I think you've found a way to look into my head and read my thoughts, but then to give them far more coherent expression. Thank you. I'm a retired 71 year old white guy and former County govt employee. I was "heterodox" long before I heard anybody use the term. I think there are a lot of us, but unfortunately we have been herded (by the Democratic party elite) into the mushy, malleable "moderate" voter demographic, where we simply became reliable, quiet electoral cannon fodder for Democratic candidates. We, the "moderates" are an extremely reliable vote because of the "better than the other guys" argument. And I'll probably roll my eyes, grit my teeth and hold my nose and vote Democratic until I leave this world. To be on the Left in America is to know defeat, disappointment and ennui. It means seeing hope recede indefinitely into a future you will not live to see. I have 2 degrees but I've always talked openly with the working class people you describe. They don't usually agree with me but they'll listen. The Democrats, with their clueless identitarian baggage have lost many of these people. But it's a rejection of ideology, not a switch to another ideology. Tr**pism, after all is not an ideology. It's autocratic, transactional and non-ideological. These people don't have a coherent worldview or even an understanding of history. They are just sociopathic, egotistical strivers who have a lot and want more, i.e., the whole thing. The Democrats are offering an ideology and a (false) narrative but in practice will enthusiastically piss it all away for a nominal, empty "victory", which they'll proudly hail as "bipartisan and pragmatic". There goes single payer, there goes the "public option", there goes an Obama stimulus big enough to actually lift most of the people out of the 2008 crash, there goes any accountability for the truly unspeakable war crimes of the Cheney/Bush regime. Hell, Guantanamo is still open and still holds a bunch of old men.
I'm going to share this piece with friends and see who gets pissed off, who agrees and who drops me like a hot rock. Thanks for making it all so goddamn maddeningly clear. Good luck and as the now thoroughly canceled Rudyard Kipling once said "Don't let the bastards grind you down".
I really appreciate this thoughtful comment and I'm so glad to have given you something to share. My entire purpose is arming people with arguments to fight the illogic. And yes, I'm with you. I didn't vote D this time but L, and it was the only protest I could register. Trumpism isn't the answer, but I understand why people put him back in office. Constant moralizing and condescension is what pushed me to not vote D this time. Anyone would chafe. You might also enjoy the book Chaotic Neutral; the author touches on many of these topics (which I read after writing this). I feel crazy sometimes writing what I do, but then I see comments like this and it all feels worth it.
A laundry list of things for Democrats to keep and to dump if they ever want to win again nationwide.
Keep a woman’s right to choose for the first trimester. Dump abortion until birth unless the mother’s health is at risk.
Keep a concern for climate change and grow nuclear power. Dump intermittent, unreliable renewable energy.
Keep and develop new effective vaccines. Dump vaccine mandates.
Keep equality of opportunity for all. Dump equity of results based on discriminating against men, whites and Asians (aka D.E.I.). Recognize that D.E.I. Is unconstitutional.
Keep the protection of gay and lesbian rights. Dump men in women’s sports, private spaces and prisons. Oh, and mutilating children who might grow up to be gay.
Keep an opportunity for selective high value immigration. Dump sanctuary cities and open borders.
Keep helping the homeless find jobs and a place to live. Dump camping in cities and allowing open drug use.
Keep a concern for due process in criminal justice. Dump letting shoplifters and other petty thieves off the hook.
Do all of the above and they might find their way back to power.
Isn't it sad that both parties have either extreme of your statements. Neither can seem to reach a true compromise position, even as Democrats compromise away everything else. People have nowhere to go between these extremes.
As a current Independent who once ran for a state-level elected office as a Democrat, I do not think it is possible anymore. The once-powerful moderate and conservative wings of the party, particularly within the US Senate, are completely gone. All the activists, campaign donors and primary voters are clearly on the Left compared to the party in the 1990s. It is now a question of Left or more Left, and the cultural values of the college-educated class will always remain their core values.
Keep in mind that virtually every Democratic elected official must win the party primary within a very Blue region. Primary voters are far more to the Left on culture war issues than typical Democrats.
Except for the Presidency and a few Purple state Governors and Senators, Democratic elected officials do not have to care what moderates and conservatives think. This means the Left will always have a veto power over nominees. The very narrow win in 2020 is probably the best that the party can do on the federal level.
I think it is going to take 3 straight Presidential election losses for the Democratic party to seriously reevaluate their core ideological assumptions. And it is not even clear that this will be enough.
I think the state of the Democratic Party is just one facet of the overall decline of the Center-Left throughout the Western world.
Yes. Fortunately, there is an alternative to the current politics of the Left and authoritarians. My hope is that the Left in general questions it’s own assumptions and changes their goals towards something that actually generates results for the working class:
I may be drinking too much of the kool aid but from the DNC, I got more than an inkling from Kamala Harris that she isn't playing the leftist games or following all of the neoliberal playbook. I think some of the old school radical politics of her parents and grandparents is seeping in. As an Indo-Carribbean immigrant, I sense a shared understanding of race and class that is pragmatic and not aggrieved. Her mixed race/mixed culture background lends itself to important distance and ability to not think in American black/white terms. She sounded different from Hillary or Michelle even though she is clearly a Dem. Some of her actions as DA in SF like jailing parents of truant kids, struck me as someone who has the high standards of people that Carribean and Indian families hold.
I appreciate this reasoned argument. I've gotten a lot of nastiness on this topic lately. I do agree that she seems to be distancing herself from the identity obsessed left and isn't giving into the people obsessed with Israel/Palestine, and even threw in a line about how we will lead instead of china. But, she has had a long relationship with the establishment, is close with Hillary, and didn't have to make the racial argument herself because others of the elite class are doing it for her. Many people are supporting her because of the vibes of her being a black woman, like they did Obama. Hell, even I supported Obama because of vibes, though he did have substance. I still see no substance from her, and her policy based thinking seems weak. She is a blank slate, and I don't trust blank slates. We saw how Obama, who is also the child of academics and an immigrant, deferred to the elite class on economics during the financial crisis. I have no reason to think Harris will behave differently. She is of an elite background as the child of two academics and one high caste Indian. She did not grow up with economic hardship. She also still hasn't done any interviews or unscripted appearances, and that seems like she doesn't respect the people enough to be authentic in the least. And, the billionaire support puts me off. Anyone who can line up the most billionaires in a crowded field just gives me gross vibes. And they wouldn't support her if they didn't think she'd do as they want. They have her ear. Maybe she'll prove me wrong, I don't know. But I have trouble moving past the issue of substance.
I agree with much of what you said. I have been through a lot of presidents so I have low expectations. As a parent, I am impressed that she and her running mate actually seem to care about women and children. As the parent of a kid who thinks they are trans, Walz upsets me but I am hopeful that if the truth about gender affirming care comes out during this administration, they will listen to it behind closed doors. I have given up on anything close to ideal.
That’s a lot for you to be dealing with. I actually know nothing about Walz’s dealings with gender but I get the sense that he’s a cultural leftist largely supported by urban liberals.
I can tell you right now, the Democratic Party is just a bunch of rich white people who think they have the right to make decisions for everyone else. It is sickening. The Democrats abandoned the working class years ago with their commitment to free trade with declared enemies of the US (China) without any regard to the costs born by working people. They believe that their ivy league degrees and their self-righteous choice to work in the non-profit sector make them better than everyone else, but especially better than the working class majority that they despise. They milk race because they can use it as a battering ram against poor whites. I am convinced the trans activism obsession is just an excuse to silence working class back Americans. The best part is that most of these ladies who lunch either come from money or their husbands are investment bankers, management consultants or lawyers at big firms. They love to point out their low salaries, but they live in ritzy downtown neighborhoods using money someone else earned.
We need to stop talking about race and gender and to start talking about class. I would love to see the capital gains tax doubled. That would be a good start. In general we need a less hands on government. So long as one side can use the power of government, no one is safe. We need to get back to the roots of a small, effective government. I used to believe that government could be a force for good, but I have seen this disproven so many times that now i just want less government overall.
Jamaal Bowman is a great example of this at play. Another person of color who has focused on the wrong things. He is rhetorically and literally favoring a specific constituency and ignoring the rest of it, esp his Jewish constituents, and we saw the results. His is also unfocused on class and overly focused on race, and we saw this when he voted against the infrastructure bill.
I think he is a perfect example. The recent election results are reassuring, but I suspect the entire election will be cast as some exercise in White Supremacy, because in the minds of these rich white ladies, Jews are Nazis. I can kind of understand why White Ladies Who Lunch would hate Asian people (they refuse to be victims, they make their own way, their families are proof that modernity need not destroy children-focused family structures, ...), but the resurgence of Anti-Semitism has been surprising. I never saw that coming. Then again, I never foresaw the entire universal victimhood culture either. We have so much work to do in building a better future, and we are training children to hate themselves and feel self-pity. I cannot help but to think that we have spent the last twenty years going backwards, building up ethnic and racial hatreds. I do not believe that this was unintentional. I think our adversaries in China and Russia have been promoting this, and our sad, pathetic educational system has been their willing useful idiots.
Hopefully the success Trump has had among Latino voters and to a lesser extent African-Americans will hit hard enough to quiet the Progressives and restore some kind of liberal sensibilities in the Democratic Party. My greatest fear is that the Ladies Who Lunch are already so entrenched that there is no longer any working class base upon which the Democrats can restore majoritarian politics.
I don't want trump to win, but if we does, I hope the white ladies in particular see the people of color abandoning democrats and come to their senses. But, much of this will also have to be borne by candidates - they have to be brave enough to buck this class, even if it means elite people of color shout at them for being white supremacists. We have to resist both groups, and there is a strong alliance between elite POC and these affluent white women. That needs to break, and people need to come to their senses as I did. They studiously ignored, for example, all the Latinos who voted for Bernie and the argument was that black voters' preferences had to be heeded as they are the 'backbone'. I see that backbone is slowly disintegrating.
As for asian americans, you are correct. We are conditionally accepted as POC when it's convenient but otherwise our own needs are ignored in favor of other groups, and we get called white supremacist if we don't toe the party line, and I resent this. You are correct that we refuse to be victims.
The antisemitism makes sense in a historical context in that when social structures start breaking down antisemitism rises. What seems also to be ignored is anti-semitism among people of color. I once thought Ilhan Omar was unfairly targeted years ago for this, but now it seems like the norm. Bowman, also, was anti-semitic in his denial of the rapes, and I saw that denial everywhere among young brown people of color on twitter. It was shocking and saddening.
Your reply is just changing the subject away from racism. Do you even hear yourself?
"Antisemitism will stop when Jews do this this this and this. . . . " Where have we heard this before? Oh yes! Nazi Germany 1930s. IF ONLY the Jews would do this, and that, and that, and not do this and that."
No. Antisemitism stops when people stop being racist and stop excusing racism. Your statement putting the onus on a race of people to have to take any specific actions as a prerequisite for not being targets of racism is abhorrent. It does not matter if Asians do or not do anything about some government regimes from certain countries linked to their race or whether they have positive or negative opinions about such regimes. It does not matter if Jews do or not do anything because of some Jewish organizations or what opinions they have about such organizations. Racism is wrong and abhorrent. Full stop.
You're the one who don't know the difference if you can't see that.
So what if someone bashes you? That makes antisemitism and racism ok? Some spats and arguments are all that it takes to excuse racial hate?
Now that the Soviet Union is gone, and People Of Influence And Authority no longer have to toss the masses a bone or two, they would much prefer that we dissipate our energy on dreary arguments about cultural appropriation and how many LGTBQXYZPDQ can dance on the head of a pin, endless and endlessly performative struggle sessions, rather than raise questions about how the economic pie is sliced.
Put another way - to paraphrase Chris Hedges - elites will gladly discuss race, they will decry gender inequality most piteously, they will demonstrate a touching sensitivity to the rights of sexual and gender minorities so oppressed that they have not been discovered yet. Those same elites will not readily discuss economic class.
Or, in the negative formulation - if businesses were to stop opposing unionization of their workers, the result would be a transfer of wealth, of concrete material benefits, to brown and black and yellow and white working class people greater than all the allyship statements ever penned, all the diversity committees ever instituted, all the preferred pronoun tags ever attached to a corporate email. Which is precisely why they will not do this.
I think it’s telling that transgenderism is most often found in affluent communities and those parents are loudest. You make a great point about the post Soviet consensus. I’m reading Chaotic Neutral which reminded me that the New Deal was about preventing communism…and I will definitely take our society over authoritarian communist states. The left still thinks that communist countries should be beyond reproach. The thing that’s most shocking to me is the pendulum swinging so far in the other direction on Islam. Yes, in the wake of 9/11 there was actual violence against Muslims, but we seem to have concluded that the experience of x minority in the US means we can’t criticize the country of origin.
This is fantastic! You're after my own heart. Have you read Catherine Liu's book, Virtue Hoarders? Great stuff in a similar (though definitely not the same) vein.
Thank you! I have read that one, and I generally devour the anti elite genre. I also recommend Dream Hoarders by Richard Reeves. I’ve made these connections based on the work of many people, but the thing most miss is the racial aspect as well as the way white guilt weaves through it all. And this is because of course people like me have an interest in perpetuating it.
I missed Dream Hoarders, thanks for that! I'll also mention Musa al-Gharbi, on the off chance that you are not familiar with his work. I'm currently reading a preprint of his book, We Have Never Been Woke, which will be out in October.
There are some wonderful quotes in here for people looking to understand what has happened to factions on the left and how to push back - while not giving up creds of being on the left. I still hear an undercurrent of dislike for anyone to the right. Rather than substituting socio-economic status for race as a basis for 'seeing the enemy' what if we didn't see each other as enemies at all? And is that even possible anymore?
Sigh, so even when they try to do "the right thing" white people are wrong, bad, etc. I don't agree with the "left" on many things philosophically and the progressive left seems pretty psychotic to me, but I do get tired of everything always being white people's fault. Are white people the only people with agency?
White people are not the only ones. I understand why this was would piss you off. My argument is that white guilt is primarily responsible for how people of color are turned into props to absolve that guilt. I don’t deny that white people are trying to do better, but the guilt has led white college educated people off the deep end of illiberalism that has then been foisted on all of us. People of color who allow themselves to be thus used also have agency, and I exercised my own to leave the cult that ensnares all kinds of people. Perhaps I should have gone there as well. Critique is fair and noted.
White person here. I do not feel guilty for being born. Why should I? Nor do I feel guilty for acts done by long dead people who were white. They are not me. I am not them. I have nothing to feel guilty about.
I get your point, but I don't know any white people that are expressing guilt over their existence. I guess I don't hang out with progressives? IT never comes up in conversation with us normies.
I envy that you aren't around these people. Where I live, and this is admittedly more pronounced among women than men (Austin), you have to keep silent about anything you disagree with. I've lost at least 5 friends over the past two years over these kinds of disagreements. And I know that's why, because suddenly I never heard from them after I admitted how I feel. I also stoped hearing from a number of friends around the country who I knew from a group of who are now prominent liberals in the media, nonprofit and political establishments after I started writing publicly, and I was kicked out from that group for being insufficiently woke (this group contains elected people and lobbyists to boot). I am envious that you don't find yourself surrounded by these people. E.g. I worked for Google here back in 2014, and even then you couldn't disagree with the diversity industrial complex (no joke, I was on the first diversity recruiting team when it first was formed, and believed it in it). My partner is a relatively apolitical moderate white dude from CT. He was highly doubtful that the type of person I describe existed, and then he met the people I have unfortunately come to associate with. Now, I could choose to have no friends, or I could choose to keep my mouth shut in company and tolerate it while letting out what I really think here. I think it does also speak volumes for me that few of my IRL friends even bother reading any of what I say; most don't bring it up even though they've seen what I've post on instagram, and we pretend I don't say those things when we're hanging out. I can't even refer to someone's sex without one of them, for example, implicitly correcting me by saying "femme" instead of woman.
Everything you just described is self-inflicted. You choose to be around these shallow virtue signalers. They are NOT your friend if they ditch you based on you thinking only men have penises (or whatever bad-think-speak crimes you commit). You choose to be in this bubble with terrible people. Why? You get one life. Why spend it this way? There are literally tens of millions of Americans (and a few billion others around the world) who are NOT like these cretins. Do yourself and your partner a favor, and move on to greener pastures. And, if you don't, quit complaining, because it is your choice to be around them.
Well, I’m not actually pissed off just tired of the “it’s all X’s fault” narrative. I agree with you that there is a psychotic guilt obsession in some segments of society and that it has deleterious effects on a number of different groups. There is also a concerted effort to push guilt on various segments of society. It’s a pretty effective control mechanism after all. It is all so very cultish as you pointed out. Like it or not we have to live together and that is never going to work if we are always trying to emotionally manipulate each other for our advantage. By that I do not mean your post, I mean the whole guilt trip/virtue signaling dynamic. I wish I had all the answers, but I do know overwrought guilt/guilt tripping isn’t one of them.
That’s the whole point, it’s not one particular group. Unless you count marketing people. They have been marketing guilt for decades now. Any group that wants an advantage had learned to weaponize it. That’s the biggest problem with the “it’s X’s fault” is such a problematic narrative. It looks for simple solutions to complex problems. The dumbing down of our institutions has fueled it. Thinking is hard. Analyzing the outcomes of your solutions requires intellectual work. So instead we’ve Balkanized our society and pitted each group against each other.
Thank you so much for saying The Truth. Why are people such cowards? We should be screaming this from the rooftops at this point! Down with authoritarianism on BOTH fringe sides! Back to classical liberalism!
I went so far down the rabbit hole I’m not sure most of them will be able to come back unless they snap out of the mass psychosis induced by TikTok and Instagram
Thank you so much. Not only do Dems not have the moral high ground, nobody does, except when it suits them. It's a very feel-good way to promote our own interests.
I'm not ready to abandon the Democratic Party, because if we can take them back from the queer cult, we win. It's the end of gender ideology, and I truly believe many mainstream Democrats don't want common sense economic policies coupled with fetish and kink.
The issue is idk if this is even possible, because gender ideology has seeped into real life and isn’t going to go away anytime soon only because millennial and younger women so ardently believe it. All I hear is that where I live from a certain class of women. Wokeness has captured the professional class, and they’d have to deprogram to excise it.
I give him a little grace because his administration is populated with elite millennials who earnestly believe this. Maybe he does, but he’s done other economically leftist things. Lina Khan herself is a big deal.
I think you're missing a key class. It's not just the progressives driving Democratic policy leftward. In fact, the Outsider Left is almost as progressive but much more racially diverse and significantly more skeptical of government. It makes up almost 10% of the electorate and anecdotally has pushed policy significantly further left, including originating defunding for the police: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/outsider-left/
These are the young anarchists and left-libertarian anti-capitalists and they are also quite important to the leftward shift but don't fit other aspects of your thesis. I'm not saying you're wrong but i think the piece would make more sense if you had addressed this group
That is totally fair. The anarchists were the ones supporting the takeover of public places in 2020 and served as a kind of police force for BLM. I will explore this group more later on. Nellie Bowles’s book details this dynamic also, I recommend it.
You can blame it on the ruling class perhaps, but white people have been forced to assimilate to this worldview on pain of loosing their jobs. Their children are taught (in public and private schools) to hate the history of white ethnicities and that those ethnicities are uniquely evil. It is an atrocity perpetrated on white people and a preparation for further atrocity. I commend you for breaking free of it, but don’t scapegoat the people who suffer most from it.
I’m not blaming those suffering under a re-education regime though I can see how it would be read that way. I am not criticizing the people who are scared but am criticizing the people who refuse to see and perpetuate it in schools, workplaces etc. I’ve now met many a white person who keep their mouths shut for this very reason. But yes, I see what you’re saying.
Perhaps the last generation truly internalized it. I don’t have enough money to pull my kids out of public school and I am at wits end. Perhaps the only people with enough cultural capital to change anything is the class of people sacralized as “poc”. Idk, I’m hoping to get my kids in an exchange program. Thanks for answering.
I don't have children but I can understand the frustration of not being able to control what they're presented as reality. I think you're onto something that only the people who prop up the system, which is women of color on behalf of white women, can force it to change. I've read accounts of women of color in DEI jobs or adjacent who tried to fight back and couldn't, because the groupthink is just that strong. I wish people could see that they're backing bankrupt politics intended to make people feel good about themselves. Magnet schools probably aren't the best answer either, but back when I did the IB program I got a better education than I might otherwise have.
Don’t want them, no desire to toil away at a job and raising children only to find myself at almost 60 and exhausted. The cost of housing healthcare and education are so high it shouldn’t cause anyone to scratch their heads when people decide to opt out of the rat race. If I had one, I’d have to be able to afford a house in a decent school district or shell out for private school. And even if either of those things panned out, there’s the cruelty of children metastasized by the phone, and then there’s the fact that teaching as a profession has been ideologically captured as Nihm has noted.
In reality, reproducing with a super-smart sperm donor and giving the resulting child(ren) up for adoption in the form of an open adoption, where they would likely be raised by a well-off family and you could still continuously maintain a relationship with them post-adoption, sounds like a pretty good idea if I was in your shoes. But I’m not, so …
You can always have a child and then give them up for adoption in the form of an open adoption. Since you're female, it's much easier to do than if you were male since you obviously don't need to hire a surrogate.
And sending one's kids to a crappy public school isn't necessarily a bad idea if the kids over there aren't violent. Greg Cochran, himself a genius, sent his five genius children to the local crappy public school in New Mexico and three of his five kids still became National Merit Finalists (or Semifinalists) or something like that, because they inherited their parents' good genes.
I think you've found a way to look into my head and read my thoughts, but then to give them far more coherent expression. Thank you. I'm a retired 71 year old white guy and former County govt employee. I was "heterodox" long before I heard anybody use the term. I think there are a lot of us, but unfortunately we have been herded (by the Democratic party elite) into the mushy, malleable "moderate" voter demographic, where we simply became reliable, quiet electoral cannon fodder for Democratic candidates. We, the "moderates" are an extremely reliable vote because of the "better than the other guys" argument. And I'll probably roll my eyes, grit my teeth and hold my nose and vote Democratic until I leave this world. To be on the Left in America is to know defeat, disappointment and ennui. It means seeing hope recede indefinitely into a future you will not live to see. I have 2 degrees but I've always talked openly with the working class people you describe. They don't usually agree with me but they'll listen. The Democrats, with their clueless identitarian baggage have lost many of these people. But it's a rejection of ideology, not a switch to another ideology. Tr**pism, after all is not an ideology. It's autocratic, transactional and non-ideological. These people don't have a coherent worldview or even an understanding of history. They are just sociopathic, egotistical strivers who have a lot and want more, i.e., the whole thing. The Democrats are offering an ideology and a (false) narrative but in practice will enthusiastically piss it all away for a nominal, empty "victory", which they'll proudly hail as "bipartisan and pragmatic". There goes single payer, there goes the "public option", there goes an Obama stimulus big enough to actually lift most of the people out of the 2008 crash, there goes any accountability for the truly unspeakable war crimes of the Cheney/Bush regime. Hell, Guantanamo is still open and still holds a bunch of old men.
I'm going to share this piece with friends and see who gets pissed off, who agrees and who drops me like a hot rock. Thanks for making it all so goddamn maddeningly clear. Good luck and as the now thoroughly canceled Rudyard Kipling once said "Don't let the bastards grind you down".
I really appreciate this thoughtful comment and I'm so glad to have given you something to share. My entire purpose is arming people with arguments to fight the illogic. And yes, I'm with you. I didn't vote D this time but L, and it was the only protest I could register. Trumpism isn't the answer, but I understand why people put him back in office. Constant moralizing and condescension is what pushed me to not vote D this time. Anyone would chafe. You might also enjoy the book Chaotic Neutral; the author touches on many of these topics (which I read after writing this). I feel crazy sometimes writing what I do, but then I see comments like this and it all feels worth it.
A laundry list of things for Democrats to keep and to dump if they ever want to win again nationwide.
Keep a woman’s right to choose for the first trimester. Dump abortion until birth unless the mother’s health is at risk.
Keep a concern for climate change and grow nuclear power. Dump intermittent, unreliable renewable energy.
Keep and develop new effective vaccines. Dump vaccine mandates.
Keep equality of opportunity for all. Dump equity of results based on discriminating against men, whites and Asians (aka D.E.I.). Recognize that D.E.I. Is unconstitutional.
Keep the protection of gay and lesbian rights. Dump men in women’s sports, private spaces and prisons. Oh, and mutilating children who might grow up to be gay.
Keep an opportunity for selective high value immigration. Dump sanctuary cities and open borders.
Keep helping the homeless find jobs and a place to live. Dump camping in cities and allowing open drug use.
Keep a concern for due process in criminal justice. Dump letting shoplifters and other petty thieves off the hook.
Do all of the above and they might find their way back to power.
Isn't it sad that both parties have either extreme of your statements. Neither can seem to reach a true compromise position, even as Democrats compromise away everything else. People have nowhere to go between these extremes.
As a current Independent who once ran for a state-level elected office as a Democrat, I do not think it is possible anymore. The once-powerful moderate and conservative wings of the party, particularly within the US Senate, are completely gone. All the activists, campaign donors and primary voters are clearly on the Left compared to the party in the 1990s. It is now a question of Left or more Left, and the cultural values of the college-educated class will always remain their core values.
Keep in mind that virtually every Democratic elected official must win the party primary within a very Blue region. Primary voters are far more to the Left on culture war issues than typical Democrats.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-primary-problem-with-american
Except for the Presidency and a few Purple state Governors and Senators, Democratic elected officials do not have to care what moderates and conservatives think. This means the Left will always have a veto power over nominees. The very narrow win in 2020 is probably the best that the party can do on the federal level.
I think it is going to take 3 straight Presidential election losses for the Democratic party to seriously reevaluate their core ideological assumptions. And it is not even clear that this will be enough.
I think the state of the Democratic Party is just one facet of the overall decline of the Center-Left throughout the Western world.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-left-has-hit-a-historical-dead
You’re right, the center left globally has proven itself unable to lift all boats, and it’s why we have authoritarians everywhere.
Yes. Fortunately, there is an alternative to the current politics of the Left and authoritarians. My hope is that the Left in general questions it’s own assumptions and changes their goals towards something that actually generates results for the working class:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-progress-and-upward-mobility
I may be drinking too much of the kool aid but from the DNC, I got more than an inkling from Kamala Harris that she isn't playing the leftist games or following all of the neoliberal playbook. I think some of the old school radical politics of her parents and grandparents is seeping in. As an Indo-Carribbean immigrant, I sense a shared understanding of race and class that is pragmatic and not aggrieved. Her mixed race/mixed culture background lends itself to important distance and ability to not think in American black/white terms. She sounded different from Hillary or Michelle even though she is clearly a Dem. Some of her actions as DA in SF like jailing parents of truant kids, struck me as someone who has the high standards of people that Carribean and Indian families hold.
I appreciate this reasoned argument. I've gotten a lot of nastiness on this topic lately. I do agree that she seems to be distancing herself from the identity obsessed left and isn't giving into the people obsessed with Israel/Palestine, and even threw in a line about how we will lead instead of china. But, she has had a long relationship with the establishment, is close with Hillary, and didn't have to make the racial argument herself because others of the elite class are doing it for her. Many people are supporting her because of the vibes of her being a black woman, like they did Obama. Hell, even I supported Obama because of vibes, though he did have substance. I still see no substance from her, and her policy based thinking seems weak. She is a blank slate, and I don't trust blank slates. We saw how Obama, who is also the child of academics and an immigrant, deferred to the elite class on economics during the financial crisis. I have no reason to think Harris will behave differently. She is of an elite background as the child of two academics and one high caste Indian. She did not grow up with economic hardship. She also still hasn't done any interviews or unscripted appearances, and that seems like she doesn't respect the people enough to be authentic in the least. And, the billionaire support puts me off. Anyone who can line up the most billionaires in a crowded field just gives me gross vibes. And they wouldn't support her if they didn't think she'd do as they want. They have her ear. Maybe she'll prove me wrong, I don't know. But I have trouble moving past the issue of substance.
I agree with much of what you said. I have been through a lot of presidents so I have low expectations. As a parent, I am impressed that she and her running mate actually seem to care about women and children. As the parent of a kid who thinks they are trans, Walz upsets me but I am hopeful that if the truth about gender affirming care comes out during this administration, they will listen to it behind closed doors. I have given up on anything close to ideal.
That’s a lot for you to be dealing with. I actually know nothing about Walz’s dealings with gender but I get the sense that he’s a cultural leftist largely supported by urban liberals.
I can tell you right now, the Democratic Party is just a bunch of rich white people who think they have the right to make decisions for everyone else. It is sickening. The Democrats abandoned the working class years ago with their commitment to free trade with declared enemies of the US (China) without any regard to the costs born by working people. They believe that their ivy league degrees and their self-righteous choice to work in the non-profit sector make them better than everyone else, but especially better than the working class majority that they despise. They milk race because they can use it as a battering ram against poor whites. I am convinced the trans activism obsession is just an excuse to silence working class back Americans. The best part is that most of these ladies who lunch either come from money or their husbands are investment bankers, management consultants or lawyers at big firms. They love to point out their low salaries, but they live in ritzy downtown neighborhoods using money someone else earned.
We need to stop talking about race and gender and to start talking about class. I would love to see the capital gains tax doubled. That would be a good start. In general we need a less hands on government. So long as one side can use the power of government, no one is safe. We need to get back to the roots of a small, effective government. I used to believe that government could be a force for good, but I have seen this disproven so many times that now i just want less government overall.
Jamaal Bowman is a great example of this at play. Another person of color who has focused on the wrong things. He is rhetorically and literally favoring a specific constituency and ignoring the rest of it, esp his Jewish constituents, and we saw the results. His is also unfocused on class and overly focused on race, and we saw this when he voted against the infrastructure bill.
I think he is a perfect example. The recent election results are reassuring, but I suspect the entire election will be cast as some exercise in White Supremacy, because in the minds of these rich white ladies, Jews are Nazis. I can kind of understand why White Ladies Who Lunch would hate Asian people (they refuse to be victims, they make their own way, their families are proof that modernity need not destroy children-focused family structures, ...), but the resurgence of Anti-Semitism has been surprising. I never saw that coming. Then again, I never foresaw the entire universal victimhood culture either. We have so much work to do in building a better future, and we are training children to hate themselves and feel self-pity. I cannot help but to think that we have spent the last twenty years going backwards, building up ethnic and racial hatreds. I do not believe that this was unintentional. I think our adversaries in China and Russia have been promoting this, and our sad, pathetic educational system has been their willing useful idiots.
Hopefully the success Trump has had among Latino voters and to a lesser extent African-Americans will hit hard enough to quiet the Progressives and restore some kind of liberal sensibilities in the Democratic Party. My greatest fear is that the Ladies Who Lunch are already so entrenched that there is no longer any working class base upon which the Democrats can restore majoritarian politics.
I don't want trump to win, but if we does, I hope the white ladies in particular see the people of color abandoning democrats and come to their senses. But, much of this will also have to be borne by candidates - they have to be brave enough to buck this class, even if it means elite people of color shout at them for being white supremacists. We have to resist both groups, and there is a strong alliance between elite POC and these affluent white women. That needs to break, and people need to come to their senses as I did. They studiously ignored, for example, all the Latinos who voted for Bernie and the argument was that black voters' preferences had to be heeded as they are the 'backbone'. I see that backbone is slowly disintegrating.
As for asian americans, you are correct. We are conditionally accepted as POC when it's convenient but otherwise our own needs are ignored in favor of other groups, and we get called white supremacist if we don't toe the party line, and I resent this. You are correct that we refuse to be victims.
The antisemitism makes sense in a historical context in that when social structures start breaking down antisemitism rises. What seems also to be ignored is anti-semitism among people of color. I once thought Ilhan Omar was unfairly targeted years ago for this, but now it seems like the norm. Bowman, also, was anti-semitic in his denial of the rapes, and I saw that denial everywhere among young brown people of color on twitter. It was shocking and saddening.
Your reply is just changing the subject away from racism. Do you even hear yourself?
"Antisemitism will stop when Jews do this this this and this. . . . " Where have we heard this before? Oh yes! Nazi Germany 1930s. IF ONLY the Jews would do this, and that, and that, and not do this and that."
No. Antisemitism stops when people stop being racist and stop excusing racism. Your statement putting the onus on a race of people to have to take any specific actions as a prerequisite for not being targets of racism is abhorrent. It does not matter if Asians do or not do anything about some government regimes from certain countries linked to their race or whether they have positive or negative opinions about such regimes. It does not matter if Jews do or not do anything because of some Jewish organizations or what opinions they have about such organizations. Racism is wrong and abhorrent. Full stop.
You're the one who don't know the difference if you can't see that.
So what if someone bashes you? That makes antisemitism and racism ok? Some spats and arguments are all that it takes to excuse racial hate?
You're morally lost.
Well said.
Sorry I was replying to a commenter and just realized I wrote this in the general comment instead by mistake.
No I was following - thx for the clarification though 😅
> They don't have the moral high ground, are an extreme minority, and we can defeat them.
Non-parallel structure.
Better: They don't have the moral high ground, they are an extreme minority, and they can be defeated.
Or: They don't have the moral high ground and are an extreme minority. We can defeat them.
Understood.
Thank you for not calling me a neurotic pedant. It goes without saying.
I’ll admit that was probably my first reaction but then I reconsidered
Now that the Soviet Union is gone, and People Of Influence And Authority no longer have to toss the masses a bone or two, they would much prefer that we dissipate our energy on dreary arguments about cultural appropriation and how many LGTBQXYZPDQ can dance on the head of a pin, endless and endlessly performative struggle sessions, rather than raise questions about how the economic pie is sliced.
Put another way - to paraphrase Chris Hedges - elites will gladly discuss race, they will decry gender inequality most piteously, they will demonstrate a touching sensitivity to the rights of sexual and gender minorities so oppressed that they have not been discovered yet. Those same elites will not readily discuss economic class.
Or, in the negative formulation - if businesses were to stop opposing unionization of their workers, the result would be a transfer of wealth, of concrete material benefits, to brown and black and yellow and white working class people greater than all the allyship statements ever penned, all the diversity committees ever instituted, all the preferred pronoun tags ever attached to a corporate email. Which is precisely why they will not do this.
I think it’s telling that transgenderism is most often found in affluent communities and those parents are loudest. You make a great point about the post Soviet consensus. I’m reading Chaotic Neutral which reminded me that the New Deal was about preventing communism…and I will definitely take our society over authoritarian communist states. The left still thinks that communist countries should be beyond reproach. The thing that’s most shocking to me is the pendulum swinging so far in the other direction on Islam. Yes, in the wake of 9/11 there was actual violence against Muslims, but we seem to have concluded that the experience of x minority in the US means we can’t criticize the country of origin.
This also why social democracy went deeper in europe, which was at greater risk.
This is fantastic! You're after my own heart. Have you read Catherine Liu's book, Virtue Hoarders? Great stuff in a similar (though definitely not the same) vein.
Thank you! I have read that one, and I generally devour the anti elite genre. I also recommend Dream Hoarders by Richard Reeves. I’ve made these connections based on the work of many people, but the thing most miss is the racial aspect as well as the way white guilt weaves through it all. And this is because of course people like me have an interest in perpetuating it.
I missed Dream Hoarders, thanks for that! I'll also mention Musa al-Gharbi, on the off chance that you are not familiar with his work. I'm currently reading a preprint of his book, We Have Never Been Woke, which will be out in October.
There are some wonderful quotes in here for people looking to understand what has happened to factions on the left and how to push back - while not giving up creds of being on the left. I still hear an undercurrent of dislike for anyone to the right. Rather than substituting socio-economic status for race as a basis for 'seeing the enemy' what if we didn't see each other as enemies at all? And is that even possible anymore?
Sigh, so even when they try to do "the right thing" white people are wrong, bad, etc. I don't agree with the "left" on many things philosophically and the progressive left seems pretty psychotic to me, but I do get tired of everything always being white people's fault. Are white people the only people with agency?
White people are not the only ones. I understand why this was would piss you off. My argument is that white guilt is primarily responsible for how people of color are turned into props to absolve that guilt. I don’t deny that white people are trying to do better, but the guilt has led white college educated people off the deep end of illiberalism that has then been foisted on all of us. People of color who allow themselves to be thus used also have agency, and I exercised my own to leave the cult that ensnares all kinds of people. Perhaps I should have gone there as well. Critique is fair and noted.
White person here. I do not feel guilty for being born. Why should I? Nor do I feel guilty for acts done by long dead people who were white. They are not me. I am not them. I have nothing to feel guilty about.
Good, do remind other white people to stop feeling guilty and do the lord’s work
I get your point, but I don't know any white people that are expressing guilt over their existence. I guess I don't hang out with progressives? IT never comes up in conversation with us normies.
I envy that you aren't around these people. Where I live, and this is admittedly more pronounced among women than men (Austin), you have to keep silent about anything you disagree with. I've lost at least 5 friends over the past two years over these kinds of disagreements. And I know that's why, because suddenly I never heard from them after I admitted how I feel. I also stoped hearing from a number of friends around the country who I knew from a group of who are now prominent liberals in the media, nonprofit and political establishments after I started writing publicly, and I was kicked out from that group for being insufficiently woke (this group contains elected people and lobbyists to boot). I am envious that you don't find yourself surrounded by these people. E.g. I worked for Google here back in 2014, and even then you couldn't disagree with the diversity industrial complex (no joke, I was on the first diversity recruiting team when it first was formed, and believed it in it). My partner is a relatively apolitical moderate white dude from CT. He was highly doubtful that the type of person I describe existed, and then he met the people I have unfortunately come to associate with. Now, I could choose to have no friends, or I could choose to keep my mouth shut in company and tolerate it while letting out what I really think here. I think it does also speak volumes for me that few of my IRL friends even bother reading any of what I say; most don't bring it up even though they've seen what I've post on instagram, and we pretend I don't say those things when we're hanging out. I can't even refer to someone's sex without one of them, for example, implicitly correcting me by saying "femme" instead of woman.
Everything you just described is self-inflicted. You choose to be around these shallow virtue signalers. They are NOT your friend if they ditch you based on you thinking only men have penises (or whatever bad-think-speak crimes you commit). You choose to be in this bubble with terrible people. Why? You get one life. Why spend it this way? There are literally tens of millions of Americans (and a few billion others around the world) who are NOT like these cretins. Do yourself and your partner a favor, and move on to greener pastures. And, if you don't, quit complaining, because it is your choice to be around them.
Well, I’m not actually pissed off just tired of the “it’s all X’s fault” narrative. I agree with you that there is a psychotic guilt obsession in some segments of society and that it has deleterious effects on a number of different groups. There is also a concerted effort to push guilt on various segments of society. It’s a pretty effective control mechanism after all. It is all so very cultish as you pointed out. Like it or not we have to live together and that is never going to work if we are always trying to emotionally manipulate each other for our advantage. By that I do not mean your post, I mean the whole guilt trip/virtue signaling dynamic. I wish I had all the answers, but I do know overwrought guilt/guilt tripping isn’t one of them.
This is fair. Who do you think is responsible for this dynamic, then?
That’s the whole point, it’s not one particular group. Unless you count marketing people. They have been marketing guilt for decades now. Any group that wants an advantage had learned to weaponize it. That’s the biggest problem with the “it’s X’s fault” is such a problematic narrative. It looks for simple solutions to complex problems. The dumbing down of our institutions has fueled it. Thinking is hard. Analyzing the outcomes of your solutions requires intellectual work. So instead we’ve Balkanized our society and pitted each group against each other.
Thank you so much for saying The Truth. Why are people such cowards? We should be screaming this from the rooftops at this point! Down with authoritarianism on BOTH fringe sides! Back to classical liberalism!
I went so far down the rabbit hole I’m not sure most of them will be able to come back unless they snap out of the mass psychosis induced by TikTok and Instagram
Thank you so much. Not only do Dems not have the moral high ground, nobody does, except when it suits them. It's a very feel-good way to promote our own interests.
Highly recommend Excluded that I mentioned in the essay on this topic along with Ehrenreich if you want more.
I'm not ready to abandon the Democratic Party, because if we can take them back from the queer cult, we win. It's the end of gender ideology, and I truly believe many mainstream Democrats don't want common sense economic policies coupled with fetish and kink.
Team D has plenty more problems than just LGTBQXYZPDQ.
Many. That’s just the one ruining the vibe with the most effect.
The issue is idk if this is even possible, because gender ideology has seeped into real life and isn’t going to go away anytime soon only because millennial and younger women so ardently believe it. All I hear is that where I live from a certain class of women. Wokeness has captured the professional class, and they’d have to deprogram to excise it.
"White supremacy is our nation's greatest threat." -- Joe Biden.
Why on earth would anyone vote for that mumbling vegetable, spewing divisive garbage like this?
Yeah. How can he say that while students across America on the left side are pro-Hamas?
I give him a little grace because his administration is populated with elite millennials who earnestly believe this. Maybe he does, but he’s done other economically leftist things. Lina Khan herself is a big deal.
I think you're missing a key class. It's not just the progressives driving Democratic policy leftward. In fact, the Outsider Left is almost as progressive but much more racially diverse and significantly more skeptical of government. It makes up almost 10% of the electorate and anecdotally has pushed policy significantly further left, including originating defunding for the police: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/outsider-left/
These are the young anarchists and left-libertarian anti-capitalists and they are also quite important to the leftward shift but don't fit other aspects of your thesis. I'm not saying you're wrong but i think the piece would make more sense if you had addressed this group
That is totally fair. The anarchists were the ones supporting the takeover of public places in 2020 and served as a kind of police force for BLM. I will explore this group more later on. Nellie Bowles’s book details this dynamic also, I recommend it.
Yes! Just caught her interview on Free Press. Loved it.
You can blame it on the ruling class perhaps, but white people have been forced to assimilate to this worldview on pain of loosing their jobs. Their children are taught (in public and private schools) to hate the history of white ethnicities and that those ethnicities are uniquely evil. It is an atrocity perpetrated on white people and a preparation for further atrocity. I commend you for breaking free of it, but don’t scapegoat the people who suffer most from it.
I’m not blaming those suffering under a re-education regime though I can see how it would be read that way. I am not criticizing the people who are scared but am criticizing the people who refuse to see and perpetuate it in schools, workplaces etc. I’ve now met many a white person who keep their mouths shut for this very reason. But yes, I see what you’re saying.
Perhaps the last generation truly internalized it. I don’t have enough money to pull my kids out of public school and I am at wits end. Perhaps the only people with enough cultural capital to change anything is the class of people sacralized as “poc”. Idk, I’m hoping to get my kids in an exchange program. Thanks for answering.
I don't have children but I can understand the frustration of not being able to control what they're presented as reality. I think you're onto something that only the people who prop up the system, which is women of color on behalf of white women, can force it to change. I've read accounts of women of color in DEI jobs or adjacent who tried to fight back and couldn't, because the groupthink is just that strong. I wish people could see that they're backing bankrupt politics intended to make people feel good about themselves. Magnet schools probably aren't the best answer either, but back when I did the IB program I got a better education than I might otherwise have.
Do you ever want to have any children, out of curiosity?
Don’t want them, no desire to toil away at a job and raising children only to find myself at almost 60 and exhausted. The cost of housing healthcare and education are so high it shouldn’t cause anyone to scratch their heads when people decide to opt out of the rat race. If I had one, I’d have to be able to afford a house in a decent school district or shell out for private school. And even if either of those things panned out, there’s the cruelty of children metastasized by the phone, and then there’s the fact that teaching as a profession has been ideologically captured as Nihm has noted.
In reality, reproducing with a super-smart sperm donor and giving the resulting child(ren) up for adoption in the form of an open adoption, where they would likely be raised by a well-off family and you could still continuously maintain a relationship with them post-adoption, sounds like a pretty good idea if I was in your shoes. But I’m not, so …
You can always have a child and then give them up for adoption in the form of an open adoption. Since you're female, it's much easier to do than if you were male since you obviously don't need to hire a surrogate.
And sending one's kids to a crappy public school isn't necessarily a bad idea if the kids over there aren't violent. Greg Cochran, himself a genius, sent his five genius children to the local crappy public school in New Mexico and three of his five kids still became National Merit Finalists (or Semifinalists) or something like that, because they inherited their parents' good genes.