What really struck me, living out here in the micro-flyover land between Seattle and Portland, is that conditions for the working class, and in particular Latinos, really did improve noticeably during the Trump years. One of the dumbest things I often hear liberals ask is why people like that vote against their interests, which to me says they don't know a thing about what those people's interests actually are.
Exactly, I can't believe it when I hear that. Liberalism in 2022 pretty clearly serves the interests of the upper-classes, from affluent educated professionals up through the "millionaires and billionaires". There's nothing in their agenda for the working class, other than a weak defense of entitlement programs.
Very nicely put. I don't consider myself much of a social conservative, but upon reviewing the platform of the socially-conservative American Solidarity Party (https://www.solidarity-party.org/platform)...it's FAR more economically-progressive and supportive of the working class than anything that the Bidens, Buttigiegs, or Harris's are peddling. In fact, it's not remotely close.
But instead of the ASP duking things out with the Dems during our elections, we've got a legion of goons funded by The Heritage Foundation and similar. Ye Gods it's depressing...
God, I love this line: This is what it came down to: “The Republican Party,” she said, “wants to become a multi-ethnic, multicultural, working class movement.” As if that's an evil goal. But really she should have shortened it to "The Republican party wants to be a . . . working class movement." The rest comes naturally. You need no malevolent intention behind it. And of course the only way you become a working class movement is by paying attention to the working class.
I often find it strange how the smartest people can miss the simplest points. How we identify ourselves, or how we see ourselves, comes down to a list of characteristics or labels, as much as I hate them, and how we rank them in importance to our self-image. And the parties use those labels to gear their tactics and "scare" voters. The Republicans in the past have done this. I still know conservatives who are convinced Christianity is under attack. I remind them there is a church on every corner and those churches are richer than God. I personally could put that space to better use and tax the hell out of them, but the laws protect those buildings and spaces, so, no, "Christianity" is safe.
But as one example of this blindness on the Democrat side, they think that all people of Hispanic descent, no matter how long they have been in the US, should identify first and foremost as Hispanic. In other words, they are Hispanics who just happen to be American and working class. But where the rubber meets the road, in the Democrat theories, the *only* label that should matter to these people is "Hispanic." However, America has progressed. And ironically enough, the party that kept reminding us that America is a melting pot has forgotten that America is a melting pot. These days, more people with "brown skin" are thinking of themselves as American and working class who just *happen* to be Hispanic, which makes all the difference.
Which leads me to my next point. When I hear someone call Trump and by extension the Trump-influenced segment of the Republican Party "xenophobic," what they're really trying to say is they hate anyone who is not white. But I don't think non-white working class people are reading it that way. I think "xenophobic" means to them what it actually means, which is a fear of outsiders, which they may or may not agree with but is certainly a much smaller sin than hating all people who are not white. And in this case the whole Mexicans are rapist thing rang a little true for them. We are being flooded by gangs and drugs due to an unwillingness to screen the people coming in. We also are importing a group of people that are willing to work for far less than most Americans are willing to or even should be willing to work for simply because their papers aren't quite in order and that leaves them vulnerable to exploitation. So in that case, it doesn't matter that the last names are similar nor the skin color or place of origin. The people switching sides see themselves as American workers first and Hispanics second. You add in the fact that Hispanics are by and large Catholic, either devoutly or as a matter of heritage, and the socially conservative nature of the Republican Party is attractive to them. And, yes, other ethnicities will follow unless the Democrats have an epiphany, which I honestly don't see happening.
The other thing that is happening is Democrats are losing the "you're racist" war. I can't honestly think of anything more racist than reducing an entire group of people to a single label and accusing them of being traitors if they don't follow your expectations of that label. If there is anything to "white privilege," it is that we are allowed or even forced into a certain degree of diversity in thought, but minorities are not. Joe Biden's "gaffes" are always interesting for the amount of truth they contain: two of my favorites are "if you don't know who to vote for, you ain't black" and "poor kids are just as intelligent as white kids." That is the worst of Democrat philosophy in a nutshell, and I doubt I'm the only one who noticed. And I'd say it's because Joe is old and from that era, but that attitude pervades the Democrat Party and the media that spins for it.
I agree with you about the need for two thriving parties, but at the moment, the Democrats have true and well backed themselves into a corner.
"I still know conservatives who are convinced Christianity is under attack. I remind them there is a church on every corner and those churches are richer than God. I personally could put that space to better use and tax the hell out of them, but the laws protect those buildings and spaces, so, no, "Christianity" is safe."
From my perspective as a nearly-atheist agnostic, I have the sense that "Christianity is under attack" didn't mean that churches were being closed. I think it meant that Christianity's unquestioned dominance in US culture was under attack. It was. Removing school-led prayer, various SCOTUS rulings on separation of church and state. Interestingly, that didn't end up being the things that secularized America; I think secularization is a result of affluence and commercialism in secular life and corruption within religion.
"When I hear someone call Trump and by extension the Trump-influenced segment of the Republican Party "xenophobic," what they're really trying to say is they hate anyone who is not white. But I don't think non-white working class people are reading it that way. I think "xenophobic" means to them what it actually means, which is a fear of outsiders, which they may or may not agree with but is certainly a much smaller sin than hating all people who are not white."
This is really insightful. I don't even think they fear outsiders in general. They *do* fear millions and millions of outsiders entering the country in a largely uncontrolled manner: we current citizens don't get to choose who comes in or how many.
"The other thing that is happening is Democrats are losing the "you're racist" war."
They are. Democrats discovered this great way to shut up opposition and galvanize their base both to vote and to destroy the more moderate parts of their own party: tar certain ideas as racist. Now it's impossible to be pro-immigration reform without being a racist. And like most groups which find a powerful tool or toy, they use it again and again until it's used up and is ineffective even for the use where it was appropriate. It's the natural progression of rationalization: find a thing that works, use it to the hilt, make *everything* about that one thing because it works, until you discover you've destroyed the value of the thing, like overfishing a shoal.
And you make a great point about "xenophobia," which is closer to the point I was trying to make but much better stated. Thank you. It's natural for a group to want control over who joins and is allowed among that group, but the label of "xenophobic" is used to belittle that very realistic expectation.
Thank you for such a thoughtful response, and I can see your point with the first, and I agree with "secularization is the result of affluence and commercialism in a secular life and corruption within religion." That's a great summation.
I completely agree, except the melting pot theory isn't taught in my kids school in Texas anymore (I'd be curious to know if it is in Common Core). Now we have Multicultural Day, where all the separate identities form a mosaic.
Isn't that an interesting shift. But they did it with race. I'm old enough to remember when we were all supposed to be "colorblind," but then as we started to approach "colorblind," suddenly it was racist not to acknowledge race. I know why it's happening. They have to keep moving goalposts to keep relevance, but still it's a head scratcher.
The search for the best metaphor that describes our multi-cultural country is both frustrating and telling. I think all of these metaphors do describe our multi-cultural experience, and all of them fail to describe it completely.
There is a melted, fused, multi-faceted overall culture of the US, a dominant strand (or several interwoven strands). The subcultures don't go away; they continue. They do fade and morph and distort, but they don't disappear. And the dominant culture is changed by them both subtly and broadly. Trying to keep those strands separate and distinct is an overt exercise of power as well as a fool's errand. From the right, the effort is to keep the dominant culture in stasis. From the left, the effort seems to be to separate each strand, keep each on in stasis, but to give each strand equal weight. Both approaches are foolish, and worse, impossible. They are counter to reality.
The Democrat leadership's heads are so far up their own asses I think only a massive defeat will shake them loose.
1) They thought Hillary Clinton was a great candidate.
2) They are unwilling or unable to suppress the totalitarian politics of their elites. They can't even properly soften it so that normal working and middle class folks don't feel like the party holds them in contempt.
Joe Biden was supposed to soften that elitist image, but he appears entirely captured by the elitist (or, more likely, his much younger, and much more part of that elite staff push him hard in their direction because they need to be able to show their faces among their fellow ivy-league activists.
If the Republicans run anyone but Trump, I'll be thinking long and hard. (I simply refuse to vote for a man who attempted to stay in office after losing the election. Unless the Democrats put up someone with similar bona fides or plans anyway.)
Andrew I encourage you to vote for Trump. He is an avatar for the dispossessed and as such a release valve for their furry. His rudeness is a feature not a bug; rudeness is and will remain a part of the billion person village. He fluked into this position, he is and will remain atrocious but ineffective and he is altogether the right person for the time. The elite are equally atrocious but highly effective and as such much more dangerous. Trump is a wrecking ball. The Abby of Misrule needs be wrecked, he is the only person extant craven enough to put a dent in it.
I understand why he's popular. My objection to him is not that he's rude (though I do object to the rudeness, I object less to it when he deploys it in favor of common sense rather than in favor of bullying his enemies; too bad the latter is by far the dominant mode); my objection to him is that he deliberately set fire to our election processes in order to create the circumstances that would enable him to remain president despite losing the election. Trump took advantage of a time of low institutional trust to benefit himself by undermining that trust even more.
Our republic has been protected by norms and values and ethics as much as it has been protected by laws. Donald Trump represents the man who undermines all of those things in his pursuit of power (or at least the appearance of power; it's hard to tell how much he likes the power versus how much he likes the trappings of power and the extent to which he even differentiates them). Laws alone cannot protect the republic. Laws need good faith to see them enforced, good faith to obey them even when they are not strictly enforced.
Trump's willingness to go against these norms is a huge part of what makes him appealing. The problem is that he's not intent on reforming the system; he's intent on self-gratification. People comfort themselves with the idea that he can't really be a threat to the republic because he's too incompetent or lazy. I agree that he is incompetent and lazy, but he's not dumb. Despite his shortcomings, we were only a few honest persons away from a constitutional crisis (at best): if the Raffensbergers and Pences of the world don't stick to their principles, if they abandon those principles like so many other Republicans did, then we are in a very different position. I will never vote for the man who deliberately put us into that position for his own self-aggrandizement. Period.
I understand why people found Trump so refreshing, but he's a nihilist. He's happy to torch the whole establishment but to what end? For his own glory, not to actually improve the lives of anyone. If he regained power he could be bought off by the establishment in half a second — all they would have to do is butter him up and bend the knee, and all the pseudo-populist bullshit would be out the window and he'd serve as their figurehead instead of that of his base. In fact I suspect he'd like nothing more, since his entire life has been in pursuit of acceptance by that crowd. Trump is about Trump, not about anyone else in the world.
Generally true, but I do wonder whether you've overstated the extent to which this transition has actually happened in the Republican Party. Definitely, the battle is on, but for a working class orientation to make its way into policy, it's going to have to be far more than just Ron DeSantis or Matt Gaetz holding press conferences against wokeness. There are donors, think tanks, ancient Congressmen and Senators in safe districts and states, and just plain old longstanding ideological commitments to low taxes, limited government, and free enterprise. But the ship is turning . . .
I hope so, not because of a commitment to the Republican Party, but because I think the enactment of a policy agenda favorable to the concerns of the working class would be good for the country.
Actually, I think the cuture war antics of the Left ensures that the ship need not turn at all to continue to capture the socially-conservative vote. And so everything continues to spin on its neoliberal/neocon axis.
I love the Solidarity Party's platform, but I think Leighton's point wasn't so much that the GOP was capturing the socially conservative vote, yes, they've been doing that for decades, but that the GOP was looking to become the party of the working class more generally. I think that's true for those aligned with Trump, just not sure that the Trump wing is really as ascendant as would be implied.
I don't think the author said that per se...rather, it was the anonymous expert hosted by The Chatham House that made that particular statement. Lots of other folks have pointed out that the strategy the GOP was following circa 1968 (birthed by "The Southern Strategy) was on a collision course of racial demographics. A change in fortunes with non-whites, whether it was voter suprression or a genuine outreach to those groups, or their opposition losing credibility with those groups - was desperately needed.
But here's the thing. The GOP really doesn't need to do all that much on broadening its appeal to non-whites to lock up an electoral college majority. Swings of a few tens of thousands of non-white voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, WIsconsin, Arizona and North Carolina are really all that they need. Very do-able, obviously, as progressive Democrats conintue building their nest in Cloud Cuckoo Land and the party, in general, demonstrates they really haven't an idea of the priorities of the economic precariat.
Of course it's a class issue. Happily the Dems don't realize it's all about class. Race is yesterday's news. The Republicans will ultimately receive a bigger and bigger share of the African American working class vote as more and more they realize how the Dems have fucked them over for years: viz. public schools, charter schools, defund the police, BLM hucksters...We will see this clearly when "Gov." Stacey Abrams gets clobbered in Georgia this November. Ultimately the Republicans will ultimately own the Jewish and Asian vote. They will be the last holdout because they are mostly college educated and middle class and today's radical Dem party will become too uncomfortable for them. Nothing is forever in politics it just feels like it will never end!
So the Republicans are poised to “reap electoral bounty” you say by attracting greater numbers of working class voters of all races due to “Alien” sounding Democratic ideologies.
But in other articles you describe voters/the non-elite as mere “Symbolic Props” in the power structure.
So are you cautioning Democrats that they are at risk of losing intra-PMC bragging rights with the Republicans over voter counts?
Or what is at stake here for the Democrats exactly?
I'm not sure there's a contradiction here — politics is an intra-elite struggle, but in elections it's a struggle over attracting the affiliation of the non-elite. The Dems are losing that battle wrt working class voters.
I wasnt trying to arbitrarily nitpick you on an inconsistency - more trying to get a precise understanding of your view on the power that voting really has on influencing laws, rules & policies. Not much if your “Symbolic Props” categorization of voters is accurate.
Therefore the only disconnect for me was in the sober warning tone of your piece vs the triviality of what’s actually at stake for the Democrats if your speculations prove accurate.
I guess I'd put it this way: politics is a struggle between elites but the byproducts of that struggle — say, labor rules or healthcare access or policing or war and peace — do have very profound consequences for all of us. So while it may be a big performance, it's a performance that has huge knock on effects.
Superb article - more than worth my upgrade to a "Paid Subscription".
As I pointed out on your Twitter a few months back - https://twitter.com/BRuegazer/status/1499877058121457667 - the progressive left's response to this is that they simply argue that members of the working class who don't share their very-specific-if-somewhat-incomprehensible SJW worldivew - aren't *actually* members of the working class at all.
The progressive Left is not only dumb - it's selfish, too. Allow me to explain...
The left likes to pretend that a socially-conservative party that represents the working class isn't even theoretically possible. That - as anybody familiar with the political parties founded in the 20th Century based on Christian Democratic and Liberation Theological principles knows - is false.
In fact, there presently exists such a party in the United States - the American Solidarity Party - though nobody should be under any illusions as to how far these folks are from the halls of power. The platform highlights are here: https://www.solidarity-party.org/platform
Yes they embody unabashedly-conservative notions of family and anti-abortion - but also support Medicare for All, Foreign Policy Restraint, Worker co-ownership of the means of production (free-market capitalists they ain't!), Anti-Consumerism, Rehabilitation of Drug Users vs Incarceration, Combating Climate Change, etc. They have *considerable* overlap with Bernie Sanders' 2016 economic platform.
So when the Left publishes this sort of stuff: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/why-we-should-abolish-the-family - the end result is that the Left relegates the socially-conservative working class vote to the goons backed by The Heritage Foundation who don't care about the economic circumstances of the working class at all and keep the USA in its neoliberal/neocon doom loop.
So the Left not only keeps itself from power, it's preventing parties from "the other side" from ever having a chance to assist the Working Class.
Another banger, thanks Leighton. I couldn't agree with this take more. I expect the share of Hispanics voting GOP to increase even more in '22 and '24 elections. If I'm not mistaken, Yongkin won the Hispanic vote in VA. Maya Flores from TX is another harbinger.
Check out different Hispanic areas across the US: East LA, National City / Chula Vista, El Centro, San Luis, AZ, El Paso, Cicero, IL, etc.; the direction of change is very clear. I don't expect those areas to be majority GOP in the next 5 years, but it seems likely the plurality of GOP voters there will continue to increase to the point that they will behave similarly to toss-up suburban districts.
The other subtext in that data is while Hispanic areas got redder, the white wealthy areas got bluer. From '16-'20, there's also a very clear "blue-ing" in places like La Jolla, Wilmette-Winnetka-Glencoe, West LA, etc.
An example, from Britain, of how what Pickety dubbed the ‘Brahmin Left’ has become less relevant to its former base. The leftish anti-Brexit group Another Europe Is Possible now campaigns almost solely on the rights of asylum seekers who everyone can see include a high proportion of economic migrants. This observation would get you branded as racist on British Twitter.
Working class people also see the downward shift in wages available for some jobs due to uncontrolled illegal immigration. Here in FL, unskilled construction workers make less than fast food workers. Construction workers make less per hour then they did 30 years ago, and they have no workers' compensation coverage or a chance to be covered by Social Security.
Want to see someone who is really screwed, find someone who is hitting their 60s after a lifetime of hard work, but they don't qualify for SS or Medicare... They are legion..
What really struck me, living out here in the micro-flyover land between Seattle and Portland, is that conditions for the working class, and in particular Latinos, really did improve noticeably during the Trump years. One of the dumbest things I often hear liberals ask is why people like that vote against their interests, which to me says they don't know a thing about what those people's interests actually are.
Exactly, I can't believe it when I hear that. Liberalism in 2022 pretty clearly serves the interests of the upper-classes, from affluent educated professionals up through the "millionaires and billionaires". There's nothing in their agenda for the working class, other than a weak defense of entitlement programs.
Very nicely put. I don't consider myself much of a social conservative, but upon reviewing the platform of the socially-conservative American Solidarity Party (https://www.solidarity-party.org/platform)...it's FAR more economically-progressive and supportive of the working class than anything that the Bidens, Buttigiegs, or Harris's are peddling. In fact, it's not remotely close.
But instead of the ASP duking things out with the Dems during our elections, we've got a legion of goons funded by The Heritage Foundation and similar. Ye Gods it's depressing...
Thank you for another great piece.
God, I love this line: This is what it came down to: “The Republican Party,” she said, “wants to become a multi-ethnic, multicultural, working class movement.” As if that's an evil goal. But really she should have shortened it to "The Republican party wants to be a . . . working class movement." The rest comes naturally. You need no malevolent intention behind it. And of course the only way you become a working class movement is by paying attention to the working class.
I often find it strange how the smartest people can miss the simplest points. How we identify ourselves, or how we see ourselves, comes down to a list of characteristics or labels, as much as I hate them, and how we rank them in importance to our self-image. And the parties use those labels to gear their tactics and "scare" voters. The Republicans in the past have done this. I still know conservatives who are convinced Christianity is under attack. I remind them there is a church on every corner and those churches are richer than God. I personally could put that space to better use and tax the hell out of them, but the laws protect those buildings and spaces, so, no, "Christianity" is safe.
But as one example of this blindness on the Democrat side, they think that all people of Hispanic descent, no matter how long they have been in the US, should identify first and foremost as Hispanic. In other words, they are Hispanics who just happen to be American and working class. But where the rubber meets the road, in the Democrat theories, the *only* label that should matter to these people is "Hispanic." However, America has progressed. And ironically enough, the party that kept reminding us that America is a melting pot has forgotten that America is a melting pot. These days, more people with "brown skin" are thinking of themselves as American and working class who just *happen* to be Hispanic, which makes all the difference.
Which leads me to my next point. When I hear someone call Trump and by extension the Trump-influenced segment of the Republican Party "xenophobic," what they're really trying to say is they hate anyone who is not white. But I don't think non-white working class people are reading it that way. I think "xenophobic" means to them what it actually means, which is a fear of outsiders, which they may or may not agree with but is certainly a much smaller sin than hating all people who are not white. And in this case the whole Mexicans are rapist thing rang a little true for them. We are being flooded by gangs and drugs due to an unwillingness to screen the people coming in. We also are importing a group of people that are willing to work for far less than most Americans are willing to or even should be willing to work for simply because their papers aren't quite in order and that leaves them vulnerable to exploitation. So in that case, it doesn't matter that the last names are similar nor the skin color or place of origin. The people switching sides see themselves as American workers first and Hispanics second. You add in the fact that Hispanics are by and large Catholic, either devoutly or as a matter of heritage, and the socially conservative nature of the Republican Party is attractive to them. And, yes, other ethnicities will follow unless the Democrats have an epiphany, which I honestly don't see happening.
The other thing that is happening is Democrats are losing the "you're racist" war. I can't honestly think of anything more racist than reducing an entire group of people to a single label and accusing them of being traitors if they don't follow your expectations of that label. If there is anything to "white privilege," it is that we are allowed or even forced into a certain degree of diversity in thought, but minorities are not. Joe Biden's "gaffes" are always interesting for the amount of truth they contain: two of my favorites are "if you don't know who to vote for, you ain't black" and "poor kids are just as intelligent as white kids." That is the worst of Democrat philosophy in a nutshell, and I doubt I'm the only one who noticed. And I'd say it's because Joe is old and from that era, but that attitude pervades the Democrat Party and the media that spins for it.
I agree with you about the need for two thriving parties, but at the moment, the Democrats have true and well backed themselves into a corner.
"I still know conservatives who are convinced Christianity is under attack. I remind them there is a church on every corner and those churches are richer than God. I personally could put that space to better use and tax the hell out of them, but the laws protect those buildings and spaces, so, no, "Christianity" is safe."
From my perspective as a nearly-atheist agnostic, I have the sense that "Christianity is under attack" didn't mean that churches were being closed. I think it meant that Christianity's unquestioned dominance in US culture was under attack. It was. Removing school-led prayer, various SCOTUS rulings on separation of church and state. Interestingly, that didn't end up being the things that secularized America; I think secularization is a result of affluence and commercialism in secular life and corruption within religion.
"When I hear someone call Trump and by extension the Trump-influenced segment of the Republican Party "xenophobic," what they're really trying to say is they hate anyone who is not white. But I don't think non-white working class people are reading it that way. I think "xenophobic" means to them what it actually means, which is a fear of outsiders, which they may or may not agree with but is certainly a much smaller sin than hating all people who are not white."
This is really insightful. I don't even think they fear outsiders in general. They *do* fear millions and millions of outsiders entering the country in a largely uncontrolled manner: we current citizens don't get to choose who comes in or how many.
"The other thing that is happening is Democrats are losing the "you're racist" war."
They are. Democrats discovered this great way to shut up opposition and galvanize their base both to vote and to destroy the more moderate parts of their own party: tar certain ideas as racist. Now it's impossible to be pro-immigration reform without being a racist. And like most groups which find a powerful tool or toy, they use it again and again until it's used up and is ineffective even for the use where it was appropriate. It's the natural progression of rationalization: find a thing that works, use it to the hilt, make *everything* about that one thing because it works, until you discover you've destroyed the value of the thing, like overfishing a shoal.
And you make a great point about "xenophobia," which is closer to the point I was trying to make but much better stated. Thank you. It's natural for a group to want control over who joins and is allowed among that group, but the label of "xenophobic" is used to belittle that very realistic expectation.
Thank you for such a thoughtful response, and I can see your point with the first, and I agree with "secularization is the result of affluence and commercialism in a secular life and corruption within religion." That's a great summation.
I completely agree, except the melting pot theory isn't taught in my kids school in Texas anymore (I'd be curious to know if it is in Common Core). Now we have Multicultural Day, where all the separate identities form a mosaic.
Isn't that an interesting shift. But they did it with race. I'm old enough to remember when we were all supposed to be "colorblind," but then as we started to approach "colorblind," suddenly it was racist not to acknowledge race. I know why it's happening. They have to keep moving goalposts to keep relevance, but still it's a head scratcher.
Lillia I think our Author Leighton explains why they move the goal posts: it is an industry and they are motivated to keep their jobs.
The search for the best metaphor that describes our multi-cultural country is both frustrating and telling. I think all of these metaphors do describe our multi-cultural experience, and all of them fail to describe it completely.
There is a melted, fused, multi-faceted overall culture of the US, a dominant strand (or several interwoven strands). The subcultures don't go away; they continue. They do fade and morph and distort, but they don't disappear. And the dominant culture is changed by them both subtly and broadly. Trying to keep those strands separate and distinct is an overt exercise of power as well as a fool's errand. From the right, the effort is to keep the dominant culture in stasis. From the left, the effort seems to be to separate each strand, keep each on in stasis, but to give each strand equal weight. Both approaches are foolish, and worse, impossible. They are counter to reality.
To clarify, Multicultural Day is a PTA program, not a TEK.
Well written and well judged argument, I agree wholeheartedly.
The Democrat leadership's heads are so far up their own asses I think only a massive defeat will shake them loose.
1) They thought Hillary Clinton was a great candidate.
2) They are unwilling or unable to suppress the totalitarian politics of their elites. They can't even properly soften it so that normal working and middle class folks don't feel like the party holds them in contempt.
Joe Biden was supposed to soften that elitist image, but he appears entirely captured by the elitist (or, more likely, his much younger, and much more part of that elite staff push him hard in their direction because they need to be able to show their faces among their fellow ivy-league activists.
If the Republicans run anyone but Trump, I'll be thinking long and hard. (I simply refuse to vote for a man who attempted to stay in office after losing the election. Unless the Democrats put up someone with similar bona fides or plans anyway.)
Andrew I encourage you to vote for Trump. He is an avatar for the dispossessed and as such a release valve for their furry. His rudeness is a feature not a bug; rudeness is and will remain a part of the billion person village. He fluked into this position, he is and will remain atrocious but ineffective and he is altogether the right person for the time. The elite are equally atrocious but highly effective and as such much more dangerous. Trump is a wrecking ball. The Abby of Misrule needs be wrecked, he is the only person extant craven enough to put a dent in it.
I understand why he's popular. My objection to him is not that he's rude (though I do object to the rudeness, I object less to it when he deploys it in favor of common sense rather than in favor of bullying his enemies; too bad the latter is by far the dominant mode); my objection to him is that he deliberately set fire to our election processes in order to create the circumstances that would enable him to remain president despite losing the election. Trump took advantage of a time of low institutional trust to benefit himself by undermining that trust even more.
Our republic has been protected by norms and values and ethics as much as it has been protected by laws. Donald Trump represents the man who undermines all of those things in his pursuit of power (or at least the appearance of power; it's hard to tell how much he likes the power versus how much he likes the trappings of power and the extent to which he even differentiates them). Laws alone cannot protect the republic. Laws need good faith to see them enforced, good faith to obey them even when they are not strictly enforced.
Trump's willingness to go against these norms is a huge part of what makes him appealing. The problem is that he's not intent on reforming the system; he's intent on self-gratification. People comfort themselves with the idea that he can't really be a threat to the republic because he's too incompetent or lazy. I agree that he is incompetent and lazy, but he's not dumb. Despite his shortcomings, we were only a few honest persons away from a constitutional crisis (at best): if the Raffensbergers and Pences of the world don't stick to their principles, if they abandon those principles like so many other Republicans did, then we are in a very different position. I will never vote for the man who deliberately put us into that position for his own self-aggrandizement. Period.
I understand why people found Trump so refreshing, but he's a nihilist. He's happy to torch the whole establishment but to what end? For his own glory, not to actually improve the lives of anyone. If he regained power he could be bought off by the establishment in half a second — all they would have to do is butter him up and bend the knee, and all the pseudo-populist bullshit would be out the window and he'd serve as their figurehead instead of that of his base. In fact I suspect he'd like nothing more, since his entire life has been in pursuit of acceptance by that crowd. Trump is about Trump, not about anyone else in the world.
On further reflection it is his nihilism that I get off on. He’s more fun than a barrel of moneys.
Bullseye!
Very well said!
Generally true, but I do wonder whether you've overstated the extent to which this transition has actually happened in the Republican Party. Definitely, the battle is on, but for a working class orientation to make its way into policy, it's going to have to be far more than just Ron DeSantis or Matt Gaetz holding press conferences against wokeness. There are donors, think tanks, ancient Congressmen and Senators in safe districts and states, and just plain old longstanding ideological commitments to low taxes, limited government, and free enterprise. But the ship is turning . . .
I think a lot of those institutional pillars of the GOP have already shifted, or they've bolted the GOP for the Democrats.
I hope so, not because of a commitment to the Republican Party, but because I think the enactment of a policy agenda favorable to the concerns of the working class would be good for the country.
Actually, I think the cuture war antics of the Left ensures that the ship need not turn at all to continue to capture the socially-conservative vote. And so everything continues to spin on its neoliberal/neocon axis.
A pro-working class, socially conservative party would - IMO - resemble this: https://www.solidarity-party.org/platform
...rather than the yuck being spewed by The Heritage Foundation, Club For Growth, etc., etc.
I love the Solidarity Party's platform, but I think Leighton's point wasn't so much that the GOP was capturing the socially conservative vote, yes, they've been doing that for decades, but that the GOP was looking to become the party of the working class more generally. I think that's true for those aligned with Trump, just not sure that the Trump wing is really as ascendant as would be implied.
I don't think the author said that per se...rather, it was the anonymous expert hosted by The Chatham House that made that particular statement. Lots of other folks have pointed out that the strategy the GOP was following circa 1968 (birthed by "The Southern Strategy) was on a collision course of racial demographics. A change in fortunes with non-whites, whether it was voter suprression or a genuine outreach to those groups, or their opposition losing credibility with those groups - was desperately needed.
But here's the thing. The GOP really doesn't need to do all that much on broadening its appeal to non-whites to lock up an electoral college majority. Swings of a few tens of thousands of non-white voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, WIsconsin, Arizona and North Carolina are really all that they need. Very do-able, obviously, as progressive Democrats conintue building their nest in Cloud Cuckoo Land and the party, in general, demonstrates they really haven't an idea of the priorities of the economic precariat.
Of course it's a class issue. Happily the Dems don't realize it's all about class. Race is yesterday's news. The Republicans will ultimately receive a bigger and bigger share of the African American working class vote as more and more they realize how the Dems have fucked them over for years: viz. public schools, charter schools, defund the police, BLM hucksters...We will see this clearly when "Gov." Stacey Abrams gets clobbered in Georgia this November. Ultimately the Republicans will ultimately own the Jewish and Asian vote. They will be the last holdout because they are mostly college educated and middle class and today's radical Dem party will become too uncomfortable for them. Nothing is forever in politics it just feels like it will never end!
So the Republicans are poised to “reap electoral bounty” you say by attracting greater numbers of working class voters of all races due to “Alien” sounding Democratic ideologies.
But in other articles you describe voters/the non-elite as mere “Symbolic Props” in the power structure.
So are you cautioning Democrats that they are at risk of losing intra-PMC bragging rights with the Republicans over voter counts?
Or what is at stake here for the Democrats exactly?
I'm not sure there's a contradiction here — politics is an intra-elite struggle, but in elections it's a struggle over attracting the affiliation of the non-elite. The Dems are losing that battle wrt working class voters.
I wasnt trying to arbitrarily nitpick you on an inconsistency - more trying to get a precise understanding of your view on the power that voting really has on influencing laws, rules & policies. Not much if your “Symbolic Props” categorization of voters is accurate.
Therefore the only disconnect for me was in the sober warning tone of your piece vs the triviality of what’s actually at stake for the Democrats if your speculations prove accurate.
No worries, didn't take it that way.
I guess I'd put it this way: politics is a struggle between elites but the byproducts of that struggle — say, labor rules or healthcare access or policing or war and peace — do have very profound consequences for all of us. So while it may be a big performance, it's a performance that has huge knock on effects.
Superb article - more than worth my upgrade to a "Paid Subscription".
As I pointed out on your Twitter a few months back - https://twitter.com/BRuegazer/status/1499877058121457667 - the progressive left's response to this is that they simply argue that members of the working class who don't share their very-specific-if-somewhat-incomprehensible SJW worldivew - aren't *actually* members of the working class at all.
The progressive Left is not only dumb - it's selfish, too. Allow me to explain...
The left likes to pretend that a socially-conservative party that represents the working class isn't even theoretically possible. That - as anybody familiar with the political parties founded in the 20th Century based on Christian Democratic and Liberation Theological principles knows - is false.
In fact, there presently exists such a party in the United States - the American Solidarity Party - though nobody should be under any illusions as to how far these folks are from the halls of power. The platform highlights are here: https://www.solidarity-party.org/platform
Yes they embody unabashedly-conservative notions of family and anti-abortion - but also support Medicare for All, Foreign Policy Restraint, Worker co-ownership of the means of production (free-market capitalists they ain't!), Anti-Consumerism, Rehabilitation of Drug Users vs Incarceration, Combating Climate Change, etc. They have *considerable* overlap with Bernie Sanders' 2016 economic platform.
So when the Left publishes this sort of stuff: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/why-we-should-abolish-the-family - the end result is that the Left relegates the socially-conservative working class vote to the goons backed by The Heritage Foundation who don't care about the economic circumstances of the working class at all and keep the USA in its neoliberal/neocon doom loop.
So the Left not only keeps itself from power, it's preventing parties from "the other side" from ever having a chance to assist the Working Class.
Another banger, thanks Leighton. I couldn't agree with this take more. I expect the share of Hispanics voting GOP to increase even more in '22 and '24 elections. If I'm not mistaken, Yongkin won the Hispanic vote in VA. Maya Flores from TX is another harbinger.
For anyone who needs more convincing about the Hispanic shift towards the GOP, check out this detailed NYT map that shows change in votes from '16-'20 on a very granular basis across the country: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html
Check out different Hispanic areas across the US: East LA, National City / Chula Vista, El Centro, San Luis, AZ, El Paso, Cicero, IL, etc.; the direction of change is very clear. I don't expect those areas to be majority GOP in the next 5 years, but it seems likely the plurality of GOP voters there will continue to increase to the point that they will behave similarly to toss-up suburban districts.
The other subtext in that data is while Hispanic areas got redder, the white wealthy areas got bluer. From '16-'20, there's also a very clear "blue-ing" in places like La Jolla, Wilmette-Winnetka-Glencoe, West LA, etc.
An example, from Britain, of how what Pickety dubbed the ‘Brahmin Left’ has become less relevant to its former base. The leftish anti-Brexit group Another Europe Is Possible now campaigns almost solely on the rights of asylum seekers who everyone can see include a high proportion of economic migrants. This observation would get you branded as racist on British Twitter.
Working class people also see the downward shift in wages available for some jobs due to uncontrolled illegal immigration. Here in FL, unskilled construction workers make less than fast food workers. Construction workers make less per hour then they did 30 years ago, and they have no workers' compensation coverage or a chance to be covered by Social Security.
Want to see someone who is really screwed, find someone who is hitting their 60s after a lifetime of hard work, but they don't qualify for SS or Medicare... They are legion..
As Paul Begala told Donna Brazile almost 15 years ago, “We can’t win with [just] eggheads and African Americans.”
Good!