Rich Lowry

Syndicated columnist

“How dare you say that” isn’t a persuasive political argument.

Yet the side that has believed it can bully its way to victory on cultural issues by policing the debate in its favor continues to act as if it is one, even after getting soundly beaten in the election.

The Left’s game has been to insist that everyone adopt its tendentious vocabulary, to call opponents bigots and to use moral blackmail — and the threat of punishment — to keep any left-of-center doubters in line.

This model, which has been quite successful over the years, has a flaw, though. If a given cause is exotic and unpopular enough, and if it becomes subject to a political debate where the broader public can weigh in, the attempt to define common sense as a thought crime is doomed to fail.

This is what happened on trans issues in the election. Donald Trump’s “she’s for they/them” attack ad was the most effective and consequential political spot of this century.

How is the Left taking it? By clinging to the old rules.

In an exchange on CNN that’s gotten attention, the Republican strategist Shermichael Singleton said a lot of families don’t think that boys should play girls’ sports, eliciting an outraged reaction from progressive panelist Jay Michaelson.

Interrupting, Michaelson said heatedly that he wasn’t going to listen to such “transphobia” and maintained with great vehemence that it is “a slur” to describe “trans girls” as “boys.”

Notably, the anchor Abby Phillip — the moderator on what is supposed to be a straight-down-the- line news network — intervened, not to say that Singleton was free to use whatever term he thinks is most appropriate, but to rebuke him and ask him “to try to talk about this in a way that is respectful.”

The Left’s attitude on this issue is not, “You may disagree, but I believe trans girls are indeed girls,” but rather, “They are girls and you have absolutely no moral right to say or think otherwise.”

It adds a spirit of hectoring intolerance to the underlying absurdity of the position on the merits — making it all even more off-putting.

The problem is that progressives consider whatever new boutique obsession they’ve come up with at any given moment to be the great moral issue of our time, indeed always to be the moral equivalent of the fight for civil rights.

So, someone who doesn’t want to see boys competing in girls’ sports, and simply rejects the fashionable terminology, is viewed as a modern-day Bull Connor.

This means no compromise is acceptable, even on the most pragmatic political grounds.

The longtime chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, Gilberto Hinojosa, just got defenestrated, at least in part for daring to say the obvious on the trans issues.

“You can support transgender rights up and down all the categories where the issue comes up, or you can understand that there’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support,” he said in an election postmortem.

He’d have been better off saying that the party should in the future call for the official end of the gender binary, by violence if necessary.

After getting slammed by his own side, Hinojosa groveled: “I extend my sincerest apologies to those I hurt with my comments today.” And now he’s gone anyway.

A top aide to Democratic representative Seth Moulton resigned after the congressman had the temerity to say that he doesn’t want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Well, he’s supposed to be afraid for a reason. He, too, was fiercely denounced by left-wing groups.

The Left’s moralistic browbeating may succeed in reinforcing the trans-orthodoxy among its own. As we learned on Nov. 5, though, the rest of the country won’t play by these poisonously stupid and illiberal rules.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.