(The following is adapted from a speech delivered to the New York Young Republican Club on Feb. 2.)

During a recent gathering with longtime friends, I endured an outpouring of lavish praise for Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro. The governor, I was told, should be appreciated for his differences from extremists like Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdani. Shapiro, they said, inhabits today’s political center. He’s a friend of Israel and, perhaps equally significant, he won’t confiscate our well-deserved earnings by imposing the sort of exorbitant taxes those two darlings of the supposed Marxist-leaning left demand. Moreover, they praised his competence in response to the June 2023 bridge collapse on the outskirts of Philadelphia, where extensive repairs were completed in record time. As his PR flaks exultantly announced, “Josh gets things done.”

In fact, the governor does get things done. As the Washington Examiner reported in December, he’s been forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of Catholic nuns, to pay for their employees’ “contraception and sterilization coverage.” Shapiro is taking this action despite a 7-2 Supreme Court decision upholding the right of the seemingly victorious nuns not to have their religious consciences trampled on. This act of defiance doesn’t quite square with the information coming from the talking heads on Fox News, who fawn over Shapiro as the picture of an exemplary “moderate.” We are supposed to believe he is markedly different from those Democratic “radicals” who may occasionally sound like him, but who are big on “free stuff” and have an exceedingly soft spot for Hamas.

The truth is that he’s a politician who pleases the legacy media and, more generally, the left whenever he touches on social issues. Shapiro enforces DEI, and he energetically and even boastfully pushes this blatant form of discrimination in the hiring of state employees and anywhere else he can. Shapiro is also enthusiastic about “gender-affirming care” and has zealously promoted this leftist policy. I’m relating these matters because most of the so-called conservative media won’t. They mislead us by exaggerating the distinction between “moderate” and “radical” Democrats—which for them boils down, mostly, to taxes and fiscal policy.

Shapiro explicitly claims the title of moderate and urges everyone to tone down their inflammatory rhetoric. But he himself has made an unseemly habit of going after Vice President Vance as an enabler of anti-Semitism, a defender of neo-Nazi political parties in Germany, and as a Republican leader who insulted Jewish victims of the Third Reich by not mentioning their Jewish identity.  Apparently, Vance’s failure to mention this identity explicitly in his remarks on his recent visit to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany for International Holocaust Remembrance Day indicated hostility toward Jews, even if it should have been obvious from the context to whom the reference was made.

 Moreover, Shapiro tries to link JD Vance to Nick Fuentes, although Vance has emphatically dissociated himself from all purveyors of anti-Jewish sentiment. Although Shapiro, in an interview with Bret Baier on Jan. 29, asserted that there is anti-Semitism on the left as well as on the right, I’m waiting for this supposed exemplar of moderation to provide examples of prejudice that are not exclusively implicating Republicans.

Republicans who spend their time praising “moderates” may be trying to convince Democrats on the center left that their party is falling into the hands of extremists. They may think that by doing so, rational Democrats will be inspired to reclaim the party of FDR, Truman, and Bill Clinton, or perhaps work up the courage (and this may be the overriding aim here) to vote for the GOP.

But this tactic won’t work. One reason is that it will confirm the judgment of those who are truly center-left that voting for those touted as centrist Democrats really is a win for “moderation.” But this, mind you, is not the same thing as Democrats voting for Republicans, whom even the alleged “moderates” consider to be excessively right-wing.

Even as authorized conservatives beam with goodwill for these “nice” Democrats, those same Democrats combine their own calls for “moderation” with rants against the supposed “trads” who they believe dominate the GOP. These would-be centrists view Republicans as a different breed of cat from themselves, or from government leaders who understand that their central job is to protect a woman’s right to choose up until the baby comes down the birth canal and who champion the surgical wishes of those with gender dysphoria.

A particularly egregious example of this kind of snow job for a socially leftist Democratic governor recently appeared in The Hill. It seems they can’t get enough of Andy Beshear, the Kentucky governor whose folksy demeanor enchants otherwise deep-red Kentuckians, and who now appears poised to run for president in 2028. The Hill quotes a wealthy Democratic donor John Morgan, who extols Beshear’s ability to reach out:

“For those craving normalcy, he is their answer,” said John Morgan, a Democratic donor and injury lawyer, who recently met with Beshear and found him to be impressive. 

Morgan says he has a “very good chance” of winning a presidential contest, should he choose to enter, highlighting the governor’s “authenticity.”

“He has won 3 times in a very red state,” Morgan said. “He knows the path.” 

One would never know from all this hullabaloo that, like Shapiro, Beshear fully embraces the LGBTQ agenda, which he frames in the language of caring and sharing. He has become, for his media promoters, the left’s answer to Billy Graham, as he goes around his state selling wokeified Christianity.   

 A second reason embracing so-called moderate Democrats won’t help the right is that the persistent misuse of the term “moderate” forces the establishment conservative media to hollow out the meaning of “conservative.” The term “moderate Democrats” suggests there is no contradiction between being “moderate” and being someone who buys the whole woke package. Although John Fetterman stands with the left on most issues consistently, our “conservatives” flatter him because he’s “good on the Middle East,” went along with the federal budget continuing resolution, and supported the president’s action in Venezuela. This is all fine and good, but we should point out, for balance, that Fetterman is much closer on social questions to Mayor Mamdani than to Vice President Vance or Senator Ted Cruz.

The problem with having media conservatives depict social leftists as “moderates” and “sensible Democrats” is that this klutzy trick may come back to bite them. It’s one thing to cultivate occasionally pliant congressional Democrats who may vote with your guys, or even to butter up a receptive Democratic governor to allow ICE to nab criminal illegals without riots. But it’s another matter to swoon over woke Democratic politicians because they seem slightly less wacky than their colleagues.

I confess that I’m getting a headache listening to Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade, Trey Gowdy, and Sean Hannity scold the other party for running “radicals” rather than choosing “moderates.” How many “moderate” Democratic politicians would emphatically deny that men can get pregnant or would insist that biological men claiming to be women should not be allowed to use girls’ lockers or participate in female sports? Trump himself did an excellent job of illustrating this point when he asked members of Congress to stand during his recent State of the Union address if they thought the United States government existed for the benefit of citizens and not illegal aliens.

Also unsettling for me was the glowing endorsement of Josh Stein in the neoconservative magazine Tablet when he was running against Mark Robinson, a black Republican pastor, in the 2024 North Carolina gubernatorial race. Although Robinson undoubtedly engaged in loose talk, thereby sometimes calling adverse attention to himself, this neoconservative commentator went into a feeding frenzy running him down. Robinson, who dared to express opposition to gay marriage and abortion, was characterized as a lunatic, whereas Stein was portrayed as a proud Jew and “pragmatic progressive” representing the political center. We were also told in this commentary that Robinson is “the kind of political arsonist incapable of winning a high-turnout election in North Carolina, where voters tend to reward pragmatism and moderation in state-level races.” If there was a difference in how The New York Times and Tablet presented this race, I could not detect it. Since his election, Stein has behaved like most other left-of-center Democrats, save for his disapproving statements about Hamas, perhaps intended for his friends at Tablet.

Finally, the more readily one judges politicians on the left as “moderate,” the easier it becomes to turn leftists into our mainstream politicians while pushing Republicans into the box reserved for “extremist.” Thus, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has faithfully pursued the leftist social policies of other Democratic governors, was celebrated in Roll Call as a paradigmatic moderate when she responded to Trump’s acceptance speech after his renomination in 2020.

This description suggests that Whitmer deserves our trust since she’s not quite as radical as some other Democrats. She’s supposedly more levelheaded than those far-out “Democratic progressives,” and so we can feel safe having Gretchen rather than AOC putting males into girls’ lockers and authorizing sex change operations for minors. Based on this minimalist standard, Stalin was a “moderate” mass murderer in comparison to Hitler, or perhaps Hitler was a “moderate” tyrant in comparison to Mao. At some point, the word “moderate” loses all relationship to reality.

The much-celebrated Democratic moderate Abigail Spanberger last month spent her first day in office as Virginia governor signing “moderate” executive orders: for example, prohibiting all government workers from in any way cooperating with ICE, and reintroducing DEI, now known as “affirmative recruitment,” in state employment. Not at all surprisingly, Spanberger is falling in line with another newly elected female moderate Democratic governor, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, who has also pledged to hamper ICE operations in her state.  

Meanwhile, Abigail in Richmond could hardly wait for day one to begin before removing a bust of Robert E. Lee from the Virginia Capitol, since presumably this illustrious early American was not a friend of “moderate Democrats.” On her first day in office, “centrist” Spanberger filled 27 open seats at state universities with outspoken advocates of DEI. Among other proposals now being considered by her administration is forbidding hand-counting of election ballots and extending the post-election period for returning mail-in votes by weeks. Spanberger’s Democratic legislature will soon have a bill on her desk calling for reducing the required prison time for several categories of robbery and expanding eligibility for parole for imprisoned criminals. The odds are that she’ll sign this as well.

Lest anyone thinks I’ve lost my senses, let me make clear that I think some Democrats are more destructively radical than others. If forced to choose between Fetterman and Jasmine Crockett in a hypothetical presidential race, I would give my vote reluctantly to the Pennsylvania senator because his opponent belongs in the loony bin. As a traditional conservative, I’m aware there are degrees of badness on the dark side. But selecting the lesser of two evils is a different thing from celebrating the lesser evil as a brilliant choice. And it’s best to do what one can to avoid having to make such unpalatable decisions.

I’ll also confess that on occasion I follow the Italian political teaching: Il peggiore è il meglio, the worse the better. Thus, if required to choose between Mamdani and Cuomo in a primary, and if Sliwa were not the alternative to both, I might have picked the pro-Hamas wokester who is now New York’s mayor. He’s a bit more likely than a slightly less odious Democrat to cause big harm in the short term, and so riding on a political roller coaster with Zohran may sway New Yorkers who can still be swayed to support a future mayor who is better than either Mamdani or Cuomo.    

Another familiar figure in the conservative establishment’s world of delusion is the “natural conservative,” a subject that a young podcaster, J. Burden, has discussed at Chronicles. Supposedly, all or most groups that invariably vote with the left abound in true conservatives, who are just waiting to discover their true selves. It therefore behooves GOP operatives and the conservative establishment to get these people to understand who they really are. Once this awakening is achieved, the GOP will receive the votes of those who have learned of their authentic political and spiritual home.

Complicating this process of self-discovery is the confusion besetting 90 percent of American black voters, who somehow imagine that the Democratic Party is where they belong. Thus, Republican commentators are trying to disabuse them of their political illusions by pointing out that the Democrats are the party of John C. Calhoun and other early-19^th-century defenders of slavery. Democrats were also conspicuous in the supposedly treasonous behavior of those who formed the Confederacy, something that American blacks should never forget. Supposedly of equal importance is the revelation that the Democratic Party, as late as the 1960s, included Southern segregationists, who voted against civil rights legislation.

Such thundering denunciations, no matter how often repeated, don’t seem to resonate with black voters, any more than other factoids relating to a now remote past, for example, that Republicans in the 1850s were often nativists, something that hardly sways or troubles today’s members of the Republican Jewish Coalition or Catholic anti-abortionists. There are good reasons that certain voting blocs stay where they are, even if we can find sound, not eccentric, reasons for them to change their affiliations. The Democrats provide blacks with preferred access to jobs and college entries, and equally important, they play up their victim status in a predominantly white society.

The mystique of victimhood clearly animates certain voters more than Republican preaching about colorblind meritocracy or about why it’s important that the state should treat all of us in the same manner. A party composed of grievance groups can connect with those who nurse grievances and hope to be rewarded through collective victim claims. In this country and throughout the West, self-designated minorities are lining up to receive goodies because of their conferred victim status. Of course, we can raise moral objections and even wax indignant about how this kind of politics is “un-American” (and it is!), but accommodating grievance-claimants works as a political tool, which is one of the reasons the Democrats win so often, particularly in places like New York.

No matter how badly black neighborhoods are convulsed by violent crime and no matter how shamelessly black Democratic politicians neglect this problem, those in charge are not likely to be replaced, least of all by black Republican politicians, who are often viewed by other blacks as race traitors. (In the latest Virginia gubernatorial race, the Democratic victor Abigail Spanberger picked up 93 percent of the black vote while her black Republican opponent Winsome Sears received, by contrast, only 7 percent.)

Similarly, Jews who view themselves as victims of white Christian prejudice are not about to vote Republican. And it’s not because they lack reasoning power. It’s because for most American Jews their fear of white Christian anti-Semitism overshadows their anxiety about things that ought to concern them more, such as unvetted Muslim immigration or having criminal illegals whisked into the country by Democratic politicians looking for future voters. It makes no difference whether certain ancestral anxieties have become groundless and mixed in with garbled memories of onetime tsarist oppression or horror stories about the Klan. Neither the fears nor the voting habits of those affected are likely to be changed, whether by Fox News or the Jewish Republican Coalition. Even for those whom it does nothing to help financially or physically, the Democratic Party, according to J. Burden, does at least provide “social and emotional patronage.”

Republican operatives should therefore spend more time finding voters where they’re most likely to be. They should stop obsessing about “natural conservatives” and start recruiting those who already lean in their direction. The Republican Party is more likely to win over recently arrived African blacks than those blacks who have been marinating in stories of white American racism and whose collective identity is reinforced by hatred for the GOP. Republicans are also more likely to win the votes of Jews whose ancestors came from Muslim countries than Jews who still nurse stories of oppression under Christian rulers. Republicans also do better among Soviet Jews than among those Jews whose ancestors came from Eastern Europe before the Communist revolution. They also win more support from Orthodox Jews than from those in Reformed congregations.

Most relevant, lots of Americans who lean right simply don’t vote. I live in a part of Pennsylvania that is full of low-intensity conservative voters, and it amazes me that the GOP doesn’t make the same effort to energize them and drive them to the polls (if such things still exist), as the Democrats do with any person who is even minimally conscious. The Republican activist Scott Presler made a name for himself by recruiting low-intensity Republican voters in my neck of the woods, starting with members of Pennsylvania Dutch communities. This may have contributed to the margin by which Trump carried our state in 2024.  

The Natural Conservative fantasy seems to survive as a Boomer fixation, one that is motivated by a desire to incorporate certain minorities into the Republican Party to showcase one’s inclusiveness and freedom from bigotry.  This mindset seems common among the “nice people” of a certain age who may be haunted by the left’s charges of prejudice. Such people hope to make their detractors like or respect them, which is unlikely to happen. Nevertheless, by working to lure designated minorities into their party or at least exaggerating their success in doing so, such people feel better about themselves and their virtue.

I am truly underwhelmed by the messaging of GOP spokespersons who tell us how well they have recruited black voters. Their peak success was in 2024, when Trump received 15 percent of the black vote, compared to his worst record four years earlier, when he received only 8 percent. Although that upward movement represents an improvement of sorts, Trump, as Pew Research properly notes, still “lost the black vote to the Democrats overwhelmingly.” My question: Couldn’t all that happy talk and frantic outreach have been better spent going after more white Evangelicals?

This is not to scorn anyone’s vote, but in a situation of limited resources and manpower, certain demographics offer the Republicans much more than others. White Evangelicals are the GOP’s most reliable voters; over 86 percent vote Republican when they turn up to vote. In Tennessee’s seventh district, where Republican congressional candidate Matt Epps won by only nine points about three months ago and where the GOP badly underperformed, Evangelical turnout was noticeably below average. That media-scorned base is one that the Republicans should cultivate nonstop.

But certain preoccupations have less to do with winning elections than gaining brownie points (if I may show my age by resorting to dated usage). Thus, we continue to hear that blacks are stampeding into the GOP and that some leftists are “moderates,” as opposed to full-time woke obsessives. In any case, the right, and the GOP, to whatever extent it defines itself as such, should stop caring about pleasing its adversaries. If they don’t take that step, they will continue to lose winnable elections, and deservedly so. Above all, in our polarized society, it is necessary to recognize hardened polarities and take them into account when plotting electoral strategies. This polarity won’t go away by imagining that it’s gone. It’s my hope that as a younger generation takes over the GOP, those delusions I’ve highlighted will be gone with the wind, if I may quote the title of a truly great movie that is now only shown with unsightly warnings about its reactionary content.