The sharpest dividing line between partisan Republicans and partisan Democrats in this age of political polarization is not respect for democracy. It is not perspective on abortion. And it certainly is not age or fitness for office of presidential candidate.
No, the one thing that more than any other divides elite Democrats from their Republican counterparts is the capacity to ignore, dismiss and virtue-signal into censorship any and all troubling information.
When partisan Republicans are confronted with inconvenient facts — say, that the leader of their supposedly “family values” party is a thrice married adulterer whose affair with a porn star does not even rise to the level of scandal — they spin and reinterpret the truth with reckless abandon: He’s “a baby Christian.” And if this same leader claims to put America first and defend the Constitution but instead attempts to undermine an election by manufacturing votes for himself? Well, there’s spin for that, too: Actually, he won the election, so, it’s really the other side that subverted democracy.
These kinds of GOP lies are morally unconscionable, to be sure; but they also leave room for Republicans to absorb a whole lot of undermining information about their own side while amassing and gleefully disseminating oodles of similarly undermining information about the Democrats.
Meanwhile, what do partisan Democrats do with politically inconvenient information? They refuse to acknowledge it exists, unto the point of repeated self-parody. Former President Trump suffered an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania last Saturday, but according to leading mainstream, liberal news stations even several hours after it was widely known that he had been hit by a bullet, the candidate had “fallen down.”
This is why I posit that those who are surprised by media Democrats’ willingness to ignore President Biden’s abundantly visible aging and lapses until they were confronted with June’s presidential debate must have forgotten about Democrats’ handling of myriad other recent issues, from COVID to crime to gender ideology. Again and again, failure to know by way of unwillingness to look is Democrats’ modus operandi.
To people willing to access and assess widely available information regardless of ideology, it was evident from the earliest days of the pandemic in 2020 that the coronavirus was: first, likely to have emanated from the Wuhan lab, not a wet market; second, not particularly dangerous to children or healthy adults; and, third, zero justification whatsoever for closing much of anything, let alone for closing schools, nor for wearing masks or “social distancing.”
Nevertheless, none of these facts was acknowledged by the mainstream media until long after the Democratic politicians to whom said media is beholden had imposed a regressive tax on working-class Americans by destroying public education and the service economy. Through 2020 (and, in many cases, into 2021 and even 2022), liberal pundits just repeated, in “Brave New World” fashion, the Democrats’ party line about the pandemic. For many rank-and-file Democrats who believed them, this misinformation was accompanied by anxiety about coronavirus itself, which festered in the absence of facts that would allay excessive fears.
Similarly, in 2020 and the years that followed, and even unto this day, highly accessible realities about education, crime and policing have proven no match for the hysterical narratives about school discipline and police violence disseminated by and among the Democratic intelligentsia. As a result, Democrat-led cities employing “progressive” district attorneys (like my own Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner) have dramatically reduced safety and increased the murder rate among socioeconomically disadvantaged people of color, the vast majority of whom support police. They have also adopted so-called “restorative justice” in predominantly minority urban public schools, the primary effect of which is to facilitate the victimization of well-behaved children by excusing and enabling their victimizers — and thereby making it near impossible for anyone to learn.
And of course, perhaps most absurd of all is partisan Democrats’ totalitarian adherence to the fantasy that “trans women are women.” Biological fact; scientific consensus; female safety, privacy and access to athletic opportunity; and what everyone ultimately knows about sexual dimorphism underneath any virtue-signaling pretense be damned. Men get to be called and treated like women if they so choose because acknowledging that the sexes are biologically different — and therefore maybe also on average psychologically and socially different — feels regressive and antifeminist.
While this Democratic delusion is beginning to crack faster than others under the weight of reality, it remains the case that if you point out to anyone at a Democratic think tank or mainstream university that this nonsensical idea of womanhood as a social performance rather than a chromosomal fact erodes the very women’s rights for which feminists have fought (and also smacks of homophobia), you will court either a polite change of the subject or a charge of bigotry.
In each of these instances, Democrats’ ability to deny reality is predicated on a tautological set up in which the only “valid” sources of “information” exist to reinforce leftist ideology, not to disseminate information. Elite Democrats’ kids weren’t the ones in shuttered public schools without access to alternative learning environments. They don’t live in crime-ridden neighborhoods where their children have to fear playing on the front porch or hide in the bathtub to be safe from bullets. And they assume — albeit with creeping unease — that transgender ideology will stop short of decimating anything that those enlightened like themselves hold dear.
But Biden’s debate was hosted by CNN, a trusted liberal news source. Plus, partisan Democrats watch political debates. So, this time, they looked (albeit unintentionally) at what they had been denying existed. And some of them were moved to ask questions about the president’s fitness for office.
As a result, for the first time in my nearly four-decade lifetime, many mainstream, liberal journalists are — or at least were, until Trump narrowly avoided assassination and Biden ultimately stepped away from the 2024 race — doing something that actually resembles journalism.
It would be really good for the country — for democracy — if, whatever happens with the Democrats, Trump or the election, at least some of them keep that up.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about education, culture, religion and politics. Her work has appeared in USA Today, Law and Liberty, America Magazine and Deseret News.
