For today’s progressive left and its corporate backers, the past increasingly determines the future. At home and abroad, they seek to remedy historical guilt. So, in recent months, progressive elites have embraced affirmative action and reparations for anyone whose ancestors have ever been poorly treated by those dastardly people of European descent.
The worst thing about the aftermath of Donald Trump’s repast last month with two open anti-Semites—Kanye West and Nick Fuentes—was not the predictable liberal outrage and conservative cowardice, but how the incident has been accepted as part of normal discourse.
Recent government moves to increase immigration to 1.2 million over the next three years reflects both a hopeful sign for Canada’s future, but also potential impact. Along with immigration’s many benefits, we could see the intensification of racialism and identity politics, the kind that is threatening to tear apart an already deeply divided United States. Read more
You can always count on California’s progressive contingent to mix lunacy with hypocrisy. The state’s nine-member Reparations Task Force last month recommended large state payments to descendants of slaves, now living in California. Read more
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels warned that the ‘spectre’ of class war loomed over a rapidly industrialising capitalist world. Today, the neoliberal world is increasingly haunted by a similar spectre, this time of a global class conflict.
Donald Trump’s intimate tête-à-tête with Kayne West and white nationalist and Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes should have caused a storm among Republicans. While Trump has tried to distance himself from the meeting, claiming not to know Fuentes, it was troubling to see how few conservatives spoke out in the first place. Read more
The divisive racial ideology that dominated American politics for the past decade is dying. Led by minority activists and white progressives, “woke” ideology promoted a Manichean struggle between a coalition of the BIPOC, an acronym for “Black, Indigenous, and people of color” (assumed to be natural allies) against what the BIPOC Project calls a hegemonic system of “white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism.” But this vision of Black and white racial conflict, while still influential in universities and elite institutions, keeps getting rejected by American voters—as happened in political referendums on issues like policing and immigration, and most recently in the triumph of “normies” and centrists in the midterm elections.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is likely to draw some encouragement from Tuesday’s U.S. midterms. Despite running an unpopular government, wand a weak economy, President Joe Biden’s party, which shares many views with Canada’s Liberals, out-performed all expectations and has kept the Republican “red tide” at bay, at least for now.
The “left coast” mostly lived up to its name during the midterms, though occasional signs of dissent could be seen. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom won big, and the GOP saw no major statewide successes. California controller candidate Lanhee Chen, the rare Republican endorsed by virtually every major newspaper, barely did better than his hapless GOP running mates in a loss. In Oregon, Christine Drazan failed to make it to the governor’s mansion, despite Portland’s ongoing meltdown and a spirited race. And in Washington, speculation about a closer-than-expected Senate race proved wrong. Read more
For all their cautious optimism earlier this week, a mild Midterms victory may prove the last thing the Democrats need. If they had performed as predicted, the Democrats and their media adjuncts would now be busily dissecting their defeat. But what has to be considered a lost Republican opportunity — gaining little in a country where lifespans are now dropping — also means that the Democrats will be slower to address their weaknesses, and may be forced to accept the unpopular Joe Biden as their leader in 2024.
With no sign of a Republican resurgence, the Democrats will likely be lulled into thinking that Biden’s polarising agenda is a vote-winner, in the same way the conspiracy-minded MAGA wing of the GOP refuses to move on from 2020. Until it’s resoundingly disproved in the ballot box, stridency tends to whip up your base: Trump’s supporters have become, as the President suggested, “semi-fascist”, while his political mentor, South Carolina’s James Clyburn, goes further, decrying the GOP as the architects of a Nazi state.
When Democrats performed poorly in the past, they were forced to rethink their politics. After Walter Mondale suffered a landslide defeat to Reagan in 1984, the Democratic Leadership Council was set up to steer the ship towards the centre — and ultimately supported both a young Bill Clinton and, to an extent, Biden himself. In turn, the DLC was inspired by the moderate Coalition for a Democratic Majority, founded after Nixon’s trouncing of McGovern in 1972. Today, however, it’s hard to say that now is the time for a new political vision when virtually all the high-profile blue state Democrats won, sometimes by wider than expected margins.
So, rather than using the next two years to regroup and craft a political programme that could win the next election, the Democrats now appear stuck with a weak leader who appears unfit to deal with the global challenges that will define America in the coming decade. Internally, too, the Democrats look increasingly unstable. A stronger-than-expected Midterms performance doesn’t mask the fact that the progressives remain a dominant faction in the party — with an associated agenda that, outside of deep blue-college towns and core cities, commands remarkably low levels of support, as Barack Obama and others have warned.
Sticking to such a programme threatens the party’s already weakening hold on working-class voters, in particular those threatened by climate policies. Over time, the economic implications of Biden’s green agenda may be obvious, but for now they are hidden amid massive deficits and increased transfer payments. However, as Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira has noted, in the longer run, the party’s emphasis on “de-growth” and austerity is unlikely to attract middle and particularly working-class voters. Already, the political implications of climate policy have ruined the Democrats’ best chance to take the GOP seat in Ohio. Their candidate Tim Ryan may have claimed to support fracking, but his backing of the Pelosi Congressional agenda proved disastrous in a state whose economy is fueled by natural gas production and hopes to attract new investment, including a possible $20 billion new Intel chip plant in the Columbus suburbs. In Florida, meanwhile, Ron DeSantis won heavily in Latino, historically Democratic regions.
Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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