Not long after last fall’s presidential election, an entire wall in New York City’s Union Square subway station was plastered with hundreds of protestors’ Post-it notes, hailed by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration as “subway therapy” for the losing side, but more akin to a billboard for the demented, all berserk with rage, contrived hysteria, and actual paranoia, lamenting Donald Trump’s victory.  “Love Trumps Hate.”  “Rosaries Off My Ovaries.”  “Resist the Normalization of Tyranny and Fascism.”  “NO to Islamophobia and Racism.”  And, from a French correspondent, “Je n’aime pas la droitisation du monde,” roughly translated to mean that the writer doesn’t like conservatives and won’t stand for it.

Quickly, the faux-intellectual celebrity psychotics, activists, and lounge-lizards chimed in with a litany of juvenile grievances.  Self-involved actress Lena Dunham sniveled that the electoral result was “painful on a cellular level” and pondered a move to Vancouver.  Disgruntled outgoing first lady Michelle Obama complained to Oprah Winfrey that she now knows “what not having hope feels like.”  Meryl Streep, voice quavering in pretend distress, carried on at the Golden Globe Awards as if the nuclear balloon had finally lifted off, a phenomenal bit of overacting more than up to the Lifetime Achievement Award she’d just received.  Momentarily losing track of her devotion to Kabbalah, Madonna reverted to her history as uncouth vulgarian, rolling out a new initiative to adopt several dozen more African children for her trophy-toddler collection while firing off a tirade of expletives about blowing up the White House as comedian Jackie Mason dismissed her as a “deranged yenta.”  A “boycott” of L.L. Bean was launched because the founder’s granddaughter had donated money to a pro-Trump PAC.  Potty-mouthed funny-women Rosie O’Donnell and Sarah Silverman called, respectively, for martial law to delay the inauguration and for a military coup d’état.  Activist black academic Marc Lamont Hill denounced blacks meeting with Trump as “a bunch of mediocre Negroes.”  Several Democratic members of Congress skipped the inauguration ceremonies.  And then there were the grandstanding talking heads and third-rate late-night comedians desperate to be part of the action, the truculent Radio City Rockettes and Keno waitresses, the Washington lifers and parasites enraged at their prospective loss of influence, consulting fees, and standing restaurant reservations.

Joseph Epstein, in a typically witty essay in The Weekly Standard celebrating the Chicago Cubs’ first World Series victory since 1908, poked fun at the team’s decades-long status as “lovable losers,” an organization somehow cursed.  The team’s failures frequently took on the comic aspects of programmed buffoonery: outfielders colliding and dropping fly balls at the worst possible moment, wild throws by infielders beaning other infielders as base-runners scored, fans reaching out of the stands to interfere with fielders, and other slapstick miscues destined to become part of sports-trivia lore.  Yet, through all their years in the doldrums—and often in last place in the standings—the Cubs were seen by many as endearing underdogs somehow worthy of sympathy and support.

By contrast, it is impossible to conjure up any sympathy for today’s leftists.  Losers they may be across wide areas of America in recent years, but, unlike yesteryear’s Chicago Cubs, they are the polar opposite of endearing, with nothing cute about their custom-designed program of radicalized fury, dishonesty, hysteria, and abuse together with the venomous attitude that anyone disagreeing with them must be silenced, vilified, punished, and destroyed, professionally or financially, and ideally both.  They tend to be encouraged and financed by an American Idol rogues’ gallery of Silicon Valley tycoons, entertainment-industry megalomaniacs, shyster trial lawyers, anti-American academics, and well-connected Wall Streeters.  They are of a general type demographer-historian Joel Kotkin has defined as “gentry liberals,” largely well-to-do, well-educated, and brimming with self-regard, cerebra fizzing with offbeat viewpoints about race, class, and “gender” politics and destructive notions that America is a cancer on the world and Christianity is somehow far more violent than Islam, topped off with vintage faculty-lounge self-righteousness about white people, Western civilization, and Western culture.  They are infantile and coercive in their enthusiasms, irrational and punitive in their many hatreds.  They never learn, never forgive, never forget, never apologize.  They mobilize many thousands of women to turn out in absurd pink “pussyhats” with cat ears to behave like simpleminded 13-year-olds in public, or round up their partisan march-and-riot cronies to throw garbage and flashlight batteries and shout graphic obscenities outside the homes and offices of public officials, or stage acts of Bolshevik improv featuring street violence, arson and looting, public defecation, and even sexual assault—all presented as “freedom of speech” for a gullible and largely sympathetic news media.  It must gall them to discover that they are distrusted and indeed mocked by a clear majority of what might be called the American Man in the Street.

To listen to the childish cursing and sloganeering, the slurs on patriotism and our national character, the dark and overwrought allegations of “treason“ and “collusion” with Russia to undermine our elections passed off as analysis in such mainstream publications as the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, calls for impeachment, and accusations of misogyny and sexual predation presented as truth by the crypto-strumpets and aging roués of our entertainment and broadcast industries, is to listen in on a bad comedy routine gone years out of date.  Even more droll is the smug posturing of Martin Sheen, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and their chums, capable enough when working from scripts on politically oriented programs like The West Wing and Veep, but clueless in their real-life misconceptions about democracy, government, public policy, and the Constitution of the United States, a document they and most of their peers despise, few understand, and almost none have apparently read.  Far from being, as they like to think, sophisticates “on the right side of history” as they proclaim President Trump a fascist, his lovely wife a “hooker,” and his young son retarded, today’s leftists are in reality blinkered, resentful ignoramuses, the most deplorable and irredeemable—to use Hillary Clinton’s words—of unlovable losers.

Newt Gingrich has talked about the “70-30 issues”—areas in which polls and surveys have for years indicated that the American public agrees with conservatives on a wide range of issues, although many conservatives may not realize it and leftists will never countenance it.  We might do well to remember the fact that, even through the madcap Obama years of active politicization and corruption of healthcare, education, charitable giving, and police work and open partisan weaponization of the EPA, the IRS, racial and civil-rights and free-speech issues, religion, and what might be called the regulatory state, most reputable polls consistently showed the American public’s steady approval of such conservative policies as less regulation, lower taxes, a smaller government, less clout for organized labor, a strong military and national defense, the defense of religious faith and the traditional family, stable levels of immigration, education reform and (within reason) Social Security reform, the continuing right to bear arms and open-carry gun laws, drilling for oil and gas, and voter ID, in every case by a majority of at least 60 percent and in many cases upward of 80 percent.  On the other hand, the public distrusts or openly despises such leftist conceits as partial-birth abortion, the bizarre postmodern neurosis we now know as transgender activism, speech codes, racial and “gender” quotas, disrespect of the American flag, the establishment of “sanctuary cities” to shield illegal immigrants and other criminals, the flagrant assault on the realities of history, the radicalization of our educational system to embrace leftist political indoctrination rather than learning, and the increasing polarization of our national discourse.  Even worse than that, as well-respected foreign-affairs strategist Gregory Copley, an Australian based in Washington, observed recently of the outgoing Obama crowd, “never has an administration done so much to undermine an incoming administration.”

Even in its current loser status, the left continues its call for resistance—ongoing disruption, grievance and special-identity demands certain to alienate the public further through accusations that any dissenters are divisive racist boobs and religious fanatics, perhaps clinging to guns and religion, as Barack Obama commented during his initial presidential campaign.  Yet even as they spew venom, they blame the lack of civility in today’s politics on President Trump, whom they claim to fear as they pretended to fear Ronald Reagan, Rudy Giuliani, and George W. Bush, even the mild-mannered Mitt Romney.

Today’s unlovable losers have updated many of the left’s standard strategies to try to impose their own views on the American public.  First, there is the drive to squelch the free speech of anyone holding viewpoints contrary to their own; indeed, they suggest that criticism is actually a form of violence.  In recent years such diverse public figures as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, women’s activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Fund, sociologist and author Charles Murray, and journalist-author Ann Coulter have been banned from such allegedly worldly campuses as Brandeis, Smith, Middlebury, and the University of California-Berkeley for the heresy of having thoughts more original and useful than lip-synching old protest songs from the 1960’s or calling on the international witches’ coven to put a curse on President Trump.  Veteran rabble-rouser Noam Chomsky seems to feel that Trump will soon stage a bogus terrorist incident in order to maintain control.  Noam might want to ease up just a bit on those hallucinogens.  Proposals for cuts in business and personal tax rates have as usual been denounced as “tax cuts for the rich,” although political economist Thomas Sowell has shown that every time similar cuts have been enacted—under the Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan, and George W. Bush administrations—tax revenues have increased and the taxes paid by the “rich” have increased both in dollars paid and percentage of total tax revenue.  Leftists, however, loathe anyone who has been successful on terms other than theirs, yet they see no conflict in grubbing for handouts from the likes of George Soros, who in the past has been forced to pay enormous legal penalties for dodgy activities described by many as insider trading and currency manipulation.

Americans are smarter, more intuitive, than many conservatives may think.  As time goes by, polls show that they have little tolerance, let alone enthusiasm, for the concepts of “microaggressions” or “safe spaces” or harebrained initiatives to provide “protection” for the fiddlehead fern, nor do they support the notion that dogs and cats are “slaves” to be “liberated.”  The public may find it ironic that leftists who openly despise the military call for military intervention to overturn the election of “someone else’s” candidate.  They surely marvel at the ingenuity of such ventures as “A Day Without Immigrants” in protest of the administration’s border-enforcement policies, although the actual purpose of the subsequent “Day Without A Woman” wasn’t clear.

A showbiz joke had it that, when Sean Connery shaved his mustache some years back, the reason he gave was that “it wasn’t working.”  Judging from the American public’s refusal to adapt to modern leftist decorum, similar words might begin a “Campaign Memo to Leftists.”  At the Academy Awards in 1985 the actress Sally Field, breathless with delight over an Oscar win for her role in Places in the Heart, gushed that “You like me, right now, you like me!”  A touching moment in Hollywood history, it doesn’t translate well to the status of the left in today’s United States.  Not so much, guys and gals, not so much.  The left may finally have achieved their dream of killing off Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, but their increasingly antagonistic, sophomoric vulgarity—exemplified only partly by the behavior of new DNC Chairman Thomas Perez and TV personalities Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee—is unlikely to endear them to an American public grown weary of such antics.  Yet what should be a net-positive situation for conservatives contains the germ of a problem, as well.  Benjamin Franklin, over a well-deserved glass of port following the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, stated that America had achieved “a Republic, if you can keep it.”  Today’s conservatives, forever haunted by their fear of betrayal, need to remind themselves, every day and in every way, that what they stand for is generally popular with the American public—if they can maintain the determination to advance it.