The Crumbling of the Democratic Empire
Ever since the rise of Barack Obama, Democrats have seen themselves as destined to rule. With his presidential victory in 2008, they created a seemingly unbridgeable political empire. With the support of big cities, young progressives, universities, the media and an ever-expanding government workforce, the party – led by what Roger Kimball calls ‘the Syndicate’ – imagined it could stay in power indefinitely.
Given their advantages and the clear vulnerabilities of their only serious opponent, Donald Trump, Democrats should have expected an easy time in this presidential election. Instead, Trump won a convincing victory last night, with Republicans also winning control of the Senate and possibly the House of Representatives. Worse yet, from the progressive point of view, Kamala Harris was forced during the campaign to bow to Trumpian views on trade and immigration, a clear sign of her political weakness.
How did this happen? Much of it has to do with the imperiousness of the Democrats. The party elite and their financial backers live in a rarefied world where only their values and interests seem to matter. As Jacob Siegel has shown, they and their analogues in Europe are so convinced of their rectitude that they have grand plans to control the media and democracy for the long-run, through the control of election rules, mainstream media and, most critically, big social-media platforms.
These elites, like the financiers of the City of London or the landowning aristocracy during the height of the British Empire, have good reasons to want to keep the current imperial order. They did well financially under the rule of their frontman, Joe Biden, even if most Americans have not gained much since 2020. As even Ezra Klein, one of the few perceptive pundits in progressive media, has noted, these elites rule over the party with a ruthless sense of their dominion, while ‘ignoring the sentiments of legions of Democratic voters’. Only when they had no choice, did they whack Biden, despite his obvious frailty and plummeting popularity. They then gave the rank and file no role in the selection of the presidential candidate.
To these Democratic imperialists, like their equally deluded British antecedents, politics need only serve the most deserving – that is, themselves. They are adept at virtue-signalling about left-sounding causes, but are loyal to their class interests in all things. They are ultra-progressive on social and cultural issues, but are not keen on redistributing income or wealth, and are hostile to any constraints on their market power.
Of course, some in the oligarchy, notably Elon Musk, backed Trump in this election. But the bulk of the big money bankrolled Harris. When Musk began supporting Trump, the Atlantic – owned by Harris’s good buddy, Laurene Jobs – accused the X owner of ‘bend[ing] the knee’ to ‘strongman politics’. I guess when oligarchs like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, George Soros or Bill Gates get the cheque book out for Harris, they are acting for purely selfless, public-spirited reasons.
Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.
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. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
