Centrist journalist Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, hit Democrats with some tough love in his latest column for The Washington Post, published on Friday.
In an election postmortem, Zakaria wrote that the Dems could have put up a stronger fight against Republicans had they not “flubbed” key issues that “inflamed the opposition and depressed their base.”
“To avoid appearing to have 20/20 hindsight, I should say that I noted each of these mistakes at the time, often provoking angry responses from the left,” wrote Zakaria.
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According to him, such mistakes included the “collapse” of America’s immigration system, the “misuse of law” to punish Trump, and playing too much into identity politics.
In place of shutting down the border completely, “liberals branded anyone protesting as heartless and racist,” wrote Zakaria. As a result, they “missed a massive shift in American public opinion in just a few years.”
Zakaria added that Vice President Kamala Harris should have declared that she would “shut down the border early and hard” to distance herself from Joe Biden’s administration.
Dems also got punishing Trump all wrong, said Zakaria. Despite having some legitimate criminal cases against him, a host of lawsuits “piled on in rapid succession gave the impression that the legal system was being weaponized to get Trump,” he wrote.
“Lawfare turned Trump from a loser into a victim,” said Zakaria. And as Trump’s indictments grew, “his campaign contributions increased and his poll numbers solidified.”
The final nail for Dems was ironically alienating populations in the name of inclusivity.
“This kind of obsession made Democrats view people too much through their ethnic or racial or gender identity,” wrote Zakaria. It also made Dems blind to how Trump was warming up to populations such as working-class Latinos, “because they were socially conservative or liked his macho rhetoric or even agreed with his hard-line stance on immigration.”
With “cancel culture” bleeding into the workplace and university campus, liberal ideologies became “deeply illiberal,” wrote Zakaria.
And he wrote that if Dems should learn any lesson from this election it’s this: “Liberals cannot achieve liberal goals—however virtuous—by illiberal means,” he wrote.
