The radical Left’s agenda isn’t only too extreme for Americans, it’s also become “personal.” While the former is important, the latter is the kicker — the result of policies being transported from homilies into homes. By taking their failed ideology from the abstract to the concrete, the radical Left are galvanizing average Americans. Now personally affected, the populous is rebelling against an extremist elite.
Liberals have forever used the “personal” … to advance their policies as government programs.
Liberals’ agenda has always been counter to average Americans’ sensibilities. We are, after all, a center-right country. Despite liberals’ vendetta against Trump helping increase turnout, 2020 exit polling still only showed 24 percent of respondents self-identifying as liberal, while three times as many identified as moderate (38 percent) and conservative (38 percent). The Constitution is further evidence: hard to change by design, it is America’s ultimate foundation — sacrosanct in our secular world. Unable to change it, liberals’ successes have had to come from stretching its definitions. (READ MORE from J.T. Young: The 2024 Battleground Grows and Tilts Toward Trump)
For the most part, Americans could and did ignore liberals. The liberal agenda largely lived in Washington and certain lefty enclaves. Yes, the federal government overtaxed, overspent, and over-borrowed, but these did not discernibly affect average Americans’ lives. The enormity made them seem unreal and their remoteness, seemingly effect-less: someone else would pay some other day.
It had always been thus and regrettably, always would be, but no one looked to the federal government as a model of efficiency. Reagan had aptly captured average Americans’ feelings with his adage, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” The federal government was impervious and impersonal — but more importantly, for average Americans it was “un-personal,” in that it rarely affected them.
The radical Left has changed this. They took liberals’ misguided theories to their illogical extremes. Setting them atop their ideology — that government could not only make things better, but that government should make everything perfect — they strapped liberals’ policies to a rocket and put them into orbit across the U.S. By so doing, the radical Left not only took liberal policies to new heights; they also brought them home for average Americans. Accelerated and elevated, the radical Left’s extremist policies also reached their inevitable — and unmistakable — failures sooner and more visibly.
“Sanctuary cities” were once a laughably liberal concept. Virtue-signaling as legislation, they offered preening without a price. Often far from the border, liberal enclaves were held harmless: CBP and ICE stood between them and liberalism’s consequences.
Then Biden, accommodating the radical Left, opened the border. With a welcome mat laid out, the predictable influx came. Soon, inundation. Costs followed: crime, crowding, and expensive government benefits.
The radical Left, via Joe Biden, had brought the Left’s policies home to Americans. It hardly stopped there.
“Defund the Police!” was akin to sanctuary cities: liberals’ knee-jerk symbol of solidarity, a shibboleth uttered in sanctimony. Again, it was easy to say while police stood between liberals and their principles.
However, the radical Left meant it. Then, they did it. Enforcement decreased. Officers were cut, culled (leaving on their own), or cajoled (effectively standing down in accordance with the radical Left’s wishes). DAs didn’t prosecute and judges released. The enforcement vacuum that existed on Biden’s border moved to cities too and, like the border, what enforcement had once stopped now rose.
Just as with law enforcement’s absence, the same result occurred absent fiscal self-control. Liberals had always wanted to spend more. However, the radical Left wanted to spend everything. Joe Biden sought to indulge them. According to the Congressional Budget Office, by 2024’s end he will have spent $7.9 trillion over 2019’s pre-pandemic spending level, racked up $7.4 trillion in deficits, and put federal debt at $27.9 trillion — 99 percent of U.S. GDP. Yes, there had been spending, deficits, and debt before, but Biden’s brought high and persistent inflation, which then brought high interest rates — both socking average Americans’ wallets.
Neither was liberal coddling of public sector unions new. To average Americans, this was government — lamentable but unavoidable. Nothing personified it like teacher unions’ domination of public schools that overspent and underperformed. Then came COVID. The radical Left leveraged it to impose government broadly and, having long since seized the teachers’ unions, the two achieved prolonged school closures. Schools went from underperforming to literally nonperforming for average Americans.
To these families’ dismay, when schools were open, they often indoctrinated rather than educated. The radical Left’s DEI, CRT, and sexual extremism found homes in homerooms. The radical Left saw to it that parents not only had no say in the indoctrination, but even in their children’s sexualization.
The radical Left saw to it that higher education took indoctrination to a higher level. Following October 7’s terrorist attack on Israel, Jews were recast as aggressors and anti-Semitism as acceptable. Parents watched as so-called elite colleges — which their children wouldn’t be considered for, or which they struggled to afford and where they now worried about their child’s safety — relinquished further control to the radical Left. They saw too Biden cancel college debts — even as elitist college students were canceling Israel (and their values) — and shift the debt to them.
Liberals had long embraced environmentalism. For them Earth Day lasted all year, but for average Americans they could go about their lives the other 364. Elsewhere there were solar panels and wind farms (bird blenders), but these only attracted attention when they blocked the Kennedys’ beach views.
Then, the radical Left took charge. With the Biden administration’s help, they sought to ban gas appliances and limit fossil fuels and gas cars — just about everything average Americans use. To no one’s surprise (but the radical Left) when supply was attacked prices rose. Again, average Americans paid.
Average Americans have learned the radical Left are not the limousine liberals who used to show up, then leave — and leave them alone. An extremist elite, the radical Left aren’t leaving. And they certainly aren’t leaving average Americans alone.
With fervency’s fury, they have put platitudes into practice on a mass scale. The radical Left did so expansively and expensively. And expressly: the costs being almost immediate and unmistakably clear. This has played out painfully — and most importantly, personally — for average Americans.
There was a discernible difference between abstract and concrete, between liberal rhetoric and radical reality. What had existed only on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the radical Left had brought to average Americans’ doorstep — then over the threshold. (READ MORE: Forget Cancel Culture. The Real Danger Is the Left’s Creation Culture.)
When liberal policies were simply abstract inanity, average Americans could roll their eyes, hold their tongues, and let their lives go on. But the radical Left made the abstract concrete for average Americans. For their part, average Americans have found the radical Left’s policies as unavoidable as they are unendurable.
Conservatives should see no little irony here. Liberals have forever used the “personal” — isolated anecdotes — to advance their policies as government programs. Now, the radical Left’s policy has made their programs “personal” on a mass scale for average Americans. Not surprisingly, average Americans are pushing back.
J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.
