I watched President Trump’s State of the Union speech last night (3/4/2025) on the Fox News feed. After came the commentary. Brit Hume, the dean of the Fox News commentariat, normally incisive and spot-on, said the speech was one of the best, in so many words. I do not know what he was watching, but I saw a classroom nearly out of control. We have a coming together of a provocative and prickly president and an extremist, disruptive, and disrespectful opposition party. This outcome should be expected when both parties fear and are driven by the mercurial activists in their midst. The result is a scene that comes close to anarchy.
The solemnity of the event is gone. Trump’s speech, inspiring at moments, quickly descended into a MAGA rally with his usual personal invective. Frankly, I think that he was incensed by Democrat behavior in the audience with their interruptions, jargonized protest placards held aloft, and the necessary removal of one among their ranks for defiance of simple adult norms. All of it was reminiscent of the radical-Left, antisemitic student disruptions of guest lecturers on college campuses. How did we get to this state of affairs, even among the governing class, people who should know better?
The scene is a sign of the powerful influence of high-strung activists in the bases of both parties. For Republicans, their activist base was in search of a walking middle finger. Policy matters less than a demonstrative display of striking back at so-called “elites”, an in-your-face approach to politics and governance.
Thus, you get a guy who will take you down avenues that you might not want to go. Did people who pulled the lever for Trump vote for tariffs, the ritual humiliation of friends and allies, a foreign and trade policy of America Alone? Or was it an electoral majority gathering around a reversal of the chaos of gender confusion, prices gone amok, crowds of foreigners jumping the border and flooding the interior of the country, crime and nasty public spaces, extremist eco-crusades that are turning people’s lives upside down, identity-mongering at the expense of merit, and humiliations abroad? Trump promises to end the worst of it, but brings in tow a penchant for isolationism, protectionism, gaudy exhibitionism in matters of minor import like the renaming of places, territorial expansion, and schoolyard bullying. Did voters call for the hooking of this caboose to their train?
The flashy replaces practical policy. For the excitable, Trump is the ticket.
If this was poker, the Democrats see you and raise ten-fold. Their activist base is crazy. Their base’s prescription for the country is national suicide. Maybe that is because they have bought into the basic Marxist premise of a systemically corrupted society that can only be cleansed root and branch. They are in a revolutionary mood to overturn all relations between the sexes, between buyers and sellers, workers and employers, the person and his or her hopes for their spouses and children, and the control of individual choices in the minutest detail. The revolution is a disaster and people can see it, and are revolted by it. But this is what the donkey party’s activist base demands. The excessive and shrill overtake moderation and feet firmly planted on the ground.
The parties’ leadership, confronting the task of governance, cringe in fear of the strident in their midst. The party leadership is either weak in the face of this mob or panders to it for power, fame, and fortune. Do not be surprised that a deafening, raucous activism produces activistic leaders, people who are habituated to the superficial, irrelevant, and operationally dopey. Trump certainly presents that peril. Democrats have actually delivered the horror.
California’s Los Angeles is a classic in activist-driven misgovernance. Its mayor Karen Bass won the mayoral brass ring for reasons unrelated to an understanding of the practical aspects of managing a city. Her résumé is limited to “community activism” and time in the state legislature and Congress, places where activism prospers. While in Congress, she authored in 2020 the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. It reified in law the Democrat groundswell to defund the police, or reshape public safety into therapy. So, not surprisingly, she gallivants to Accra, Ghana, without a thought devoted to the forecasted 80-mph Santa Ana winds coursing down an environmentalist-protected and overgrown fire-climax watershed waiting for a spark. Down-to-earth experience in dealing with running large-scale enterprises would have come in handy.
The superficial attributes flow down to her appointments on the city’s fire commission, all known for their union activism and DEI qualities. Kristen Crowley, Bass’s appointed fire chief due to her gender and sexuality, ignored standard fire practice and ceased the monitoring of an earlier fire that was probably the origin of the cataclysm (see #3). Bass chose Janisse Quinones to run the Dept. of Water and Power to “prioritize” “vulnerable communities” and swear to “the goal of 100 percent renewable energy by 2035” (see #3). And a reservoir above Pacific Palisades remained empty to fight the fire. There is no room for more incompetence. Bass exhausted the supply.
The apex of the city’s cultural pyramid is equally dismissive of practicalities. The Los Angeles Times’s endorsement of Bass lauds her “holistic vision” as they pan her opponent, Rick Caruso, for his “luxury malls” and the millions that he contributed to his campaign. After the incineration of parts of the city, a poll conducted in late January shows Caruso besting Bass by 7%, 43% to 36%. As for Bass’s handling of the fires, she is underwater by 17%, 54% to 37% (see #1).
The poll is interesting but still mystifying. For a significant chunk of the LA electorate, apocalyptic fires, intensified by colossal incompetence, still cannot bring them to vote center-right or center anywhere. I suspect that it is because, in the California/LA context, center-Left actually means Left, hard Left anywhere else. And the extremism is not limited to “elites”. It is a populist thing seeping into huge demographies in the state and its urban centers. The shock of the fires will wear off as media come to her defense by catering to the leftist prejudices of this governing supermajority.
Already, streaming platforms are airing stories of the greedy rich, like the Resnicks, seizing water for themselves and leaving LA high and dry (see #2). False, but it appeals. You see, so they say, the hydrants went dry in Pacific Palisades due to the scheming water robber barons of their imagination. California has a deep preference for activists who check the right identity boxes instead of somebody who has a history of successfully making the trains run on time. Give it time and LA and California will revert to its preferred mean of incompetence.
On the activist Right, Trump bashes Zelenskyy and mouths moral equivalence platitudes that would be met with jeers if expressed by Obama, while many in the party lather themselves in hypocrisy as their prior hawkishness evaporates into appeasement. It is “peace through strength” so long as it accords with Trump’s latest outburst. Whatever he says and does, they nod in agreement and rush to the microphones to grovel in worship. It is disgusting.
For many on both sides, the chief motivator appears to be fear of their base. Talk radio hosts craft issues and messages to the talk radio audience under a cloud of anxieties about losing their Trump-crazed listeners. It would be commercial suicide to counter the insanity. Leftist politicians refuse to condemn the worst barbarity, or they divert attention away from the murder of babies, children, men and woman, young and old, the healthy and infirmed, to generate sympathy for those who aided and abetted the savagery. It is stupefyingly breathtaking.
Activism and its activists are making a shambles of our republic. This is what populism looks like. It is the “populism” of the most vocal. In ancient Rome, tyrants and other degenerates in purple were of the populares (Caesar, Caligula, Commodus), the party of the common people (plebes) and in opposition to “elites” (patricians). Populism guaranteed their power. Caligula did all he could to humiliate “elites” such as Senators because it was entertaining to the street. For instance, he commanded the attendance of Senators and their wives to a bacchanalia so he could eye the prettiest women, have his way with them, return to the drinkfest, and boast of the conquests in front of their husbands (according to Suetonius in The Twelve Caesars). Populism elevates the most popular, not the most fit.
Today’s populists can be traced back to them. The rise to the top rung of power was through pandering, demagoguery, and feeding the mob’s desires. In today’s context, the bread and circuses are delivered in the form of DEI favoritism, looting the rich, tariffs that protect my job at the expense of everybody else’s, hosing benefits to your constituents through bankrupting entitlements, eco-extremism to cater to the passions of white-collar urban professionals, unrestrained abortion and a lavish child-care public infrastructure to indulge the lifestyle of single college-educated women, expanding the civil rights state to advance teenage genital mutilation and public school indoctrination and the destruction of the family, etc., etc.
Left populism, Right populism, and activists of both stripes are producing mediocrities, the ineffectual, and failures in public office. We suffer, but we had a hand in choosing them. Where are the adults? There are not any because they cannot survive the activist gauntlet. We are living the consequences of activism gone mad. Enjoy.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Poll: Bass Flops Handling of Wildfires; Caruso Should Be mayor”, Isegura, 810 KSFO, 1/24/2025, at https://www.ksfo.com/2025/01/24/poll-bass-flops-handling-of-wildfires-caruso-should-be-mayor/
2. There’s a host of class warfare videos on YouTube, such as “California’s Water Mismanagement: Billionaire Resnicks Plunder California’s Precious Water! Fire!”, at https://youtu.be/2ryi893yIP8?si=YvDE5a9Nun7JgQ8Y
3. “Wildfire of the Vanities”, Will Swaim of the California Policy Center, National Review Magazine, March 2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/03/wildfire-of-the-vanities-californias-political-model-has-failed/
