Lakeland Times: Our View

America spoke with a loud and clear voice in the presidential election Tuesday, shouting out for a new direction and for a new unity by giving Donald Trump not only a significant electoral college victory but a popular vote win, too, the first time since 2004 the GOP has accomplished that latter feat.

Voters saw through the joyless effort by Kamala Harris to run a campaign of — of all things — joy. It’s hard to be successful with a campaign based on joy when the last four years have been nothing but misery for the working and middle classes, as the elites taunt us with their wealth.

Voters also saw through the Democratic effort to paint the MAGA movement as a dark and sinister, even Hitlerian, force. Turns out that calling what now appears to be more than half the nation fascist and racist was not a wise political strategy. America finally put its foot down.

Democrats never believed any of that, of course. That’s why in desperation Democratic Senate incumbents in battleground states ran late and desperate ads boasting about their ability to work with Trump if only voters would re-elect them. Photos of Trump even appeared in their ads.

Why would any ethical Democrat show themselves next to the Fuhrer if they truly believed that’s what he was?

It was all about trying to scare voters, and it failed. Such a gambit might work in some parts of the world, but Americans are not easily cowered. Maybe the campaign realized that her base was imploding in front of their very eyes and throwing a Molotov cocktail was seen as the only viable option.

Democrats like to tout their diversity but, just as a major party realignment was completed this week after several decades of slow transformation, they saw the coalition members shrink to a countable few. The working class is gone; minorities are getting fewer by the year; women turned out to not be so universally in their camp as believed. Even young voters deserted the Democrats in droves.

What’s left increasingly in the Democratic Party are voters tethered to the government in some concrete and necessary way — through social welfare programs; government employment or government contractors; grant recipients, to name just a few — and the corporate and institutional elites who seek power and wealth for the sake of power and wealth. 

The real diversity Tuesday showed up in the MAGA movement itself: Workers and union members, blacks and Hispanics and middle-class moms and dads. 

The realignment is complete. The Democrats are the official home of Big Business, of Big Labor, of Big Identity Groups, of Big Public Health, of Big War. The GOP is the party of the working and middle classes, the party of peace, and no Never Trumpers can change that. It was the Trump-Vance campaign that celebrated this diversity and ran a true campaign of joy and inclusion, and American embraced it with open arms.

If the Democrats are smart, they will use this election as an opportunity to reflect in the mirror and correct their course. It is their only chance of serving as a mass party rather than as the defeated propaganda arm of a globalist elite.

That said, the MAGA movement must now show America we mean what we say. MAGA must earn its survival and future growth. We must let America know what MAGA is all about — peace and love and prosperity. We can start by showing the nation we understand that they hired us, and can fire us, not the other way around.

We must quickly let it be known that we are not about retribution but inclusion. The left has many insights we can learn from — and compromise on — especially on abortion. There must a seat at the table for Democrats, too, on critical questions such as border security and foreign policy. On these questions past fecklessness does not earn eternal cancellation; diversity of opinion is the first ingredient of forward progress.

We must deconstruct the administrative state — the single greatest threat to liberty — and show America that we mean it when we say “the people” shall govern the nation. We must put the “experts” out to pasture, far from the fields of actual policy. Let them chew their academic cuds; it could lead them to an understanding of who they really are.

We must show we mean it when we say Make America Healthy Again. We must show America that we will no longer allow Big Food and Big Pharma to control what we eat — and what we must inject into our bodies. 

We must quickly show there will no censorship of political views, no matter the political viewpoint. The Washington Post once said, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” That’s true but it’s also true that democracy dies in silence — specifically when the people are silenced.

We must reject the scientific and moral relativism that tries to pass as social justice. We must above all reject the gaslighting of the public and instead speak truth to power. In that regard, we must move to end the weaponization of government for ideological purposes.

We must remove the state from our children’s education. We must remove the state from interfering with medical freedom and the right to control our own health care.

We must restore fiscal responsibility. We must end the war in Ukraine and acknowledge that we are not the world’s police, that we shall put the interests of America First, just as other nations must put their own nations’s interests first, most immediately by paying for their own security.

We must immediately unleash our energy resources and halt the government’s assault on gas-fueled vehicles, on stoves, on air conditioners and on other appliances.

We must once again protect women’s and minorities’ rights in this country. Girls must be safe in their sports, able to compete fairly for the rewards of their hard work, and safe in bathrooms; minorities need to be given the resources and opportunities to pursue the American dream rather than staying imprisoned in government welfare bureaucracies with no hope of a better life; children too young to make critical decisions about their lives must be protected from those who would conduct and carry out the irreversible mutilation of their bodies without parental consent.

We must quickly move to oppose discrimination in all its forms, especially anti-semitism but also DEI hiring and the eradication of merit-based work and advancement. 

Identity and woke politics have ushered in a new oppression of the most vulnerable in our society and so the time is ripe for a new civil rights movement. That must be the MAGA/MAHA movement.

We must purge the government not only of unelected bureaucrats — except for those who perform core government functions sanctioned by the constitution — but also aggressively subject their big corporate partners to the appropriate anti-trust enforcement.

We must make Main Street Great Again for small businesses by reducing job- and wage-killing regulations.

Finally, we must invite Democrats — hopefully after they engage in some much-needed reflection — to sit at the table and to contribute their insights and resources. The most dangerous thing that can happen in a democracy is when polarization becomes so intense that one side refuses to talk with or listen to what the other side has to say.

The death of democracy comes shortly after the regime in power concludes that not only is there no value to the other side’s thinking but it poses a threat to it. That’s a signal that that side has made the leap from seeking truth to simply seeking power.

And so the other side is seen as worthless garbage. That’s what has happened over the years. The Democrats have a hunger for power that has reduced more than half the nation to garbage needing to be tossed.

MAGA/MAHA must not respond in kind to all that they do to us. Instead, we must recognize the value and dignity of all citizens, even when we disagree. That’s how we get back on track.

On Tuesday the nation made a course correction. The Trump campaign had promised to fix the messes the Biden-Harris administration made, but the voters made the needed first fix — getting Donald Trump back where he belongs, into the White House.

That alone is a salve to the soul. The healing has begun.