Democrats overplayed their hand in 2020 and lost the culture | Opinion

Objects in the rearview mirror are closer than they appear. So it is with the summer of 2020 − a surreal confluence of pandemic and panic, grievance and guilt-mongering. Like a banged-on pinball machine, our culture went tilt, and only now is the dysfunction being addressed.

It’s hard to fathom now that we’re on the other side, partly because the whole truth hasn’t been written. Reporters are releasing books about the 2024 election, breathlessly exposing the Joe Biden cognitive conspiracy. Yet, each scoop of mud reporters dig up on the Bidens and their White House protectors is flung backward − to cover the tracks of their complicity.

Resolved: We’d be better served if journalists come clean about 2020’s summer of hysteria and its long shadow over both the Biden and Trump eras.

First, rhetoric became a weapon. After the "Hands Up, Don’t Shoot" hoax in Ferguson some years earlier, liberals latched onto the fallacy of "I can’t breathe" in 2020, using it to justify appalling behavior while firing cannon volleys of cancellation from the mirage of their moral high ground.

When words failed, they turned to violence, calling it a necessary response to Trumpism. It was an absurd contradiction: Progressives demanded compliance with COVID-19 mask mandates while simultaneously stoking the fire − literally and figuratively − of massive fiery protests. The virus was woke enough to pass over the right kind of protests, don’t ya know.

In Minneapolis, riots caused half a billion dollars in property damage, including the burning of a police precinct − destroying countless rape kits and vital evidence. In Portland, federal courthouses and buildings were attacked, and federal officers were assaulted. In Washington, D.C., protestors breached the White House security perimeter and set a fire in the basement of the historic St. John’s Church parish house. Over 60 Secret Service agents were injured.

One opinion columnist went even further than overheated allegations of police discrimination by pointing out the inherent racism of… jogging. Others pointed to the despicable bigotry of math, and even the children’s book “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

Then Biden won. It was inaccurately seen as a leftward lurch. Liberals raced to cement the illusion. The same people who excused mass violence and protected protestors labeled Jan. 6 an "insurrection" worthy of over-aggressive prosecution, though even Biden’s Justice Department couldn’t find evidence to support such a charge.

Emboldened, they pushed further. Anyone who opposed biological males competing in women’s sports, or sharing locker rooms with girls, or surgeries to mutilate children’s genitals was smeared with insincere cries of homophobia and bigotry.

Biden leveraged this churning atmosphere to unravel gains in border security and immigration enforcement. He caved to the anti-war left and led a reprehensible withdrawal from Afghanistan that killed 13 U.S. Service members. Biden initially did not meet with their survivors or even say their names, though he later attended the dignified transfer of the service members' remains at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where he met privately with the families of the fallen troops. 

Still clinging to their faulty 2020 worldview, progressives returned to the streets defending Palestinian terrorists after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. University presidents were humbled before Congress, caught defending the cancel culture’s biggest myth: that free speech is reserved for the left.

What a miscalculation. Democrats didn’t win 2020 on the merits − they won on chaos. What followed was the worst presidency since Jimmy Carter. Then came the reckoning: a stunning Donald Trump sweep of swing states and a mandate for change.

Now, instead of tiptoeing in fear, biological males are being removed from women’s sports. Illegal racial preferences styled as DEI programs are dismantled. Transgender surgeries for kids are outlawed. Even comedians are making jokes great again.

Progressives haven’t learned their lesson. In their fury, they continue to believe that outrage equals outcome, and volume equals votes. They’ve dusted off the same tired playbook, hoping to catch another comet ride, except this one burned out like the buildings that rioters torched in 2020.

Protests and shouting may feel cathartic. They create a delusion of momentum and moral clarity. In that world, feelings can substitute for facts. For much of today’s left, that’s enough. After all, they’ll say, it worked in 2020.

But the country’s outlook has shifted. The silent majority is no longer buying what they’re screaming. In 2020, progressives shouted "I can’t breathe" into a crowded democracy, causing panic. Now, finally, we’ve exhaled and returned to reason.

Matt Dole is a political and communications consultant who lives in Newark and works in Columbus.