The Bulwark’s Absurdity And The Enduring Ruthlessness Of The Left

“I have a chapter in my book called ‘Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus,’” announced Sarah Longwell, the “Republican political strategist” who works to elect Democrats and publishes The Bulwark, on Thursday morning. “It recounts the stark cultural differences between working with Republicans (mercenary) vs. Democrats (soft as babies). And those differences have electoral consequences.”

Fascinating.

By mid-afternoon, The Bulwark’s Tim Miller had asked the following about Daniel Di Martino, a Venezuelan immigrant and economist at The Manhattan Institute: “Why has the guy talking not been deported yet he speaks worse english than Melania.”

Well, it’s English (proper noun, we’ll explain it to you later, Tim), and Di Martino speaks it fluently with an accent. This might have been a bit too much for the pea-sized brain behind a face designed to perpetually convey bewilderment, contempt, and its owner’s failure to take care of himself.

Miller’s unprovoked, racially motivated attack on a young, accomplished scholar for the crime of being both Latino and conservative on the same day his boss asserted their moral superiority proved extraordinarily inconvenient, but it was only an exclamation point on a much-deserved rebuttal.

The idea that Democrats arrive at knife fights armed with pillows while Republicans come bearing machine guns is an attractive one to progressive elites because it’s a fantasy that allows them to indulge two more. One, that they are the more honorable, scrupulous combatant in the American political arena. And two, that if they only shook their gloves off every once in a while, they would win more.

It’s utter nonsense — rubbish, poppycock, balderdash, baloney, hogwash. Democrats have been every bit the ruthless actors that Republicans have been, and arguably the chief aggressors in the decades leading up to the Trump era.

The list of offenses is long.

Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater’s championing of individualism and strident anticommunism led to their being tarred as racist madmen running for office only to slam their fists down on the big, red nuclear button on the Resolute Desk.

Robert Bork’s adherence to an actual judicial philosophy, as opposed to the ad hoc, anything-liberals-like-goes approach of Democratic appointees, compelled Ted Kennedy to finish his drink, push through the waitress he had been harassing, and take to the floor of the Senate to kickstart a vicious smear campaign upon the announcement of Bork’s nomination for the Supreme Court.

“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids,” declared Kennedy. Might the nation’s rivers and lakes have turned to blood and a plague of locusts descended upon our crops, too?

The successful torpedoing of Bork’s appointment inspired an entire cottage industry of increasingly dastardly character assassination. There was the attempted high-tech lynching of Clarence Thomas, and the unthinkable rash of accusations against Brett Kavanaugh — up to and including gang rape — that every elected Democrat across the country endorsed and promoted without a single shred of evidence to support them. The only Democrat to break ranks was then-Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia — who voted to confirm Kavanaugh despite vocal “reservations” about accusations no one could substantiate.

Less well-known is the case of Miguel Estrada, an accomplished lawyer whom George W. Bush tried to place on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit but was instead subjected to a needless years-long fight during which his wife suffered a miscarriage. About a year after Estrada finally withdrew his name from consideration, she died of an apparent overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills.

And why the delay? An aide to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) gave the game away in a memo: Estrada was “especially dangerous” because he was “Latino” and the White House appeared “to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.” Perhaps Miller should apply for an internship in his office? And maybe Di Martino should be flattered.

The genteel Republicans who preceded Trump as the standard-bearer withstood similarly ruthless attacks. John Lewis, the civil rights leader-turned-legislator, accused John McCain of “sowing the seeds of hatred” and drew a bizarre comparison between the conduct of the moderate war hero and that of George Wallace, the infamous racial arsonist who pledged to defend “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Then-candidate Barack Obama poured fuel on the fire by suggesting that McCain had been riling up crowds “by stoking anger and division.”

Four years later, Mitt Romney got it even worse. He was an animal abuser. He was a tax cheat. He was going to put blacks “back in chains.” He was responsible for the death of a woman who contracted cancer. He was sexist for making a point of hiring women during his tenure as governor of Massachusetts.

Not really, of course, but it worked just as well to lie about it.

Politics is a rough-and-tumble sport full of sharp elbows, dirty tricks, and behavior that would otherwise be considered completely out of bounds — one that many Republicans have eagerly competed in and Donald Trump appears to relish.

But since time immemorial, they have been met on the battlefield by opponents just as eager to engage in such savagery.

And Longwell, of all people, ought not to need much more proof than her own payroll.

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Isaac Schorr is a columnist at the New York Post and a 2023–2024 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.