slogans for female empowerment. Nor are they so helpless that they need Hillary Clinton to show them the way to excel and achieve success. Liberal assumptions underestimate women. Recent criticisms of female Trump supporters indicate that liberals might not learn their lesson this time around. The young girls whom liberals claim to be so concerned about would be better off ignoring their self-appointed liberal guardians.

John B. Judis over at the Washington Post also made a similar observation when he wrote that Clinton’s team and supporters “overestimated the strength of a coalition based on identity politics” and that Clinton had assumed that everyone belonging to a certain minority group all fit conveniently in the same box:

Infused with the promise of a rising American electorate, Clinton wrote off the significant slice of voters Democrats need — in states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin — to win majorities. But she also failed, except among single and college-educated women, to sufficiently rouse her target groups. Millennials, it turns out, care about more than the relief of their student debts. Hispanics don’t necessarily rate immigration reform first among their concerns, and many of them are as leery of illegal immigration as one of Trump’s so-called deplorables. They want a larger vision of the future. In this year’s election, Clinton didn’t give it to them, and for that reason her vote fell short even among the groups she relied on.

It’s worth pointing out the fact that Clinton and the left assuming that all members of a minority group were the same is racist, sexist, etc, in itself, but that’s its own article.

The punchline here is that Americans and identity politics didn’t mix. We’re too individualistic and would much rather get along than hate each other. Clinton wanted to unite certain groups and pit them against Trump’s supposed jingoistic future. Clinton was trying to appeal to people’s fear and loathing. Meanwhile, Trump was appealing to people’s desire for success.

She failed, but Trump didn’t. That should have been a massive lesson to the left, but it wasn’t. Its leaders like Elizabeth Warren began saying that the reason Clinton lost was that they weren’t leaning on the left’s new politics enough.

Fast forward to 2018, and the battle over Kavanaugh and America is seeing the full force of identity politics being used against an obviously innocent man. It’s the same ugly kind of politics we saw in 2016, and as it fails to stop Kavanaugh the left doubles, and triples, and quadruples down. It looks disgusting and people begin to wonder out loud if this is the kind of future we want for our children.

Republicans win, the left devolves further into mob tactics and public temper tantrums with claims that America is sexist, racist, and more.

And now Republicans are seeing more success than previously thought as the midterms approach.

“Get woke, go broke,” is the popular saying now. Anything that embraces the social justice ideology of identity politics begins to wilt, and quickly. The Democrat party is no different. It was proven in 2016, and it’s being proven now.