President Trump has the left’s number.  He spent a lifetime among the leftist glitterati.  He knows the moves they are going to make.  He’s setting them up for a fall every time, and he’s boosting his poll numbers every time he does it.

The left can’t get out of his trap because it’s based on leftists’ fundamental beliefs and who they are.

Some of this is set upon their irrational hatred of the man.  If Trump came out in favor of oxygen, leftists would call for everyone to stop breathing.

But at heart, the man is a builder, and he intuitively knows that any building must have a good foundation.  If this is lacking, the resulting structure will soon fall, no matter what is built upon it.

These days, the left is like an old, crumbling building that’s been dressed up with some fancy marble or new paint but is teetering and sinking into the ground.  It needs a new foundation to survive, but everyone knows that would mean a “fundamental transformation” (to coin a phrase) of that side of the political spectrum.  But everyone also knows what that would entail.

Leftists are thrashing around, desperately hoping some old tricks from the past will work, perhaps thinking they can curse their way into some new magical popularity or stumble into some new shiny way of fooling the people once more.   

Watching from the outside, they seem to be at disparate stages of grief at their loss of power: although some acknowledge their failures, they are in complete denial over their decline.  A recent piece from The Nation exemplifies several of their problems, starting with their complete denial over being a party in decline.

The Democratic Party needs to throw a punch, to make it clear who is hoarding wealth and power and who is paying the price. And above all, it needs to be relentless about one thing: affordability. Billionaires like Elon Musk and Donald Trump loot from working families while using culture wars to distract, divide, and conquer. They stoke outrage over DEI, put mass deportations on daytime TV, and flood social media with spectacle to keep attention off their smash-and-grab tactics. Meanwhile, life keeps getting more expensive — healthcare, housing, childcare, groceries — and the people in charge keep telling us to blame anyone but them.

Their false hope is that dressing up the façade of the party with a fresh coat of paint to gain attention will fix everything.

The second failure is structural, and just as consequential: Democrats are losing the war for attention. Politics isn’t just about passing laws and winning elections; it’s also about shaping the broader information environment in which those laws and elections take place. Conservatives understand this. That’s why they’ve spent decades building an infrastructure that doesn’t just participate in political debate but defines the terms.

Sorry to break it to them, but the left has always been the master at defining, or rather re-defining, words to their liking.  Pro-freedom patriots are playing catch up on that score, so leftists practicing what they’ve always done isn’t going to push them that much farther.  

It’s different for the left this time, there is a political realignment taking place around the globe, and spewing Gen Z buzz words isn’t going to cut it this time around.  Just as erecting a new façade on a building that is falling down won’t repair a crumbling foundation.

Leftists’ bedrock belief informs everything they do.  It permeates their national agenda.  Just like how replacing a foundation usually requires a complete teardown of a large structure, a complete makeover of a party will require a change in its foundational belief system.  That’s the only way they can “survive.”  Cosmetic changes won’t cut it.

Collectivism is the left’s bedrock belief.  It fundamentally guides everything leftists do.  So their only way out of the political wilderness is to get rid of it as soon as possible.  It’s the only way they can survive. 

D Parker is an engineer, inventor, wordsmith, and student of history, former director of communications for a civil rights organization, and a longtime contributor to conservative websites.  Find him on Substack.

Image: Chris Dodds via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.