OOOF!

Where Lies Sanity Now?

I’m not going to write much today. Too much to assimilate. Too easy to succumb to the blame game. Unchecked, I might write something on the order of Bret Stephens today. No doubt, the Democratic Party will have to change or wither now—but that can wait for another day. I’m also not going to blame Kamala Harris. She ran an honorable campaign; she made mistakes, but all candidates do. Trump made a ton of them, and yet he won.

No, I’m going to start with the material closest to hand. With me. And an apology:

I got this one wrong. Way wrong. You deserved better from me.

My theory of the case was that this was a boys v girls election, and girls were more likely to vote. The people I most respect in politics made that case and I believed them, even though they were chasing ghosts.

Turns out, it was boys against girls. But I—and many others, I suspect—didn’t understand the level of intensity on the boys team. I was—we were—pummeled by constant reporting about how pissed off women were about abortion, how pissed off they were by Donald Trump’s crudeness, how they constituted a reasonable majority that would promote sanity in public life. At the heart of this was abortion—an impossible moral decision that was far more difficult than Democrats pretended— but abortion turned out not to be as important as other things.

And the biggest, decisive other thing was strength. The appearance of strength beat the appearance of weakness in this election. There is a lesson in that. The boys—and a great proportion of the women who love them—were sick of being pushed around. They had lost their place in the natural order of things; they weren’t as good at school or work as the girls were. They felt they weren’t valued. They were tired of an enforced passivity. Think of it: America has seemed docile at home and in the world—the docility a consequence, in part, of Joe Biden’s age and nature. He was a natural born legislator trying his hand at an executive job; legislators compromise, executives lead. It didn’t come naturally to Biden. And guys couldn’t understand why the President couldn’t just close the damn border. Or do something about prices. Or end the war in Ukraine. Or Gaza. Or decimate the drug cartels. And the guys couldn’t understand why Biden, and Kamala, had allowed themselves to lassoed into supporting some very weird—a key word in this election—cultural positions. Nor could the guys understand why some words and phrases in common usage before—homosexuality, minorities, illegal immigrants, gals, and on and on—were suddenly verboten. They couldn’t understand why calling a woman “honey” was demeaning not affectionate. They could handle some of these things, but all of them wrapped in a bright rainbow-bow, all at once, was just too much.

It turned out the Trump’s desire to “protect” women was not a gaffe, but a natural condition of maleness. A certain physicality was, too. Testosterone wasn’t poison, but a requirement for life on earth. None of this meant that women needed to get back into the kitchen. That was over. But men were being told to act differently. It was in the ether. It was in the culture of the Democratic Party, and in the mainstream media. If you didn’t want to be considered a chauvinist brute, you had to talk and act the way women demanded you do. I don’t defend wanton male aggression or barbarity here, of course. No excuse for those things. But a politically correct softness had become the order of the day. On campuses—which were the worst advertisement for the Dems—"sensitivity” and “trigger warnings” ruled. And there was a sense among men—often expressed in defiance, more often lurking just below the surface—that the very notion of strength was somehow anti-social.

I don’t think strength is an exclusively male attribute. I think Liz Cheney is strong as hell. I’ve believed for decades that the first woman president will be a Republican. (It was easy to forget that in the heat of this most recent battle.) But men and women are different. Women aren’t good at some of the things men do well, and vice versa. The differences should be celebrated; for too long, they’ve been muted. Men have been on the defensive. And the primary message of this election was: Enough of that.

I will have more to say about this and other topics in the days to come. I’m open to your suggestions as to where Sanity Clause should go from here. I’ll continue to hold Trump to account, but I want to write about ways that a party of true moderation can be assembled. And I’ll continue to write about books and films and music. I’ll make more of an effort to celebrate good people like Dr. Dave Callaway and all those others who struggle to make sense of a very difficult world. I hope you’ll stick around for the ride.