By David Bittinger

November 24, 2023

Have you ever made a serious mistake, then put off dealing with the consequences? Congratulations if you’ve done that less often than I have.

Serious mistakes, ones that drag on and pile up, have accumulated a big past-due bill for America. But government glorifiers in almost all media and every public sector have camouflaged recognition of these mistakes, giving people denials and rationalizations instead.

Isn’t Biden inflation making simple grocery shopping stressful and putting home ownership out of reach for most younger Americans? Oh, no, that’s actually not happening. We’re in the era of triumphant “Bidenomics.”

The New York Times’ Paul Krugman recently published a column declaring that “The war on inflation is over” and “We won, at very little cost.” Krugman corrected common sense by arguing that inflation is no problem for Americans who are not eating, not using gas or electricity, and not living under a roof. He thus demonstrated that an economist awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics by Scandinavian deep thinkers can double as an accidental clown.

Has Biden’s foreign policy been creating one American humiliation after another, now risking American direct involvement in wars east and west? Don’t worry! The new, post-history left doesn’t see looming crises repeating the patterns of past ones. Frailty in the face of villainy is now a faded memory . . . or a pretty olive branch.

Are U.S. taxpayers being forced to support surging millions of benefits-seeking illegal immigrants while many employable professionals wait long years to immigrate to America legally? Relax! The goal is more indentured voters for Democrats, and that goal’s being achieved. And progressive plutocracy doesn’t need a middle class.

What about Democrat-ruled cities’ crime waves fueled by prosecutors who refuse to prosecute repeat criminals? What crime waves!? George Soros is financing that “social justice,” and as a far leftist multi-billionaire, he must know what he’s doing.

As if these alibied mistakes haven’t been bad enough, we’re also likely facing a bad-sequel mistake: one more Biden vs. Trump election. And once again a majority of voters will probably be more worried about Trump than they are about the rot he campaigns against, more bothered by alarmism than by alarming realities.

And the rot spreads. As more people flee the cities failing under non-governing government and aggressively pardoned crime, many of them perversely bring their politics along with them to new homes in the suburbs and exurbs.

So the suburbs gradually turn into If-I-Had-A-Hammer hamlets. Why do so many of the people fleeing failing cities vote again for the ruinous politics they fled? Poor memory, poor education?

The suburbs have been my main terrain. I grew up in an idyllic western suburb of Chicago, Glen Ellyn. It’s still idyllic, just much pricier.

But prosperity can breed ideological sociopathy, and not just on the coasts. A Glen Ellyn peer of mine moved on to become a major figure in leftist activism, participating in multiple left-wing terrorist acts by building bombs, one of which went off prematurely, killing three of his confederates. Years later he hosted a fundraiser for a simpatico rookie Illinois politician, Barack Obama, who would, of course, go a long way with what is called “progressive” politics.

Did I move on from youthful suburban insularity to participate actively in civic affairs and service to America? Sorry to admit, I did not. I did get some op-eds into newspapers that (back then) occasionally published conservative wise-guy commentary, but mostly I wrote advertising that produced only paychecks.

And I ended up in another western suburb, this one 90 miles north. This amounted to moving from Chicago, which was then beginning to run toward disaster, to an area just slow-walking it.

So maybe I am, through laziness or lack of courage, just one more default participant in America’s decline. You might have noticed that decline with $33 trillion of ignored debt, government schools indoctrinating children in neo-Marxist dogma, presidents who behave like geriatric teenagers, an economy tethered to Chinese communist autocracy, and repeat criminals put back on city streets to ply their trade.

America has a hard-to-defeat voting majority now. Call it The Disaster Coalition. It’s a satisfied bloc of college-educated virtue posers, tenured government and education payrollers, the government-dependent couch-committed, scot-free shoplifters and their enablers, plus other people deficient in basic math and language skills. This broad population is difficult to beat politically.

We old-fogey advocates of functional government keep hoping to defeat The Disaster Coalition and its defense of dysfunctional government. We do have a better model in favoring —

• a federal government that prefers not to put every state and community at the mercy of as many know-it-all federal bureaucrats as possible
• a constitution written carefully by learned freethinkers who’d abandoned and rejected British royalty (as opposed to the neo-royalist disdainers of the constitution who’ve been gaining power over our past 75 years)
• an economy focused on a productive private sector rather than the Venezuelan economy destroyed by Hugo Chávez’ socialist government
• prosecution of actual crimes rather than thought crimes

But the truth is, our model hasn’t been winning elections lately, thanks to shrewd marketing by leftist bumper sticker marketers and the ego-driven distemper of a reality-TV guy. Now hoping the next election goes better feels something like hoping people will go back to reading serious books.

But the hope is worth pursuing. We can still vote against The Disaster Coalition, still hang on to underdog goals, as we Chicago sports fans do. I can still hope my defeat-addled White Sox will stop their volunteer blundering, even though right now that feels unlikely as the recently crushed hope that Chicago would elect a mayor less disastrous than Lori Lightfoot.

So, here’s a four-point plan to defeat The Disaster Coalition. It’s not the one that a big Republican political consultant would propose, but it’s a solid plan.

1. Point out that all Democrats known to covet the 2024 presidential nomination have serious inadequacies in capacity or character. Just look at them. One is a life-long blithering dunce whose first presidential campaign (36 years ago!) ended because he was caught having delivered an impassioned autobiographical campaign speech that was actually the speech of a British politician. Not many people remember, but this man was a blithering dunce long before he began suffering from infirmity. Then there’s his vice-president, who’s gained fame for her cackling and baby talk. Then there’s the smiling, empty performer who, as Mayor of San Francisco and now Governor of California, has gone to great lengths to trash his state and appears to be a motorized mannequin. Then there’s the governor who cut his personal property taxes by removing toilets from a mansion, gave big vote-winning checks to Black churches, and now gobbles up Illinois’ resources (and much else). Then there’s . . . .
2. Don’t nominate the only current-Republican politician who disturbs people even more than whoever the Democrat candidate will be. Please don’t, even if you admire his recent hostility to the party he once showered with campaign contributions. A 2024 Trump vs. Name-Your-Leftist-Nitwit election would be the most dim, substanceless, nation-roiling election since . . . well, since the last one.
3. You can make the case for Ron DeSantis over Nikki Halley, Halley over Vivek Ramaswamy, Ramaswamy over DeSantis, or any other viable Republican candidate. But maybe it’s best not to take any such candidate as indispensable. Just review the streets and management of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and so on. Then take a long look at the Democrat candidate and use your imagination.
4. Recall why Reagan was so electable and admirable. Or, if you recall or care to research it, go back further to Eisenhower. You’ll find that those presidents provided general stability, progress, and confidence in America’s future. Neither was capable of such incompetence as, for instance, fueling ruinous inflation, then refueling it through a pseudonymous “Inflation Reduction Act.”

Just vote against disaster. That’s not so difficult.

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David Bittinger lives in Wisconsin but still feels loyalties to the Chicago he moved from shortly after the kingdom of Daley The First.

He graduated from the first coed class at Vassar. As a young advertising copywriter in Chicago, he was invited to Tribune Tower, where the sagacious Managing Editor told him he should consider writing newspaper commentary. This good advice unfortunately took 15 years to sink in. 

The first op-ed submission he made was miraculously published by The Washington Post. But that was followed by many rejections, as newspaper circulation and editorial sense of humor began declining. Still, a great, open-minded Tribune editor, Marcia Lythcott, published him a number of times, and he also placed op-eds at the Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and elsewhere.

Today he publishes commentary on his own website and political poetry on “X.” Even better, he now contributes to the website of America’s best columnist. 

He’s been a devoted White Sox fan since the Louie-Nellie era but is now too embarrassed even to wear that wonderful logo.