Does Andrew Yang Hate America Enough to Please the American Left?

My latest in PJ Media was written just before Yang dropped out of the New York City mayoral race.

With all due respect to Kamala Harris and Howard Dean, it is Andrew Yang who holds the crown for the most awkward presidential campaign of the twenty-first century (so far). Or have you forgotten when he declared, “I’m the full service presidential candidate,” and gleefully squirted whipped cream into the mouths of kneeling supporters, until he was pulled away by a mortified aide? Yang is now running for mayor of New York, and he seems to have learned his lesson: asked Sunday what he thought about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Gaza) likening the U.S. and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban, Yang offered neither whipped cream nor a single word in response. Instead, he just turned and walked away. Ignoring this problem, however, will not make it go away for him.

Yang was caught in the dilemma of the modern Democratic Party. Ilhan Omar and her fellow to-the-Left-of-Mao-Zedong Squad members represent its base, far more than Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer ever did, and Yang knows that full well, as does every Democrat on the national scene today. Omar was expressing the general views of the party’s base when she tweeted: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban. I asked [Secretary of State Antony Blinken] where people are supposed to go for justice.”

The worst part of Omar’s statement was not that she lumped together forces that work hard to avoid civilian casualties with those that target civilians and glory in their deaths, but that so many online Leftists leapt to her defense in the ensuing furor and insisted that she was right.

In the face of that, what was Yang to do? He could have joined them and declared that Omar was indeed right, and that America is not great, was never great, and can never and will never be made great again. He could have echoed actor John Cusack, who is slightly to the Left of Joseph Stalin, and who recently tweeted: “We aren’t great – we aren’t even mediocre – we’re f**king awful.”

If Yang had done that, however, he would have alienated the dwindling number of Leftists who think that maybe America is not entirely evil, and that national suicide may not be the best policy. There may even be a handful of such people in New York City itself. He would also have drawn the ire of conservatives and patriots, who still exist in sufficient as-yet-uncanceled numbers to cause him some public discomfort if he had decided to become the successor of Gotham’s worst mayor by promising to be even worse still.

There is more. Read the rest here.