Here is Jonathan S. Tobin writing at National Review:
A leftist insurgency shouldn’t be dismissed, but it might be a tougher sell than they think.
After weeks of being forced to rely on partisan Saturday Night Live comedy skits to keep their morale up, Democrats finally had some genuine good news last week. The spectacle of crowds heckling Republican members of Congress at town-hall meetings warmed the hearts of liberals who, despite what they think is ample evidence of the new administration’s incompetence and ill intent, remain powerless in a Washington where the GOP controls both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
The left-wing impulse to resist rather than to futilely oppose Trump had, it seemed, finally found a practical outlet. These incidents built on the mobilization efforts that tried but failed to defeat the confirmations of various Trump Cabinet appointments. But the town-hall demonstrations also seemed a conscious effort to replicate the success conservatives achieved in the summer of 2009 with the first stirrings of the Tea Party. The analogy was enough to encourage liberals to believe that the same pattern of grassroots unrest could lead to a midterm landslide and produce a Democratic Congress in 2018.
. . .
In the absence of such a kitchen-table reason to throw out the GOP, the Democrats are left with their paranoid delusions about a Trump coup. That sort of conspiracy mongering is, as I noted here yesterday, not limited to the fever swamps but is now being adopted by mainstream liberal pundits. In the New York Times on Friday, Paul Krugman outlined his belief that Trump would use any terrorist attack to essentially void the Constitution, and even Parker’s optimism about the president’s impending fall was tempered by worries that the republic may not last long enough to see his overthrow. They genuinely believe he will declare martial law and suppress dissent. What they fail to realize is that while this sort of extremist hysteria appeals to their base, it’s likely a turnoff to the centrist voters they’re going to need if they are to realize their ambition to cut Trump’s time in office short.
Read more: National Review
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