Our university-run country isn’t working. It’s held together by Green Ideology (Gaia, the Mother of Creation), pro-abortion feminism, and elite entitlement. Its core weakness: the national majority doesn’t embrace an elite record of failure.
Complacent elite supporters should reflect on Andrew Abbott’s (pen name) discussion
of Ruy Teixeira’s current thinking. Along with co-author John Judis, Teixeira in 2002 wrote the seminal politics book The Emerging Democratic Majority, which asserted that by appealing to young and minority voters, Democrats could make Republicans obsolete in a few decades. After Obama won, that projection simplified to “demographics are destiny.”
“Destiny” then evolved into a “coalition of the ascendant,” reflecting the party’s leadership elite including their “moral judgment” that Democrats are morally righteous. And superiority brought with it disdain for those living below, including the nonwhite working-class, particularly Hispanics.
Teixeira notes that among minorities, Democrats lost 19 margin points between 2012 and 2020, while gaining 16 margin points among college-educated whites. At present, 70% of nonwhite working-class voters believe biological males should not be allowed to play in women’s sports, even as Biden plans to withhold federal lunch money from schools that stop biological boys from competing with girls.
Recently, a friend recommended to me an article
by one of the “coalition of the ascendant’s” true believers, the female Heather Cox Richardson. Born in 1962, she attended the 243-year-old, elite prep Phillips Exeter Academy, graduating in the school’s 10th co-ed class. She then went on to Harvard (BA, PhD), later writing six books. She has over 1 million followers of her nightly newsletter, the largest
of any Substack paid-publication’s individual authors. She’s on-track to make $1 million a year. She also co-hosts a podcast with Joanne B. Freeman of Yale.
What do we learn from Richardson’s article of September 17, 2023? Certainly, we are not her “coalition of the ascendant” target audience.
1. Richardson quotes her 2019 review of “Trump’s mental decline” amidst a “faltering presidency.” He “stonewalled” investigations of “potential criminal activity,” sought to pack the Supreme Court, and was aided and abetted by Mitch McConnell — showing Trump is “a dictator on the rise taking control of formerly independent branches of government.” Comment: Irony. Impervious to Biden's current situation, she writes about a president’s “mental decline” during a “faltering presidency,” linking it to “potential criminal activity.” She also seems unaware that Democrats, not Republicans, support “packing the Supreme Court,” thereby destroying a “formerly independent branch of government.”
2. Trump, through his appointee, unsuccessfully attempted to “withhold” from a “congressional committee a whistleblower complaint.” Never before had such an official attempted to prevent “a properly submitted whistleblower complaint. . . determined to be credible,” says Richardson, quoting Representative Adam Schiff, who lied through 2-plus years of the debunked “Russia Conspiracy.” Comment: It’s as if Dr. Richardson (Harvard) is ignorant of today's Justice Department’s efforts to ignore and suppress IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler’s evidence that Hunter Biden’s business was selling the Biden “brand” abroad, and that access to the President Biden (aka “the Big Guy”) was the Biden family’s most valuable asset.
3. She writes the 2019 whistleblower complaint involved a phone call in which Trump had asked Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to “do us a favor.” It led to the failed, five-month effort to impeach Trump on the eve of the 2020 presidential election. Comment: Former Trump advisor John Bolton’s book did assert that Trump asked Zelensky to “do us a favor,” but much to Democrats’ dismay, Bolton refused to repeat those words under oath during Democrats’ impeachment trial.
4. Richardson adds that "Career intelligence professional Sue Gordon” should have been the new Director of National Intelligence, not Trump “loyalist” Representative John Radcliffe. Comment: Who besides Richardson cares about civil servant Sue Gordon? And don’t both parties often place loyalty above experience?
5. She writes that “the question at the heart of the [last] four years . . . has been whether the rule of law on which the United States of America was founded will survive.” Impeachment evidence against Trump “was so overwhelming that Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said: ‘Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one.’” Comment: Hearsay. The source wrote “Cruz reportedly said” (NOT “said”) to fellow Republicans. Cruz was upset about how poorly Trump's lawyers were handling Trump’s case. From Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump, by Politico’s Rachael Bade and The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian.
6. Richardson faults Republican senators for standing behind Trump. “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” McConnell told his colleagues. “It’s about flipping the Senate.” Comment: McConnell was acting just as Democrats had in 1999 when working with Clinton during his impeachment to win a political battle; see Bade and Demirjian, above.
7. When Covid-19 pandemic shattered the country in 2020, Richardson said Trump claimed “absolute authority” to reopen states. “The [President’s] authority is total,” Trump stated, adding that “[t]he federal government has absolute power” and that he had the “absolute right” to use that power if he wanted to. Comment: In reality, Trump failed to reopen states, and Democrats successfully used the bureaucracy’s power under Anthony Fauci to shut down the country, undermining Trump-led economic achievements, forcing people into masks, then with the teachers’ unions, crippling U.S. education.
8. Leaping ahead to this year, Richardson finds Trump poison in the failure to convict Texas attorney general Ken Paxton on 20 counts of corruption and bribery. She describes Paxton as “supported by hard-right wealthy donors” who used his position to “advance Trump’s fortunes” rather than to “defend Texas laws.” She quotes the progressive Axios’s Mike Allen writing that Trump supporters flooded senators demanding acquittal as party leaders warned senators that they would face well-funded primary opponents if they voted to convict. When the Senate acquitted Paxton, Trump congratulated the attorney general on his “Texas sized VICTORY.” The progressive Dallas News warned: “We have come to a place of great danger.” Comment: With a Senate of 18 Republicans and only 12 Democrats and with 21 votes needed for conviction, how were Democrats to win this battle? The final vote was a mere 14-16 for conviction.
9. “At the same time Republican Party leaders have abandoned the rule of law, the rest of us have realized how imperative it is to demand its restoration.” Comment: Irony of ironies. Richardson is apparently blind to the reality that under Biden & Attorney General Merrick Garland, we live under a two-tier system of justice where Republicans go to jail, and Democrats skate unpunished. I’ve compared our two-tiered justice system to Stasi-run East Germany.
Richardson concludes her newsletter by recommending we read/purchase a new book, Democracy Awakening, that covers politics over the last seven years, beginning with the 2017 Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration—“the largest single-day demonstration in world history.” Modestly, Richardson fails to note she wrote this new book.
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