Watching progressives analyze the 2016 election, I couldn’t help but recall the story of the young boy who undertook to experiment on a housefly. After offering the fly part of a cookie crumb, the young man then commanded, “Fly!” Well sir, the fly flew, circling the room and then landing back on the table in front of the boy, who then offered another cookie fragment as a reward.  “Fly,” the boy again commanded, and again, the fly took to the air and circled the room before landing in the same location on the table. With a pair of tweezers, the child then pulled the fly’s wings off before again ordering it to “Fly!” But this time, the fly just stood there, prompting the lad to write in his little notepad: “When the fly’s wings are torn off, it goes deaf.”

So it is with a great many progressives who, having seen Republicans respond to their 2008 defeat with a relentless and critical examination of the American right, now respond to their own defeat in the same way — with a relentless and critical examination of the American right. Because win, lose, or draw, most progressives assiduously avoid looking too deeply into the mirror, chiefly for the same reasons the wicked witch avoided water, or the Clintons avoid testifying under oath — the results could be calamitous to the cause.

Some, like Garrison Keillor, whose vicious caricatures of Mr. Trump’s voters range from intuiting their dislike for “chamber music concerts, wine tastings, lectures on Byzantine art and poetry readings” to comparing them to, “people who shoot up movie theaters,” resort rather reflexively to the sort of tawdry and infantile attacks that too often pass for reasoned analysis on the left. Several years ago, I sparred with a guy from the Village Voice following my column on Chief Justice John Roberts’ mental gymnastics in support of Obamacare. Quoting the portion of my piece wherein I mention that I drive an 18-wheeler, author Roy Edroso went on to compare my photo to Larry the Cable Guy, adding his coup de grâce, “Give him liberty or Git-R-Done!” “It is instructive,” I responded, “that when progressives, who fancy themselves as the voice of the working man, are actually confronted with one, they instinctively resort to stereotypical derision.”