The Left Is Going for Broke This Year. Good.

Just up the street, my liberal neighbors still have their #WeBelieve yard signs out front from a year ago that declare that "Kindness is Everything." And the lesbians at the top of the hill still have their "Hate Has No Home Here" yard sign displayed. So I suppose the liberal anti-NRA hate-fest after the Parkland school shooting had nothing to do with them. Just a few yahoos at CNN going for ratings gold. Yes, liberals, we just need to give the administrative state yet more power, wave our hands, and declare guns illegal, and that will end the plague of young men aching to become "professional school shooters." Pay no attention to the fact that the administrative state is utterly useless and, as the Brits say, "not fit for purpose" and is not even that good at siccing the intelligence community on the opposition party.

I thought conventional liberal wisdom was that their efforts to politicize gun control really had not delivered at the polls. I thought liberals were sadder and wiser now after failing to bury the NRA in previous massacre panics. And I thought it was conventional wisdom that you did not want to wake the gun nuts up from their slumber at election time. Yet here is Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) telling us that the panic is on, as the Tommy Dorsey song has it. The debate over guns, the "me too" movement against sexual misconduct and the federal government's handling of hurricane recovery in Puerto Rico will give Florida Democrats victories up and down the November ballot, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson predicted Thursday. No doubt he'll be right, unless the left's gun control and #MeToo rhetoric bring out the Trump voters in their millions, the kind of people who think Trump "cares about people like me." See, I think the Republican Party has the inside track right now because it is the unapologetic party of the nation. The party of the nation gets to say the U.S. is the best country in the world, that we are going to Make America Great Again, and we are all Americans here, love it or leave it, and jobs, jobs, jobs. But the Democrats really don't believe in America. They believe in America's Original Sin of slavery, followed by the Trail of Tears, lynchings, back of the bus, racism, sexism, homophobia, and their politics depends on dividing America. The liberal elite is too good for America, and the rank and file are the helpless victims of America. So my man Kevin D. Williamson is wrong when he tut-tuts that "An Enemies List Is Not a Philosophy." It doesn't work, Kevin, to suggest at a CNN town hall that we should cool the rhetoric and have a serious discussion of the issues. You need a take-no-prisoners advocate like Dana Loesch at such events and then have her raise the stakes by accusing the "legacy media" of whoring after white mothers mourning their dead children and ignoring black mothers in Chicago. You need someone to fight for "people like me." You need a party whose only concern is to Make America Great Again. It really is about time that the legacy conservative media get the Trump effect. Trump won the presidential nomination because he is a fighter, as Bush II and Romney clearly were not. Then he won the rust belt states because he persuaded the white working class that he cares about average Americans, people like them, as Bush and Romney had not. And now, a year after his inauguration, Trump's record is about as conservative as you can get, with a staggering corporate tax cut that seems to have jolted corporate America out of its overtaxed slumber and a search-and-destroy deregulation effort that makes Ronald Reagan look like a piker. Conservatism should be about ideas, not enemies lists, writes Williamson. But hey, how about both? If the left is deciding to put all its chips on guns and #MeToo and firing people who don't have the liberal-approved ideas on guns and gays and affirmative consent, I say bring it on. Yeah. Trump fights for people like me. You can call it enemies-list politics. But I reckon that when you find yourself in a knife fight, you should at least bring a knife. The lesson of my adult life is simple. The only reason the Democrats gave up on sixties leftism was that they lost four of the five presidential elections after 1968. We are New Democrats, moderates, Bill Clinton told us in 1992, and then he sicced his wife on the health care system in 1993. The only reason the Democrats will give up on the Obama lurch to the left will be a similar experience: two terms of Trump followed by you ain't seen nothing yet. Then all your liberal friends will swear they are nice, kind moderates. Until next time. Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on U.S. government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.