It is an unfortunate development in American politics that honest discourse is no longer possible on the American Left. They have replaced it with the “narrative” which is a series of assertions or memes that are established to serve some political end. It matters not whether they are true. In political warfare, what matters is that they are effective.

The election of 2022 has been built on different narratives than the election of 2020. The 2020 narrative was driven largely by: “Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler and anything, and everything, should be done to ensure that he’s not reelected.” This narrative was advanced by an army of radical leftists from Antifa and Black Lives Matter on the ground, to George Soros and a network of dark money organizations financing multiple independent operations that sowed chaos throughout America. It had the advantage of both scaring people, justifying large-scale violence, and paralyzing law enforcement at all levels. This kind of chaos gave political oxygen to the idea that the so-called suburban white women had been alienated from Donald Trump and a return to normalcy could be found in Joe Biden. That suburban white women had never thought this way before was irrelevant.

In 2022, the predominant “narrative” is that President Trump and his many supporters are a threat to Our Democracy™. America has lived with this meme for the past two years. California Governor Gavin Newsom recently said in an interview that his party was losing the “narrative war.” This is a rather quaint way of saying that their lies are not working. But the goal of this narrative war, interestingly enough, does not appear to be to win over voters.

Who could believe that “Trump is a threat to Our Democracy™” would be effective in 2022, given the wholesale destruction of the U.S. economy by the Biden Administration, or the crisis that must not be named on America’s southern border?