Tag Archive for: race politics

A Middle Class Rebellion Against Progressives is Gaining Steam

A specter is haunting America, a great revolt that threatens to dwarf the noxious rebellion led by Trump. The echoes of a another potentially larger pushback can already be heard in progressive America. But it’s not towards socialism, as many suggest. It’s the opposite: a new middle-class rebellion against the excesses of the Left.

This new middle-class rebellion isn’t rejecting everything that progressives stand for; the Left’s critique of neo-liberal excess is resonating, as is the need for improved access to health care. But the current focus on “systemic racism,” coupled with a newfound and heavily enforced cultural conformism and the obsessive focus on a never-ending litany of impending “climate emergencies” are less likely to pass muster with most of the middle class, no matter how popular they are with the media, academics, and others in the progressive corner.

And this new middle-class rebellion is being bolstered by a wide-ranging intellectual rebellion by traditional liberals against the Left’s dogmatism and intolerance. Indeed, what we’re about to see has the potential to reprise the great shift among old liberals that had them embracing Reagan in reaction to the Left’s excesses of that generation.

In a way, this should not be surprising. After all, the progressive base is limited: According to a survey conducted by the non-partisan group More in Common, progressives constitute barely eight percent of the electorate. The report also found that fully 80 percent of all Americans believe that “political correctness is a problem,” including large majorities of millennials and racial minorities.

Party line journalists may see President Biden as the new champion of the middle class, but every time he adopts central tenets of the new Left, he undermines his pitch. And this happens not infrequently: The Biden Administration has adopted elements of the “anti-racist” agenda, for example, by explicitly favoring Black farmers for subsidies, rather than focusing on all farmers in need. Race issues may be popular on college campuses and in the human relations departments of giant corporations like Lockheed and Amazon, but a recent Yale study found that language based on inclusivity around class was far more popular than one focused largely on race, even with progressive voters.

This is not the message coming out of the Biden administration, which has put a premium on diversity hiring and “equity,” despite the fact that racial quotas, in hiring or in college admissions, are unpopular with three out of four Americans, including African-Americans and Hispanics; 65% of Hispanics, 62% of black Americans and 58% of Asians oppose affirmative action in college admissions.

Read the rest of this piece at Newsweek.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the 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.

Homepage photo credit: Hollywata via Flickr under CC 2.0 License

Why Jews Are Confused

Assailed from two sides, American Jewry is having an acute crisis of identity.

Es iz schver tzu zein a yid. (It is hard to be a Jew.)

—Sholem Aleichem

From missiles falling on Tel Aviv and the assault on synagogues during last summer’s riots to mob violence on the streets of LA and New York, the sense of well-being among America’s Jews has been shattered. After decades of relentless social and political ascendency, Jews now face rising anti-Semitism in ways not encountered in over half a century. Attacked from the far right, as well as an increasingly vitriolic far left, Jews are pincered and suffering whiplash.

Amidst what Hoover Institution fellow and Somali immigrant Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes as a rampant rise of “tribalism,” anti-Semitism is becoming normalized in America. Yet in the face of this rising risk, Jews themselves are divided and deeply conflicted. The Jewish establishment has generally focused on white nationalists as the prime threat and, to be sure, lone racists have expressed their anti-Semitism lethally from Kansas City and Pittsburgh to Poway. To a people who have experienced centuries of persecution from the Tsarist regime to the Nazis and the Klan, the far right’s elevated profile fueled by the power of social media—if not the actual size of the white nationalist movement—is nevertheless terrifying.

Yet this is not the real measure, or even the bulk, of the threat. Groups like the Anti-Defamation League focus on Islamists and right-wing hate groups, but their statistics have been roundly criticized in such respected magazines as Tablet, and are widely thought to reflect their increasingly progressive bias. The reality, missing from the mainstream narrative, ignores the arguably more potent threat from an aroused, and increasingly radicalized, left.

The roots of leftist anti-Semitism are nurtured in anti-Zionism that has been brewing for a half century on the left. But now, for the first time, even Congress has a band of anti-Zionists who denounce Israel’s strong response to missile attacks as a war crime. The assault on Israel’s right to self-defense—though still backed by President Biden—comes from the ascendant left faction of the Democrats—led by such figures as Rashida Tlaib and the openly anti-Semitic Ilhan Omar. They assign exclusive blame to Israel for their response to the mass missile attacks on their cities from groups like Hamas, whose genocidal urges are well demonstrated and enshrined in the group’s founding documents, and whose Judenrein territorial goal, “from the river to the sea,” is now chanted by street mobs around the world, and tweeted by none other than the labor union at the New Yorker magazine.

Israel appears to have lost support among American Jews, particularly the younger and less affiliated. Having alienated the Obama administration with their West Bank settlement policies and opposition to the Iran nuclear agreement, Israeli policy-makers now worry more about Democratic Administrations. A former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. recently opined that Israel should prioritize the “passionate and unequivocal” support of evangelical Christians over that of American Jews, who he said are “disproportionately among our critics.” Certainly the new administration’s intent to return to the Iran accords are troubling, as are charges that John Kerry, the president climate czar, gave intelligence to the Iranians, who openly promote eradication of the Jewish state.

These divides are particularly dangerous as the community is aging rapidly, faces increasing pressures to assimilate, while major institutions are under pressures not seen in generations. Overall, the American Jewish population—unlike that of demographically robust Israel—is unlikely to grow by 2050. There is no likely replacement for the influx of Persian, North and South African, and Russian Jews who rescued the community from demographic decline over the last half century. It is also a community that is no longer the global center of Jewry, and has been replaced by Israel, a state that acts primarily in its own self-interest, sometimes in ways that upset many American Jews.

Although Trump made some modest gains among Jewish voters in 2020, the bulk of American Jews, nearing 70 percent according to Pew, identify with the Democratic Party. Jews are widely represented in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, including Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and progressive icon Bernie Sanders, and are well represented in the media, academic, and corporate communities that have rallied behind President Biden. Democrats account for 36 out of the 38 Jews in Congress, and one-third of them are members of the far-left leaning Congressional Progressive Caucus, whose leading members, during the current hostilities, moved to block a planned $735 million weapons package for Israel.

Leading progressive Jews often embrace the notion of tikkun olam (“healing the world”) as the mission of the faith. In their mind, Jewish values are intrinsically progressive and point with pride to the community’s support for the African American civil rights movement, and their more recent unrequited backing for the Black Lives Matter movement and the Women’s March. Yet many of these groups are led in part by enthusiastic backers of the most influential anti-Semite of our time, National of Islam head Louis Farrakhan, who smirks that he is an “anti-termite” and insists that Jews controlled the slave trade, and other leaders who accuse Israel of genocide, and of running an apartheid state. Professedly anti-Zionist, BLM has allied with Islamist groups and disparaged Israel during last year’s DC demonstrations as well as during the recent Gaza conflict. BLM protests have also led to rioters vandalizing synagogues and trashing Jewish owned businesses in Los Angeles, New York, and Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Moreover, violent, unprovoked attacks on Jews in Los Angeles, New York, Raton, Montreal, LondonArgentina, Chile, Germany, Austria, Poland, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, and Turkey demonstrate that much of anti-Zionism is in reality anti-Semitism.   

Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the 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.

Edward Heyman is currently active as a volunteer and consultant in the Orange County, California, Jewish community, following a career as a partner in a software development firm serving the defense and intelligence communities.

Photo credit: Gregory Hauenstein via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

What Happened to Social Democracy?

In a world that seems to be divided between neoliberal orthodoxy and identitarian dogmas, it is possible to miss the waning presence of traditional social democracy. Born of the radical Left in Marx’s own time, social democrats worked, sometimes with remarkable success, to improve the living standards of working people by accommodating the virtues of capitalism. Today, that kind of social democracy—learned at home from my immigrant grandparents and from the late Michael Harrington, one time head of the American Socialist Party—is all but dead. This tradition was, in retrospect, perhaps too optimistic about the efficacy of government. Nevertheless, it sincerely sought to improve popular conditions and respected the wisdom of ordinary people.

In its place, we now find a kind of progressivism that focuses on gender, sexual preference, race, and climate change. Abandoned by traditional Left parties, some voters have drifted into nativist—and sometimes openly racist—opposition while more have simply become alienated from major institutions and pessimistic about the future.

The revolution in class relations

Social democracy was a product of the inequities of the industrial era and the consequent solidarity that flourished among working people. This often resulted in greater justice for racial minorities. The German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein developed an “evolutionary” ideology based on gradualism, practical results, and a commitment to democratic norms. Observing late-19th century Britain, where unions were accepted even in business circles, Bernstein noticed that working conditions, contrary to Marxist dogma, were steadily improving. He believed that the proletariat was evolving from an oppressed underclass into a more upwardly mobile group, whose goal was to find “an appropriate status in industrial society.” For their efforts, Social Democrats were denounced as “social fascists” by Stalin, and Antifa’s predecessors—the German Antifaschistische Aktion—spent at least as much time fighting them as fighting the Nazis. A fatal error.

After the Second World War, however, social democrats enjoyed considerable success while the remarkable productivity of the private sector helped transform the once-forlorn proletariat into something more bourgeois in aspiration. A study covering the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States shows that all three saw a rapid decline in the concentration of wealth until the 1970s. Their program focused on physical needs such as boosting access to electricity and improving public health and education.

Never before had so much prosperity and relative economic security been so widely enjoyed. By the 1960s, the American labor movement could boast of “developing a whole new middle class,” said Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers. Industrial laborers could afford to buy homes, send their kids to college, and live the kind of life only the affluent had previously enjoyed. Western Europe benefited from the same process—economic growth helped finance a welfare state that provided greater security and improved the prospects of most families; the rapid growth of export industries, in particular, was an integral part of the original Swedish social model of increasing wages without inflation.

Starting in the 1970s, such things as foreign competition, mass immigration from developing countries, automation, and the growing financialization of economic power undermined this progress. In the United States, data from the Census Bureau show that the share of national income going to the middle 60 percent of households has fallen to a record low since the 1970s. Wealth gains in recent decades have gone overwhelmingly to the top one percent of households, and especially to the top 0.5 percent. Social mobility has declined in over two-thirds of European Union countries, including Sweden. Across the 36 wealthier countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the richest citizens have taken an ever-greater share of national GDP while the middle class has shrunk. Much of the global middle class is heavily in debt—mainly because of high housing costs—and “looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters,” suggests the OECD.

Parties repositioning

One might assume that this concentration of wealth would energize traditional working class parties—Labour in Britain and Australia, the Liberals in Canada, the Democrats in the US—but they shifted their focus away from blue-collar and lower-middle-class workers. Instead, leftwing parties are increasingly peopled by, and cultivated support from, the well-educated professional class—now an estimated 15 percent of the US work force—along with the corporate elites and academic clerisy. These classes have done well over the past few decades, while the traditional lower-middle and working classes have languished.

Read the rest of this piece at Quillette.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the 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: Nicolas Nieves-Quiroz via Unsplash under CC0 1.0 License.

Joel Kotkin talks with Vicki McKenna About “Blue” Policy Failure

By: Vicki McKenna
On: The Vicki McKenna Show at iHeart radio

Joel Kotkin talks with Vicki about his recent piece entitled Blue Today, Bluer Tomorrow — how the “blue” left needs to reset toward addressing pragmatic issues. Joel and Vicki discuss how “blue” policies are failing the very minorities and working class people they purport to serve.

 


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Joel Kotkin talks with Dan Proft: Blue Urban Leaders Failing Minorities and Working Class

By: Dan Proft
On: The Dan Proft Show on Omny Studio

Joel Kotkin talks with Dan Proft about his recent piece entitled Blue Today, Bluer Tomorrow — how the pandemic is highlighting the failures of big urban — and typically “blue” metros to develop policies that actually benefit workers and minorities. Joel and Dan discuss how white progressives and the political class fail to address the pragmatic challenges with policies that minorities and workers need to pursue the “American dream”, and how minorites and workers are voting with their feet towards smaller metropolitan areas in order to realize homeownership and upward mobility.


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Joel Kotkin talks with Lars Larson: Progressive Policies Fail Working Class and Minorities

By: Lars Larson
On: SoundCloud

Joel Kotkin talks with Lars Larson about how progressive policies haven’t been helping blue-collar workers and minorities. The progressive movement has shifted from upholding the value of work, towards what Marx called the “proletarian alms-bag.”

Progressive politics is no longer about getting a job, moving up, buying a house, raising a family…
— Joel Kotkin

Related:

Blue Today, Bluer Tomorrow

Joel Kotkin talks with Madeleine Brand About the Future of Cities

By: Madeleine Brand
On: KCRW

People have been fleeing cities for months, reports show. A new NPR and Harvard poll out today shows the pandemic’s financial toll on America’s four largest cities: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Houston. In LA, more than half of all households report serious financial problems. Black and Latino communities are disproportionately affected nationwide.

KCRW talks about the future of cities with Joel Kotkin, a professor and fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, and author of “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class.” Also in the conversation is Annalee Newitz, a science writer and the author of the forthcoming book “Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.”

The important thing is to understand that these trends existed before the pandemic. Over the last three-four years, LA, Chicago, New York all lost population. Migration has been moving a) to suburbs, b) to some smaller, more affordable cities. So I think we had a trend that was already developing that is now accelerating.
— Joel Kotkin

Related pieces:

Is the Big Cities Boom Over?

The Twilight of Great American Cities — how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting outmigration from large cities to smaller communities

Joel Kotkin talks with Dan Proft About How Race Politics Burns Out

By: Dan Proft
On: Omny

Joel Kotkin joined the Dan Proft to talk about his essay — How Race Politics Burns Out. They cover today’s racial identity politics, and how they have failed to improve the conditions on the ground for the vast majority of historically disadvantaged groups like African-Americans.

Joel and Dan also discuss his other recent pieces — Kamala’s America and The Heartland’s Revival Read more