E.J. Dionne, Jr., a Washington Post radical-left columnist, began his November 4 election analysis by warning that if Democrats don't "respond with urgency" to the "defeat" in the elections, "they will surrender the country to a Republican Party still infected by Trumpism.  That term was repeated in the penultimate paragraph, asserting the Biden's "task was not only to defeat Trump but also to replace him with a more hopeful and practical vision of how our country can be governed."

What does "a more hopeful and practical vision of how our country can be governed" possibly mean?  Then again, what does Dionne mean by the term "Trumpism"?

A slight, but not complete, digression: Dionne's comment on the need "to defeat Trump" and also "to replace him" with Dionne's image of hopefulness reminded me of David Plouffe's bullying comment, June 2016, that not only must Trump be defeated, but he and his kind must be destroyed thoroughly.  I do not doubt that a radical lefty like E.J. Dionne, Jr. shares, with Plouffe, the same totalitarian mindset.

Dionne, typical of the political pundits, partly blames Terry McAuliffe's defeat by Republican political neophyte Glenn Youngkin on the failure of the Democrat-controlled Congress to pass Biden's vast spending bills on infrastructure and on social policy.  Yet columnist Dionne cites exit polls in Virginia that "made clear hostility to Biden mattered more than alarm over Trump."  But did a voter's view of Biden or Trump determine his vote?

Interestingly, Dionne, if only tangentially, touched on the radical school board issue, writing that Democrats "must be more aggressive in responding to a right-wing strategy of disrupting school boards all over the nation and seeking to censor books not to the far right's liking."  On the censorship point, is it the "far right" that got Huckleberry Finn removed from school libraries?  On the disruptive school board meeting point, are we supposed to envision hordes of pitchfork-carrying deplorable parents marching on schools "all over the nation," demanding the teaching of creationism?  The only incident at a school board that comes to mind is the arrest of an angry parent upset that he was not taken seriously in his allegation that his daughter had been sexually assaulted in a girls' restroom by a skirt-wearing male student.  I have seen no reference to that incident, nor to a poll question on the subject, in media analyses of the Virginia gubernatorial result.  School officials at first denied the fact of the assault.  Later, they acknowledged that it had occurred — indeed, the alleged perpetrator was removed to a different school, it was learned, where he allegedly assaulted another girl (it not being clear that the alleged perp wore a skirt during the second incident).

Dionne's assertion of disruptive school board meetings all over the country ties in nicely with Attorney General Garland's call to consider as "domestic terrorists" all parents opposed to woke practices and theory in the schools.  But Dionne does not think to credit at least some of Youngkin's vote to parental concern that school authorities tolerate deviant practices in the country's schools.

For all the continued leftist talk about "Trumpism," I can't think of a single column that alludes to "Bidenism."  "Trumpism," for me, is simply conservative populism, which encompasses a foreign policy resting on principles of national self-respect and economic principles committed to the common good, leading to lids on inflation, regulation, and taxation.  "Bidenism" is a political phenomenon where the president is not a leader, but a receiver — of dictates, drafted for him to approve, from the most radically left advisers and staffers — people who share the deny-reality ideas of an E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Bidenism is a bad approach to governing.  It exalts irresponsible people into positions of faux authority.  It is, in brief, a bad cause.

Remember, it is lost causes that are worth dying for, not bad causes.  The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 was a bad cause; it took seven decades for the people of Russia to realize this.  The Woke Revolution is the bad cause of this 21st century.

Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 41, wrote: "A bad cause seldom fails to betray itself."  Why did Terry McAuliffe lose his bid for a second term as Virginia governor to Glenn Youngkin?  Because any cause that denies reality, as woke thinking does, is a bad cause.  On November 2, 2021, in the Old Dominion, it betrayed itself for all to see.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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