From Thomas Friedman‘s “There Was a Loser Last Night. It Was America,” posted in the N.Y. Times on 11.4.20:

“But Democrats have a lot to rethink as well, notes Michael Sandel, a professor at Harvard and author of ‘The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good.’

“’Even though Joe Biden emphasized his working-class roots and sympathies,’ Sandel told me, ‘the Democratic Party continues to be more identified with professional elites and college-educated voters than with the blue-collar voters who once constituted its base. Even so epochal an event as a pandemic, bungled by Trump, did not change this.

“‘Democrats need to ask themselves: Why do [so] many working people embrace a plutocrat-populist whose policies do little to help them? Democrats need to address the sense of humiliation felt by working people who feel the economy has left them behind and that credentialed elites look down on them.’

“Again, while Biden made small inroads with working-class voters, there seems to be no huge shift. Maybe because many working-class Trump voters not only feel looked down upon, but they also resent what they see as cultural censorship from liberal elites, coming out of college campuses.”

In other words, wokester scolding.

“As Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, wrote in an Oct. 26 essay, ‘Trump is, for better or worse, the foremost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tide that has swept along the media, academia, corporate America, Hollywood, professional sports, the big foundations, and almost everything in between.’

“’To put it in blunt terms,’ he continued, ‘for many people, he’s the only middle finger available — to brandish against the people who’ve assumed they have the whip hand in American culture. This may not be a very good reason to vote for a president, and it doesn’t excuse Trump’s abysmal conduct and maladministration.'”

And yet these assholes voted for him regardless. Despite all the horror and arrogance and the collossal pandemic mismanagement, they stuck with him. And that not only makes them idiots and fools but socially subversive chaos agents. They’re voting like children. Worse, like delinquents.

From “The Democrats Just Got Crushed,” an 11.4 essay by The Week‘s Damon Linker:

“So please, Democrats, look in the mirror and show a little humility. You’re not nearly as self-evidently wonderful or widely loved as you’d like to believe. You are not destined to prevail anywhere. You share a country with a large group of people who hate your guts, and who aren’t going to submit to your rule or go along with your giddy plans to remake the nation in your image. It’s time to start acting like you understand this implacable fact and all it implies about the limits of your power and the parameters of the possible.

“American politics is a war of attrition right now. The sooner Democrats learn to live with that fact, the better.”