Robert Reich Emerges as Face of Dismal Democratic Party

By Conrad Black

The death wish of the self-styled progressive Democrats is now so profound that it gives a clear hint of the suicide mission that the country would now be on if they had won the last election. Senator Van Hollen of Maryland is stirring up his colleagues to follow him in pilgrimages to the criminal gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia, now detained in his native El Salvador.

Promoting the civil rights of such a person, who entered the United States illegally, is not going to win friends for his political sponsors in the United States and confirms that the venerable and often splendid Democratic Party is in a  self-destructive St. Vitus’ dance.

Either these so-called progressives (as if anything that they say or believe could be described as progress by any sane person) will be ground to powder in the Democratic primaries by more sensible candidates, or the Republicans will again have the honor of performing that great national service.

The tour of congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Sanders is an extraordinary expose of the vapid, clichéd, ambition to dismember and destroy practically every element of the strength, self-esteem, and admirable traditions of the United States.

They are performing the service of projecting AOC forward as a possible candidate for Senator Schumer’s seat from New York, on her way to the presidential nomination in 2028. Defeating Mr. Schumer would be a service to the country, but the elevation of AOC would not.

The reason American politics are today so polarized is not because the Trump Republicans are particularly conservative; they are moderate and populist right and well within the mainstream but are almost as hostile to the Bush-Romney-McCain and Bill Clinton center as AOC and Mr. Sanders are.

Perhaps the dying breath in this pitiful expiry was sounded by the former labor secretary of the Clinton Administration, Robert Reich, who appears every week in the Guardian, the most pathologically anti-American newspaper in the English-speaking world, desperately trying to find some new rude and nonsensical new thing to write about President Trump. Mr. Reich has previously announced his political death, his imminent incarceration, and the foreordained failure of every campaign and policy initiative of his political career.

Mr. Reich reinvigorates his morale every week after each failed prediction of a new Trump fiasco. In the Guardian on April 17, he began with the weary self-satisfaction of the vindicated forecaster: “It was bound to happen. Encouraged by the ease with which many big US institutions caved into their demands, the Trump regime — that is the small cadre of bottom-feeding fanatics around Donald Trump (JD Vance, Elon Musk, Russell Vaught, Stephen Miller, and RFK Junior) along with the child king himself — have overreached. They’ve dared China, Harvard, and the Supreme Court to blink.”

This was the habitually mistaken Mr. Reich’s opportunity to claim victory — no need to wait for how it turns out with Communist China or Harvard or the Supreme Court. The fact that they did not preemptively capitulate was an unspeakable humiliation for “the child king,” twice elected president against 95 percent of the national political press, two-thirds of the campaign donations, a politicized Justice Department, and the efforts of assassins presumably unintentionally assisted by the incompetence of the Secret Service, (and the certitude of Mr. Reich that he would lose).

Where the vice president, and the wealthiest man in the world, and Robert Kennedy Jr., and the others have been transmogrified as described is not clear, but they share in the presumptive humiliation of the president.

Mr. Reich’s ululations of triumph are premature. China cannot possibly win a tariff war with the United States, and it cannot possibly persuade a significant number of other countries to substitute enhanced trade with China for their commercial relationships with the United States.

Mr. Trump is not attempting to “interfere with academic freedom” at Harvard. He is launching a campaign to reform the disaster of higher education. Tenured academics are spared any competition or responsibility to present a balanced curriculum, and the academic system is a vast unemployment deferral operation which qualifies millions of people every year in fields where they could not possibly earn a living.

To pay for the bloated administrations and unaccountable, under-worked academics, they drive millions of students into debt while wallowing in their colossal tax-free endowments, $53 billion in Harvard’s case. Mr. Trump is taking on these universities one at a time largely because of their failure to contain antisemitism. He will take his chances with public opinion and the courts and given Mr. Trump’s track record in both those activities, Mr. Reich, if he had any sense of preservation, would be less hasty and overconfident with his jeremiads.

It has been hilarious to see the self-destructive Democrats pile onto this ill-starred bandwagon: Mr. Garcia is almost certainly an MS-13 gang member, did commit the crime of entering the United States illegally, and while the due process in his deportation was defective, the deportation is legally justified, and as he is now an El Salvador citizen resident in the highest security prison of his native country, court orders in the United States to “facilitate” his return have no effect.

There is no method to compel the president and his entourage whom Mr. Reich also describes in the same piece as “the testosterone-poisoned lackeys around King Trump,” to lift a finger to carry out the court order of unspecified “facilitation.” With substantial dissent, the Supreme Court determined that he should not have been sent to El Salvador, but does not dispute that the government was right to expel him from the United States. Mr. Reich and the “progressive” Democrats, even as political suicide cases, should be choosier about the hill they die on.

Mr. Reich has almost always been wrong about everything, in government or out, was thrown out of the Clinton Administration and has warmed up for the second Trump term by calling Governor DeSantis a “fascist” and President Biden “shrewd, careful, and calibrated.” Rejected and passé though he is, Mr. Reich’s socialistic spitefulness and compulsive belligerence are now the face and voice of the doomed and dismal contemporary Democratic Party.

First published in the New York Sun