Instead of class conflict, politics became a battle between two cultural factions, neither of which represented the working class. On the left side of these politics are many professionals whose concerns for equality have narrowed to involuted and essentialized conceptions of race and gender detached from the real material needs of the marginalized groups they claim to support. Meanwhile, the reactionary Right is populated by many relatively high-earning but uneducated small-business owners and tradespeople who obsess over the excesses of the Left, indulge in fear-mongering about crime and immigration, and toy with—or outright embrace—racist tropes. While this right-wing identity politics likes to invoke the downtrodden white working class and sometimes borrows from the rhetoric of mid-century labor politics, it effectively serves the interests of another set of the elite through a standard business-oriented Republican playbook. Our fervid cultural politics do not emerge, bottom-up, from a public that channels its economic anxiety in misguided, illiberal directions; it originates with those at the top of the economic system, whose privileges it obscures.
The subtitle for Stern's article is "Embracing technocracy will pnly fuel the populist surge." It is one of the best pieces I've come across in summing up our predicament. The culture war is a proxy war in which uneducated working class voters are manipulated to fight for the interests of the wealthy who stoke resentments by telling them that big-gummint-woke-Democrats want to destroy everything that they hold sacred. And so the Cosmopolitan Left enters the fight fists aflyin' on the culture-war terms these wealthy interests have defined. They think their cause is righteous, and, you know, they're gonna win because history is on their side. But guess what? The historical dialectic is a bitch.
I have not been writing here about the Trump indictments because it's going to play out the way it's going to play out. I think his strength in the national polls is meaningless.Nobody's focused on politics now. The reigning commonplace is that both parties are corrupt, and a pox on both Republicans and Democrats. But when push comes to shove, most Americans will not vote for Trump. And they're less likely to do so in the swing states that put up the looniest of MAGA candidates last year. They know what they're dealing with there because they've seen the crazy up close. And while I doubt a sociopath like DeDantis could get elected again in FL because since the pandemic Floridians have come to see him for the cynical empty suit that he really is, that doesn't mean he can't get elected if he ran against Biden.
I understand the arguments of those who think that Biden's running again is an unforced error by Democrats. I certainly would feel better if Dems ran Gretchen Whitmer or Chris Murphy or any reasonably competent Democrat under the age of 70. I think Douthat's analogy in today's column is apt. Putting Biden out there is akin to Boston's keeping Bill Buckner on first base in the '86 world series. They thought that it will probably be all right. What are the odds that a ball will be hit to him that will go under his gimpy legs? Well it did then, and it can again. Biden during the next year is one McConnell-esque TIA away from losing the game. And then what? What is the Dem Plan B? Is anybody in the Dem establishment talking about that?
In the meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether MAGA can be anything more than a rabid personality cult that can bring itself to think strategically. Probably not in time for '24, but at some point, post-Trump, it probably will. And this is really the point of Stern's article. Whatever happens in '24, MAGA is a symptom of a deeper problem, which is broad detestation of the technocratic managerial state and its elite, Neoliberal, cosmopolitan, meritocratic ethos. Defending that is not a long-term viable solution for Democrats. The Dems have got to find a Capra-esque multi-racial mythos that will re-establishthe Dems as the party of the little guy. I think lots of Dems think that's who they are because their policies are in fact more worker and family friendly, but they just don't get that that's not how they are perceived anymore. And it's up to educated Dem elites to understand this and change it.
And it's also the point that I've been making here for years. The cosmopolitan Left is deeply mistaken if it thinks it can win the culture war in the long run. It thinks it can win because it believes young people share their cosmopolitan values and MAGA will age out. But, again, the historical dialectic is a bitch, and now that Woke defines boring conventional establishment thinking, it provokes robust anti-woke rebellion in the young. Count on this continuing to be a thing.
BTW, if you want to understand why Hard-Right thinking can be so compelling for serious, spirited young people, read A World after Liberalism by Matthew Rose. He's raising all kinds of warning flags that a complacent Left should be paying attention to. And so the Democratic Party, as the vehicle for what is a very confused and feckless Left, must return to its class-first roots, and that requires that they find a way to win back the white working class, and in doing insure that they retain the loyalty of the Black and Brown working class.
What's going on in the Hard Right is an overdetermined, complex social phenomenon, and while an atavistic white racism is a part of it, it cannot be reduced to and dismissed as just that. There were an uncomfortable number of Black and Brown people storming the Capitol on J6. Educated Black, Hispanic, and Asian ideologues do not represent the thinking and values of working class Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. And yet the thinking and values of these educated elites have become the brand of the party. How many educated Democrats understand how alienating that is for the rank and file?