Democrats will regret their social media retreat

Denial is a river you can watch in real time.
At the moment it flows from social platform X, formerly known as Twitter, to social platform BlueSky, otherwise known as utopia.
In one sanctimonious declaration after another, Democrats are registering their disgust for the people they blame most for losing the 2024 presidential election.
The American people. 
From the Democrats’ point of view, the 2024 presidential election was a test of character, and Americans came up wanting. 
They elected a “fascist.” 
So, Democrats are making their exodus from Platform X, whose owner they despise and whose users they deplore.
Elon Musk is not merely the richest man in the world and the guy who bought Twitter. He is now a member of Republican “Team Unity” that is returning Donald Trump to the White House.
Democrats won’t tolerate heresy like that, so there must be separation from the rabble, from the larger swath of America that voted one more time for Trump. 
The Democrats will take their moral certitude to a social media domain more serene and high-minded, more controlled. A veritable heaven on earth.
BlueSky is the domain for good people — well-bred and mannered people. People of distinction with master’s degrees on their mantels and no gluten in their diets.
There in their warm blue bath they can chatter on about the climate crisis and the halcyon Obama years and never feel reality poke at them.
Which at the moment it does. Quite sharply.
Their world has flipped. They used to be the people who had it together. Who were hip to Black and brown people and their cultures and needs.
And now Latino voters are moving in droves to the Republican Party. And more and more Black men are wearing red.
Black and white NFL players are doing the Trump victory dance in the end zone, and a Black mixed martial arts champion just did the MAGA jig before handing his championship belt to Trump.
Not only have Democrats been rejected, they’ve been rejected by the demography they once believed would deliver them an indestructible new majority. 
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The bubble has burst. So, what now? 
They move in a huff to a new bubble — BlueSky. Was there ever a more perfect name for sustained delusion?
If they could only stand back a little and see where they went wrong, they might start to lift themselves up. But they can’t.
Denial hardens the muscles like rigor mortis. 
It’s clear as day why the Democrats face-planted in 2024.
They stopped being liberals. 
If there was an archetype for the American liberal, it was the one Steve Jobs created for the legendary Apple ad that played during the 1984 Super Bowl.
She is a woman dressed in hot-orange athletic shorts and shoes who sprints down the center of a seated throng of gray people with closed minds. She is running toward a Jumbotron where Big Brother drones on about “the anniversary of information purification … a garden of pure ideology.”  
As she nears the big screen, she stops and wheels and hurls her sledgehammer at the Jumbotron, blowing it up and jerking open the eyes and jaws of every automaton in attendance.
That was American liberalism busting through barriers, rescuing free speech from the censors and our lives from the control freaks.
It reflected perfectly how the American left viewed the birth of the internet — as the tool that would flatten the hierarchies, democratize information and give voice to the people who don’t own million-dollar printing presses or TV studios.
Now anyone could self-publish without much cost, giving rise to new voices and perspectives that had never been heard before.
But something changed on the way to the revolution. This marvel the left had birthed — the personal computer — made them rich. With wealth came power and with power came control.
Now they tightened their grip on the power centers — the White House, the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the corporate boardroom, the arts and entertainment.
Pretty soon, free speech was no longer the bedrock of liberty, but a challenge to them — the establishment. Longtime fighting liberals like John Kerry were soon questioning constitutional freedoms, as in, “Our First Amendment stands as a major block.” 
Block to what?
“To hammer … out of existence (disinformation).”
Show me the controlling authority that decides what is disinformation, and I’ll show the authoritarian on the “1984” Jumbotron. 
Speech is so fundamental to freedom that to control it is to attack our very independence, wrote Antonio García Martínez, tech executive and author of The New York Times bestseller “Chaos Monkeys.” 
“America wasn’t built on ‘content moderation’ guidelines and ‘problematic’ this and that. It was built on the inalienable right of every citizen to tell their government, as well as any fellow citizen, to go f— themselves and read and write and do whatever they like.” 
The liberals used to talk this way. Not anymore.
They created a therapeutic society of safe spaces and forbidden words, their own “garden of pure ideology” called wokeness that tried to police free expression and rub out opposing voices.
The American people put a stake through all that on Nov. 5. It’s over.
Now you Democrats have a choice.
You can retreat to your BlueSky and bubble wrap, or you can return to your own first principles, to those heady times when you were the lions of free speech.
Time to be liberal again.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at [email protected].