J. Peder Zane: Democrat's Long March Through the Institutions Unlikely to Be Derailed by Electoral Losses

 I regretfully agree:

   The short answer is that progressives are content to bank their gains – e.g., the Great Society programs and Obamacare – and then wait until the Republican Party overplays its own hand so thoroughly that Democrats get another window of opportunity. During temporary reigns, Democrats often produce permanent results.
   Today, however, as their midterm prospects dim toward full eclipse, Democrats are in denial mode. The current line is that they never supported defunding the police. They never favored teaching critical race theory in schools. And they have never, ever supported open borders.
   A skilled lawyer could parse the strict meaning of these words so they do not seem laughably false. But the intent of Democrats’ policies is clear. The “criminal justice reforms” pushed by progressive prosecutors (along with Biden’s election year declaration that “nobody should be in a jail for a nonviolent crime”), the administration’s fierce commitment to equity instead of equality, and the flood of migrants Biden has resettled through secret flights across the land belie the spin.
   Irrespective of how Joe Biden positioned himself while campaigning in 2020, the reality is that his government is staffed with ideologues who believe America is a deeply racist oligarchy that only serves the interests of rich white men. This mindset explains two contradictory actions the Biden administration has recently taken concerning COVID. On the one hand, it has decided to lift a Trump-era pandemic-related restriction on migrants (Title 42) – thereby allowing innumerable more people who might carry the virus to cross into our country – because, it claims, the health crisis no longer demands it. On the other hand, even as Democrats assert that the economy is “roaring back,” the administration is extending the moratorium on student loan repayment because, the president says, “we are still recovering from the pandemic and the unprecedented economic disruption it caused."

OTOH, it's clear that Biden has been a great boon to the cult. So it seems hard to believe that electoral losses don't impede it.  They're just not enough to defeat it. So long as the left-wing intelligentsia controls academia and remains religiously committed to its antirational and antiwestern project, electoral losses probably won't be sufficient to defeat it. But they may be necessary--or nearly so.

   Zane:

   For those who are confounded by such notions, it may be comforting to believe that a few election cycles can reverse the trends. This is wishful thinking. We are not in the midst of a political moment but, instead, a deeply rooted cultural revolution which will not be extirpated easily.
   To appreciate its depth, get a copy of Thomas Sowell’s indispensable masterwork, “The Vision of the Anointed.” Published in 1995, it could have been written today as it details the intentions and strategies of the left. Among other things, it reveals how contemporary concerns about victim culture, virtue signaling, and the rewriting of history as exemplified by the New York Times’ 1619 Project (and the demonization of all who oppose the project as racists, fundamentalists, and extremists) have a long pedigree. Their purpose, he writes, is “a constant indoctrination of new attitudes.”

   The left has constructed a kind of social mechanism for dismantling Americanism and Western civilization generally. Trump, for all his flaws, was a monkey wrench in that machine. Electing Biden was analogous to removing the wrench and lubricating the gears. Now the thing has revved up and is running like a top. We need more wrenches--and that's what winning the House in November will provide. It's not nothing.

   Ultimately, we need to take the machine apart in order to win. But, for now, wrenches are better than nothing.