I grew up among people who worshipped the pillars of the 20th century Democratic Party: the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt, and the great public works project known as New York City. The Democrats were then the party of progress—of new roads, bridges, ports, factories, and laboratories. They were also the party of national defense, a relic of the triumph of World War II, sustained by fear of communist aggression.
But the recent development of the Democratic Party stands in stark contrast to its heyday. Today, Democrats are losing ground among some of their core constituencies, particularly among skilled workers, Latinos, Jews, Asians, and even some African Americans. In their new configuration, Democrats operate as an electoral cabal forged by an alliance between the business elite, the free classes, the federal bureaucracy, and the dependent voters.
If anything, the Democrats’ synchronized swimming of the last month could only have taken place in a party that is largely unified in its core voters and its essential beliefs. They shift positions and loyalties through technology and media control, and use influencers to conceal problematic positions from the past with a dexterity that would make a communist vozdh as Joseph Stalin would have appreciated.
The new mindset is obvious when you consider that Democrats are joining the tech oligarchs who have long supported Kamala Harris and the universities, another bastion of progressive power, in embracing censorship. It is also built on the assumption that the experts, supported by progressive voters, should be given free rein because they know better than the masses.
The key to understanding the increasingly authoritarian Democratic Party is threefold: class, race, and sexual politics. As someone trained in Marxist theory, I tend to put the class component first. In the past, the Democrats were a party that appealed to “the little people,” such as factory workers, small shopkeepers, small farmers, skilled mechanics, and artisans. Democrats from Kennedy to Clinton focused on private sector growth as a means to achieve the rise of the American middle and working classes.
But in the new Democratic policies, most of the job growth is concentrated in government and government-funded health care. And the Democrats’ voter base consists largely of those professionals who benefit from a more regulated government.
The differences between urban professionals, who are concentrated in college towns and densely populated cities, and the bulk of the population are enormous. In fact, a recent Rasmussen study of high-earning, highly educated urban workers found that their views on a range of issues, including restrictions on meat, gasoline and free speech, differ sharply from those of most Americans.
Read the rest of this article at American Mind.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, where he directs the Center for Demographics and Policy. For more information, visit joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter. @joelkotkin.
Photo: Democratic Donkey Down, by DonkeyHotey Flickr under CC 2.0 license.
