U.S. President Joe Biden, in one of his regularly inept utterances, recently castigated Japan and other East Asian countries for being “xenophobic,” compared to the relatively immigrant-friendly United States. The president surely made no friends, but actually spoke something of the truth, or perhaps more of a half-truth. Read more
The wannabe Trump vice-presidents have made a sad spectacle of themselves, genuflecting in support for their morally deficient leader in what has to be one of the least edifying trials in history. Potential VP candidates JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy and Doug Burgum all made a show of obedience at Trump’s Manhattan trial over the past few weeks.
As they grovel at the feet of the leader of the GOP, they are aware that the presidency could soon be in their reach. Simply put, despite the bad looks from Gotham, Trump and his Republican party right now hold the edge.
Biden’s bungling of the Gaza protests, and his general incompetence, has some “anti-populists” reconsidering Trump. But the real killer issues are the border and Biden’s economic record. Largely ignored in the party press, there’s been a surge in workers seeking unemployment benefits and much slower GDP growth. Indeed, one in four Americans overall fear losing their job in the next year.
Having already lost much of the white working class, the party’s historic base, the Democrats are also alienating two historically Left-leaning groups: ethnic minorities, and young people. Recent polling suggests that young people are shifting away from Biden, who won their votes easily in 2020, and towards Trump. Media accounts may link this to the Palestine crisis but polling shows that young people rank virtually every issue as being more important to them.
But perhaps the most critical shift this year involves ethnic minorities. Trump has made considerable strides in appealing both to African Americans, and particularly blue collar black males. Latino identification with the Democrats now sits at the lowest level ever.
These three groups – Latinos, African Americans, and young people – should determine the winner of vice-presidential sweepstakes. Trump seems unlikely to win over the highly educated professional classes but can appeal to suburban “soccer Moms”, many of whom voted for Biden in 2020, who have been turned off by his embrace of far-Left policies.
But 2024 is not 2020, or even 2016. Trump needed Mike Pence to bolster his credibility with the evangelical Christians and small-town moralists who have traditionally been a big part of the GOP base. This time around the challenge is quite different. Biden’s addled shift to the Left, his increasingly unsure gait and general appearance of fragility means that the base, however horrified by Trump’s amorality, will be less likely to break ranks.
Running with the likes of Doug Burgum might have the advantage of bringing competence and tech savviness. but Burgum would offer more to Trump as a cabinet officer. Running with another MAGA favourite, JD Vance, would offer a more intellectual take on Trumpism but would do little to exploit Biden’s basic weaknesses. Clearly the dog-murderer Kristi Noem, whose appeal to women might have been useful, has managed to disqualify herself.
The real focus should instead be on groups shifting away from the historic Democratic base. This includes younger voters who might be attracted to the selection of former Democratic Congressperson Tulsi Gabbard, an attractive 43-year-old military veteran and Samoan surfer from Hawaii. She could appeal to younger voters by making an appeal as a younger Republican convert.
Read the rest of this piece at Telegraph.
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 and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Michael Vadon via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
Jews, like elephants, tend to have long memories. We see in the past warnings of the future. As Israel marks its 76th birthday on 14 May, perhaps the most relevant and terrifying precedent comes from the days of the Roman Empire.
This week’s surge in workers seeking unemployment benefits should be a sign that America’s already weakening economy, and much slower job growth, could prove the key to this year’s election. Indeed, one in four Americans fear losing their job in the next year.
As in the Medieval past, scarcity will likely define our present, facilitated by our “net zero” economy. This brave new world will support fewer people, juggling between them expensive resources, less food, and uncertain energy production. Perhaps the biggest struggle will be over electricity, the preferred energy solution of our ruling green hierarchy.
Once the putative party of the people, the Democrats are increasingly the party of political “Mean Girls.” Read more
Like most Americans, I always tended to believe Canada was our more sensible, if less intense, neighbour. It was a country that respected liberal traditions derived originally from England, embracing values such as free speech and assembly along with tolerance for opposing views.
This is no longer the case. As authoritarian regimes are expanding all around the world, notes Freedom House, Canada and other western nations seem to be tilting in that awful direction. Some Canadians may fear the future of democracy under a new Donald Trump administration in the United States, but they would do well to look closer to home.
Indeed, even as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issues statements denouncing Russia and China, his regime is now contemplating an online harms law, Bill C-63, which would permit judges to impose house arrest on those who they fear might commit a hate crime in the future. In the case of the most heinous speech, like advocating for genocide, this law would allow lifetime imprisonment. Lighter sentences or simple house arrest could be applied to anything that censors regard as hate speech, which could include such things as “misgendering” people or criticizing any aspect of Islam.
Spiked rightly compared this to the 1956 novel Minority Report by Phillip Dick, set in a future America “in which a ‘precrime’ police division uses intelligence from mutants known as ‘precogs’ to arrest people before they’ve committed an offence.” The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood called it “Orwellian.”
This controlling trend was foreshadowed during the COVID pandemic, where dissenting views were censored at the behest of a federal official, a regime that one U.S. federal judge compared with “the Orwellian Ministry of Truth.” In Tory-controlled Britain, the BBC, Facebook and Google worked with the government to squelch dissenting views.
Read the rest of this piece at National Post.
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 and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: European Parliament via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
One 19th century Gentile described California as “the Jews’ earthly paradise”. It is paradise no longer. Reports of attacks on Jewish businesses, homes and institutions are becoming ever more commonplace, while university campuses – hardly considered to be bastions of hate – have allowed acts of flagrant anti-Semitism to go unpunished.
The recent decision by the National Health Service to ban puberty blockers under prescription outside of upcoming clinical trials is a rare indication that common sense and biological reality are staging a comeback. However, this ruling is but a small victory against a growing trend that places ever less emphasis on family, marriage and children.
The battle of the sexes shifting into a battle of infinite sexes represents a key front in this age of familial and gender confusion. Today over 28 per cent of all Gen-Z women identify as LGBTQ, more than twice the rate for millennials and almost three times that for young men.
This break with heterosexual norms has many sources. Women generally outnumber men: 75 per cent of Ivy League presidents, 66 per cent of college administrators, and 58 per cent of recent graduates are now female. On college campuses, as author and longtime feminist Susan Jacoby notes, even the most sensitive and sympathetic men “have been robbed of their true nature and humanity.”
Alienation from heterosexuality has its cheering section in the scientific community, which increasingly denies even the existence of biological sex. The media is, unsurprisingly, on board: Andrea Chu’s New York Magazine’s cover The Freedom of Sex openly advocates letting children decide about their own gender while still young. Colleges do their part by allowing transgender women to compete against biological women, to the consternation of many female athletes.
Transgenderism even gets a boost from the highest echelons of government. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken may fail to address Russia, Hamas or Iran, but has time to urge diplomats to eschew “sexist” words like father. The President himself has promoted transgenderism as the “civil rights issue of our time.”
In such circumstances, it’s no surprise that relations between men and women increasingly resemble those of almost different species. Young men, for example, are generally heading to the political right while young women trend far more towards the left. Politically engaged women, notes the American Enterprise Institutes Sam Abrams, support cancel culture far more than their male counterparts. This divergence is not only felt in America but exists in other countries including the UK, Germany and South Korea.
Faltering relations between men and women are likely to worsen a mounting demographic crisis now evident in virtually all high-income societies. In the US, a quarter of all people have not married by age 40, a historic record. Much the same is occurring in the EU, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and now China. Last year, the UK’s birthrate hit a record low, with fertility rates for women under 30 at their lowest levels since records began in 1938. A fifth of all British women are childless by mid-life.
Even when people have children, they increasingly do it on their own. In the United States, the rate of single parenthood has grown from 10 per cent in 1960 to over 30 per cent today. Between 1972 and 2019, the number of marriages in Britain dropped by half. Post-familial attitudes are, if anything, even more common in continental Europe. By 2000, more than half of births in Sweden were to unmarried women (though most of them cohabiting).
Read the rest of this piece at Telegraph.
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 and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Ted Eytan via, Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.
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