" Apologies to Elton John, but in Washington and throughout so much of the country, can you feel the hate tonight?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked by reporter James Rosen if she hates President Donald Trump. She responded with an "if looks could kill" fire in her eyes and denounced Rosen for his question while claiming she doesn't hate Trump.

Former Vice President Joe Biden verbally attacked and challenged an 83-year-old man in Iowa to a push-up contest at a gathering of Democrats. The man asked about Biden's son and how he managed to get a lucrative job with a Ukraine gas company while lacking any experience in the field. Biden called him a "damn liar."

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley testified before the House Judiciary Committee that although he didn't vote for Trump and is not a Trump supporter, he doesn't believe the president has committed impeachable offenses. He wrote in an op-ed for the Hill on the subject. and for his honesty, "My home and office were inundated with threatening messages and demands that I be fired from George Washington University."

While some blame President Trump for the rhetorical escalation, that is too simple an explanation. I think the real problem for Democrats in general and the far left, which dominates the party, in particular, is that the president is winning. He has stolen success from failed Democrat policies, and the only response Democrats have is impeachment. They must destroy his presidency or risk their own destruction.

Consider last Friday's jobs report and the stock market reaction. CNBC summarized the good news:

» "Nonfarm payrolls surged by 266,000 in November, better than the 187,000 expected by economists polled by Dow Jones."

» "The unemployment rate ticked down to 3.5% from 3.6%, back to the 2019 low and matching the lowest jobless rate since 1969."

» "The end of the GM strike had a big effect, boosting employment in motor vehicles and parts by 41,300, part of an overall 54,000 gain in manufacturing."

» "Average hourly earnings rose by 3.1% from a year ago, slightly above the 3% expected by economists polled by Dow Jones."

The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared 337 points in response.

African American and Hispanic unemployment are at record lows. Could the result be more support for the president and other Republicans from African Americans and Hispanics in the 2020 election? Three recent polls -- Emerson, Marist and Rasmussen -- show the president at 30% approval or higher among black voters. As candidate Trump said during the 2016 campaign, African Americans have been voting for Democrats for decades and what have Democrats done for them? He urged them to try someone else, namely him.

This is what scares and angers Democrats. If they lose significant numbers of black voters, they're toast. Democrats have taken the black vote for granted. They have talked a good game but failed to deliver with jobs and better education opportunities -- such as school choice.

If the hatred seems bad now -- and it is -- imagine what it will be like should Trump have the opportunity to name another justice to the Supreme Court. It will make the hatred directed at Brett Kavanaugh seem tame.

Government has become a god to the left. If they aren't controlling it, they become out of control. If they aren't addicting more people to government, they are losing them, as those who have been dependent on government become more independent and self-reliant.

With House Democrats contemplating a vote on articles of impeachment against the president before Christmas, we seem to be closer to "peace on earth" than we are to "good will to men" (and women). "

"Blowout" was how one U.K. newspaper described the decisive victory of Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party in last week's election.

How decisive was it? Not only did conservatives win an 80-seat majority in Parliament, a constituency in Blythe Valley in northeast England elected a conservative member for the first time since its creation 40 years ago.

Pundits leading up to the election were wrong, as usual. They predicted a very tight race.

The election was viewed as a referendum on Brexit, which voters approved in 2016 but which some politicians had blocked. They wanted another referendum, which is reminiscent of voter recounts in the U.S. The recounts stop only after a Democrat wins a majority. Johnson campaigned on giving the voters what they voted for, otherwise known as democracy. Britain's divorce from the European Union could be finalized as early as next month.

The deniers were out in full force. Jeremy Corbyn announced his resignation as Labour Party leader but claimed the disastrous results were not his fault and ludicrously asserted his hard-left agenda was "extremely popular."

If that is an example of popularity, it is difficult to imagine what unpopularity would look like.

Among Corbyn's other faults were his virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements. Some, perhaps even in his own party, will view his departure as good riddance to bad rubbish.

Also among the deniers was former Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow, now a commentator for Sky News. On election night, Bercow, who was elected as a conservative but is a frequent critic of his party, said: "The fact that the conservative message resonated with voters doesn't necessarily mean it is the right message." Say what?

The U.K. election will also be seen by some as a possible predictor of next year's U.S. presidential contest. That's what happened in 1979. One year after Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, Ronald Reagan swept to victory. Republicans also won the Senate, but Democrats still controlled the House.

The 2020 election might see Republicans win a House majority as especially conservative voters will be motivated to seek revenge on Democrats who have voted to impeach President Donald Trump. Should Republicans again hold all three branches of government, watch for a Trump-Republican agenda to be placed on fast-forward to the despair of the media and the remaining liberals in Congress.

The headline on a Daily Mail column by Piers Morgan read: "Boris Johnson's triumph proves democracy-denying radical socialists backed by self-righteous celebrities on Twitter are electoral poison -- and if Democrats fall for the same delusion, Trump will decimate them in 2020." I love the British tabloids!

Morgan continued: "There was also another massive reason why Johnson won so big, and it was that (Corbyn) … is a hard-core socialist so far left he makes (Rep.) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez., D-N.Y., look like a capitalist. … As I've been warning for months, there's not a cat-in-hell's chance of a socialist candidate beating Trump next November, especially not with the U.S. economy doing so well. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren both share Jeremy Corbyn's socialist agenda and both appear to be as popular as him on Twitter."

Happy days are returning to Britain. With the U.S. economy booming, by next November they may return to American shores. As with Britain's 1979 election, this one may also be a foretaste of better days to come and the burying of socialism for a generation.  "

" Here's a theory for why our politics are so confusing these days: Neither party wants to be a majority party.

From an ideological perspective, majority parties are, by nature, weird. For instance, the long-dominant FDR coalition included a strange mix of blacks and segregationists, corrupt city machines and the reformers who hated them.

Over the several decades that followed, most major policy questions were hashed out within the Democratic Party. The Republicans factored in mostly as stalemate-breakers.


So, for instance, the great intra-Democratic Party fight between liberals and Southern segregationists was only settled when Republicans sided with the civil rights bloc. Eighty percent of Republicans voted in favor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, while fewer than 70% of Democrats did.

Samuel Lubell, a Polish-born political analyst, famously described this dynamic as the "sun and moon" system of political parties. In our "political solar system," Lubell wrote in 1951, "it is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period are fought out; while the minority party shines in reflected radiance of the heat thus generated."

The Democratic sun started its long arc of descent in 1968. In 1972, Richard Nixon managed to pick off sizable support from the white working class for a massive landslide re-election victory. Ronald Reagan's victories and the subsequent GOP capture of the House in 1994 -- after a 40-year Democratic reign -- seemed to seal the deal.

But then, as New York Times columnist David Brooks noted in 2011, "something strange happened. No party took the lead." The outcome, he wrote, is "both parties have become minority parties simultaneously. We are living in the era of two moons and no sun."

Nearly a decade later, things are even more bizarre. We may be more partisan than ever, but the partisans tend to dislike their own parties -- they just hate the other party more.

There are many reasons for this polarization, but one of them is that the most committed members of each party have a decidedly lunar mindset. Progressives and conservatives alike are convinced they are victims of the Powers That Be. One of the main arguments that propelled Trump to the White House and sustains his GOP support today is the feeling that the right has lost every important battle of the last 40 years.

The left is hooked on the same feeling. Each side defines the Powers That Be differently, though there is some overlap when it comes to animosity toward economic "elites" (hence Fox News host Tucker Carlson's populist assaults on the free market and praise for Elizabeth Warren's economic program). Hillary Clinton was the candidate of the establishment, and even though she won the Democratic nomination, nearly all the passion in the party flows to some version of Bernie Sanders' or Elizabeth Warren's radical indictment of the system.

As political consultant Luke Thompson notes, minority parties tend to obsess about unity because without it they are even more powerless. This makes ideological purity a vital source of cohesion. Majority parties have both the luxury and the burden of power. To govern is to make policy choices, and choosing A over B will always disappoint the backers of B.

Writing in 2017, Thompson argued that the GOP needed to come to grips with the fact that it was the majority party and behave accordingly, stringing together disparate and often disagreeable factions. The Democrats, by betting on the "ascendant coalition" of minorities, immigrants and the young to get Barack Obama elected, had not realized that this coalition was good at voting for Obama but unreliable for other Democrats.

The problem is that the ideological purity dominating both sides is a kind of righteous victimhood. The result is a Democratic Party suffused with a sense that it should be a majority party but is being denied its rightful status, making denunciations of "white supremacy" and the "oligarchy" simultaneously more intense and comforting. Voter suppression is a legitimate issue, but it is not the unified field theory for Democratic failures some want it to be -- nor can voter fraud be blamed for Republican failures.

Meanwhile, the GOP could be a majority party, but the perceived need to be a Trump party prevents it from even trying. Not only are Trump's politics fueled by culture war resentment and victimology, but his bottomless need for adulation is simply an inadequate rationale for a sun party to hold a majority together.

Both parties are weakened by decades of misguided reforms and the growth of a media industrial complex invested in telling its customers what they want to hear, making it impossible for either moon to achieve the escape velocity required to become a sun party.

As political scientists Steven Teles and Robert Saldin argue, the best way out is for new moderate political factions to organize and demand concessions for their support. But that will require a lot of work, made all the more difficult by the burden of toiling in moonlight. "

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