Rusty Bowers would vote for Trump again. What that tells you about the new left

Rusty Bowers showed the entire country this week what we've known about him in Arizona. He is a good and honest man.

The Arizona Speaker of the House said no to all the president’s lawyers who tried to reverse the election Donald Trump had lost.

For resisting that pressure, Bowers was the toast of Washington for a day and earlier one of five recipients of the 2022 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award.

He was compared to Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” standing righteously against a powerful political machine.

He told the Jan. 6 commission how he had once told then-President Trump “that I supported him, I walked for him, I campaigned with him. But I wouldn’t do anything illegal for him.”

It was magnificent testimony. Inspiring.

Bowers was honest again. It silenced his applause

But before the credits rolled, it was as if the slumping Jimmy Stewart had picked himself up from his seat on the Senate floor, turned to the corrupt and silver-haired Claude Raines and said, “Senator, you can count on my vote next election!”

Bowers told the Associated Press, “If (Trump) is the nominee, if he was up against Biden, I’d vote for him again. Simply because what he did the first time, before COVID, was so good for the country. In my view it was great.”

It was a moment of stunning honesty. And it came at a cost. It silenced a lot of the applause he enjoyed from his testimony. Establishment media railed:

“(It) is sort of like defending Mussolini by reminding people that before he teamed up with Hitler, he made the trains run on time,” wrote Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin.

If an honorable man like Rusty Bowers would still vote for Trump over Biden, it may tell us less about Bowers and more about the unbridgeable gulf between Republicans and Democrats.

The left doesn't see its own defects

The left has a clear sense of the awfulness of Donald Trump. I share it. What it lacks is a clear sense of its own prominent defect – its growing condescension.

Today’s left is a cross hatch of competing interests all fighting to advance their own particular agendas. Tribalism is promoted. Differences are celebrated. Many have worked up a religious fervor to hate the heretic – the conservative American.

“White supremacy” was an expression once reserved for neo-Nazis and skinheads. Now many Democrats use it to describe anyone who votes Republican.

As Democrats concentrate on the excesses of Trump, blue cities in America turn their jails into turnstiles and their streets into hellscapes. The party’s own economists warned that lavish spending would feed inflation; now we have $6 gas and $4 milk.

Rusty Bowers must have noticed. So have many Republicans. And even worse for Democrats, many of their long-standing constituencies – working people, unions, Latinos and older feminists – are noticing as well.

I miss the old left. I miss the liberals who defended free expression and my right to have an alternative point of view. Who raged against the machine and cared as deeply about the poor in Appalachia as they did about the poor in south Harlem. They weren’t high hat. They didn’t look down their noses.

They do today.

Clinton told the left not to 'hector and moralize'

Rod Dreher of The American Conservative tweeted: “A leftist I know ended our 40-year friendship because I said that Trump deserved impeachment over his 1/6 behavior, though he had done some good things in his presidency. The fact that I had any good words about Trump, though I backed removing him from office, was intolerable.”

Bill Clinton saw this proclivity and recently told his liberal podcast listeners, “Don’t hector and moralize, as though the merits of your position should be self-evident to any decent person. Assume a position of modesty that argues, ‘If you really disagree with this, then you will go out and make another choice, but here’s why I think it’s better for you.' ”

Neoliberalism that replaced the old left has spread across the western world. President Emmanuel Macron tried to stop its foothold in France, but American identity politics swept his continent.

The European left has become the American left – highly-degreed, decadently rich and controlling most of the levers of power. They dominate big media, academe and government. They own entertainment and control Big Tech and medicine.

They are the establishment. And as is the habit of the very powerful, they have become snobs.

Snobbery is the downfall of the 'lifestyle left'

So says Sahra Wagenknecht, a liberal German who speaks to them.

Formerly a leader of Germany’s Die Linke (Left) party and a member of the Bundestag, she grew weary of neo-liberalism and its American import – identity politics – and described her discontent in a new book: “The self-righteous."

As reported in Compact magazine, she offers a stinging rebuke to what the left has become:

“‘Left’ was once synonymous with the pursuit of justice and social security, resistance, and revolt against the upper-middle classes, and commitment to those who were not born into a wealthy family and had to support themselves through their (often backbreaking) labor.

“... Left parties ... didn’t represent the elites, but the most disadvantaged.”

The “traditional left” she writes, has been replaced by the “lifestyle left.” Its believers think they are liberals, she notes. “(However, they) no longer place social and political-economic problems at the center of left-wing politics. In the place of such concerns, they promote questions regarding lifestyle, consumption habits, and moral attitudes.”

“Since lifestyle leftists hardly ever suffer real financial hardship, they show little real interest in working-class economic concerns,” she wrote. And they promote division over unity.

“Left liberalism and its identity politics, which urges everyone to define their identity on the basis of their origin, skin color, sex, or sexual inclination … creates rifts precisely where solidarity is urgently needed.”

“This doesn’t just undermine solidarity in workplaces; it also destroys the sense of belonging of the community as a whole, that is, the most important precondition for solidarity and social justice.”

America must be better than Trump and the left

America has to be better than the multimillionaire demagogue who rode the Republican ticket to the White House, and better than the pious snobs who dominate new progressivism.

In 1998, Trevor Nunn of London’s Royal National Theatre brought another U.S. import to western Europe – the stage musical “Oklahoma!” He had seized upon a line in one of the lyrics that he thought captured the spirit of America.

It was a song about feuding farmers and ranchers in territorial Oklahoma who would have to put aside their differences to achieve statehood. They sang:

“I don’t say I’m no better than anybody else / But I’ll be damned if I ain’t jist as good!”

Said Nunn, “Revolutions have been fought over that kind of sentiment.”

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Rusty Bowers would choose Trump again. What that says about the left