Keeping It Real

"I want to talk about a simple thing. It’s a preoccupation that came again to mind as I watched President Trump sign, in an East Room ceremony on Wednesday, the executive order ending federal funding for educational programs that mandate biological males be allowed to compete on girls’ or women’s sports teams.

The mood in the room wasn’t triumphal or mean, but grateful and joyous. If you still seek to understand the depth of the president’s popularity with voters, you need look no further than that ceremony, all or parts of which were on cable and broadcast news. It is still amazing to me that the Democratic Party put itself so firmly on the wrong side of this issue. I ask donors and party leaders why, and they can never say how it happened.

My simple thought: that in our politics now we consistently go too far and ask too much. It has become a major dynamic in the past 20 years or so. It manifests in a kind of ideological maximalism. You must get everything you want and grant your foe nothing. In terms of the issue above, you don’t ask society to give you good and just treatment of all transgender folk. Instead you insist that others see reality exactly as you do—that if a man experiences himself as a woman, then you must agree that he is a woman, and this new insight must be incorporated into all human activity, such as sports.

Reaction to the Trump executive order from those who disagree with it has been curiously absent. The reason is that they know they went too far." - Peggy Noonan