VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Election 2024 — those who lecture versus those tired of being lectured

The election is finally shaping up to be not only liberal Democrat Kamala Harris versus conservative Republican Donald Trump.

Instead, it has become a larger contest between those who talk down to their fellow Americans and those who are increasingly sick and tired of being lectured. How smart is it, for example, for Harris supporters to claim nonstop that ex-president Trump is a fascist dictator — and thus, by extension, those also who vote for him?

Women voters poll heavily for Harris. Trump enjoys a similar, although likely somewhat smaller, margin of male voters.

Yet Harris — along with campaign surrogates Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — has been lecturing both Black and white male voters nonstop that they are misled. Or they supposedly suffer from false consciousness — as if they have no clue that Harris and her progressive agenda are really in their own self-interest.

Such haughtiness reached a zenith when Harris ran ads of actors costumed as supposedly working-class men. They voiced scripted talking points to prove that “real” men are progressive Harris supporters.

But the actors were so patently ridiculous, their canned lines so unreal, that most viewers likely thought the ads were run by Trump himself — to show how arrogant, out-of-touch elites must imagine how the so-called “clingers” and “deplorables” think and talk.

The Trump campaign also tries all sorts of strategies to win over women voters, from promising to rectify the Biden-Harris hyperinflation to reducing spiraling crime in towns and cities. But one method they avoid is claiming women are ignorant of their real self-interest and deluded by Harris — accurately assuming that a candidate does not win voters by belittling their intelligence.

Harris and Obama both dressed down Black men, claiming they are especially culpable for not voting en masse for Harris — even though a far higher percentage of Black males will vote for Harris than for Trump.

This hectoring the electorate on its supposed ignorance or moral shortcomings has become a Harris campaign trademark.

To Harris, objecting to 10 million to 12 million foreign nationals entering the country illegally without background checks during the Biden-Harris administration is supposedly a sign of a lack of compassion. And claiming that a current declining rate of illegal immigration should allay voters’ supposed paranoias utterly ignores the millions of illegal aliens who were all but welcomed in by Biden-Harris before the 2024 election cycle.

Voters are also talked down to ad nauseam that they do not appreciate the Biden-Harris economy given the rate of inflation is falling.

True. But most voters go shopping in a manner politicians do not.

So they resent such top-down sermons. They know best that prices for staple foods, fuel, insurance and housing have spiked by some 20 percent to 30 percent since 2021 — and stayed astronomically high.

Currently, the auto industry is in crisis. Its huge inventory of electric vehicles sits unwanted and unsold. Harris and the left, remember, mandated all sorts of EV standards in their war against the internal combustion engine. Then the proverbial people revolted against the comparatively limited range of EVs and the difficulty in finding accessible and quick-charging stations.

So the free market and consumer demand ignored the increasingly strident lectures.

Likewise, Harris pontificated that crime that had spiked in 2021-2023 is now not all that bad. But voters know all too well that their major cities are now unsafe. They sense one reason this year that crime is not soaring as it was two years ago is because it had gotten so bad that any further commensurate increases would have made life utterly unlivable.

The Harris campaign was further hurt by past videos that keep popping up of Harris lecturing voters about how they either must think correctly or remain cluelessly selfish or ignorant.

So a recent clip surfaced on Columbus Day 2021 of a Vice President Harris lecturing America about Western civilization’s “shameful” sins in discovering the new world.

Another video reveals Harris warning the country in 2020 on national television that the massive post-George Floyd demonstrations — that had turned violent and deadly — were not and should not stop, as if the country had to pay collective penance for its sins.

This 2024 race may be becoming analogous to an October 1980 teachable moment.

Then a preachy and sanctimonious incumbent Jimmy Carter — ahead in the final October polls over challenger Ronald Reagan — finally turned off voters for good.

The previous underdog Reagan won in a landslide for a variety of reasons. But certainly, one explanation was that the electorate had finally collectively shrugged off their weariness. They were sick and tired of Carter’s downer lectures about how they were wrong and culpable.

Reagan, however, reminded voters that America was better than all the alternatives, needed not be perfect to be good and had nothing to apologize for.

The same contrast will likely determine the election of 2024.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact at authorvdh@gmail.com.