Thomas Edsall’s column this week focuses on the problems that Dems have with voters without a college degree, aka Populists. He talks to various experts about this. Most interesting to me were the comments of Michael Podhorzer and Herbert Kitschelt.
Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and a founder of the Analyst Institute Board, made the case in an email that “Neither party is genuinely ‘of’ the working class in terms of consistently addressing their core daily concerns or consistently siding with them over corporate interests — despite isolated gestures like Biden’s presence on the U.A.W. picket line.”
The point is that neither party represents the material interests of populists, and so this is why presidential elections ping-pong back and forth between Dems and the GOP. Neither party really wants to capture them in a sustainable way. Podhorzer again:
The Democratic Party is as dependent on the failures of Trump and the Republican Party as Trump and the Republican Party are dependent on the failures of the Democratic Party.
In nine of the last 10, and 11 of the last 13 elections, the party in power has lost, a pattern with no historical precedent. At the presidential level, three consecutive party switches have happened only once, more than a century ago. That neither party offers what voters want is further evidenced by the fact that the 1.3 point average margin is the lowest for three consecutive elections in well over a century.
I’m not going to belabor what I consider the political malpractices of the Dems losing the so-called working class; it is what it is. The question is whether they can ever win them back again, and there’s good reason to think not. The Dem establishment is captured by a donor class and base constituencies that make adjustments extraordinarily difficult. There’s a whole swath of folks that would vote Dem except that the Dems make it as hard as possible for them to do it. Edsall quotes Kitschelt—
[There are] many elements of the electorate without four-year college degrees that do not fit any of the templates of Trumpist populism:
They are wage earners in clerical-administrative jobs in banks, insurance companies, municipal administrations, logistics firms, tourism/travel and in sociocultural (semi-) professions in health care, education and a wide spectrum of cultural and social services.
These voters are more favorably disposed to and winnable by moderate Democratic Party strategies, although they have been put off by the more radical cultural-identitarian elements of Democratic progressivism.
The Dems have made a whackadoodle, Trump-dominated GOP the more attractive option for these moderate voters. Truly astonishing. Have the Dems learned the lesson? Well what lesson should they learn? In a recent profile in the Atlantic, Chris Murphy tells us what it is and what should be obvious to anyone with a lick of common sense:
Murphy puts forward a version of an argument that has been advanced by the likes of Steve Bannon and J. D. Vance: that millions of working-class Americans of all ethnicities are to the left of the GOP on economics and to the right of Democrats on social issues, and whichever party can occupy that sweet spot will reap major benefits. “The race is really a matter of whether Republicans become more genuinely economically populist before Democrats open up their tent and accept in folks who aren’t with us on every single issue, from abortion to climate to guns,” he said. This approach cuts against both the economic self-interest and the cultural preferences of much of the Democratic donor base. But it seems to have worked for some swing-district Democrats, including Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Representative Pat Ryan of New York, social moderates who emphasized anti-corporate themes and ran far ahead of Harris in their congressional districts last year. (Source)
The point to emphasize here is that "moderation" is on cultural issues, not economic ones. Most self-declared “moderate” dems are pro-corporation Dems who look to big corporation and Wall Street types for their campaign funding. What’s needed is exaclty the opposite, more moderate on cultural issues, and more Left on economic issues. And whoever wins and holds the ‘populist’ vote wins an enduring majority for the next several decades. This is the only thing that breaks the ping-pong dynamic described above.
But when push comes to shove, neither party seems to care about winning and retaining the Populist vote—the Democrats because of their cultural aversion to Populist conservative social values, and the Republicans because they have no substantive Populist policy agenda–in the end it's always about eliminating taxes an regulations and privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that benefit Populists constituencies more than anyone. If the GOP can play the culture-war card to con Populists into voting for them every other cycle, cool. That’s all they need to win in the long run.
But maybe the Trump GOP no longer thinks it has to worry about things continuing to ping pong. Perhaps Trump in ‘24 was last ‘pong’, and in electing him American democracy has ping-ponged itself to death.
So sure, it's easy to see Trump’s reelection last year just an extreme example of well established pattern dating back to Nixon in which Americans elect really awful Republicans to make a mess that the Dems are subsequently elected to clean up until it’s time to elect Republicans again to make an even bigger mess. If that pattern holds we should elect Democratic congress in ‘26 to at least prevent Trump from making an even bigger mess than he could with a supine GOP congress. But there’s good reason to think that the Dems won’t get a chance to do their janitorial work again because the current GOP mess is the one that finally brings the whole system down.
Why should we assume that Trump will risk losing his legislative majorities next year? Why shouldn’t he make up some pretext next summer to declare martial law and suspend elections? If he does, who will stop him? What’s the downside for him if he were to do so? That he’ll get impeached?! That people will riot in the streets. Bring it on. It's great TV.
Is the Dem and broader pro-democracy establishment preparing for such a scenario? Maybe it’s being discussed somewhere, but not in the stuff I’m reading or watching. Murphy has addressed it, but the Atlantic article makes clear that nobody in the Dem establishment is buying what he's selling. Instead I mostly hear people in the MSM who keep talking about how politically unpopular Trump policies are, and doesn't he realize that people will vote against this in the next cycle? But it’s obvious to me that he doesn’t care about how his policies are polling outside his base because the only poll that matters is the one on election day, and the only election day that mattered was the last one because it was the last one.
Will this happen? I think it’s 60/40 likely. Did anybody believe that J6 would happen? Isn't this the next step? The 40% chance it won't is based on whether when push comes to shove Trump is just a showman who wants to play a dictator on TV but is incapable of imposing authoritarian discipline in an effectively consistent way. For him, the show's the thing, and reality mustn't impinge. Perhaps a real coup would be too real for him, with too many uncontrollable, real-world consequences. But if the people around him want it, he'll probably green light it as he did J6.
But who really knows? Maybe there’s inertia in the system that makes this harder than it appears. Maybe there will be unexpected, effective resistance from actors who are currently out of view. The bottom line is that we’re all on a bus without anyone sane in the driver’s seat. Chaos is the spirit of the age. Anything is possible. Assuming that old norms and patterns will hold is foolishness.
Peter Thiel Postscript–If you listen to the Douthat inteview with Peter Thiel, maybe you would find him bo be an impressive intellect. But from my point of view, what a truly frighteningly bizarre human being and intellectual second rater. I truly expected something more interesting and challenging from him. But he's like a smart college sophomore who has read a few books and learned all the wrong things. He's obsessed with stagnation, but despite his purported Christianity, it's hard to imagine someone who sees a solution for it in formulaic materialist cliches.
You could lift parts of his conversation with Douthat, insert it into the crackpot dialog of Mountainhead, and it would fit right in the film’s absurdist flow. He represents everything that wrong with one-dimensional thinking that dominates thinking in the TCM in that he thinks that our spiritual crisis is solvable by transhumanist materialist means. And he is doubly dangerous because he tries to coat his transhumanism with a bizaare. bible-quoting Christian patina. He fears the anti-Christ in Greta Thunberg of all people! Classic Right Wing projection. It would never occur to him that whatever the Anti-Christ might be, it is more likely he who serves it. He has no idea what a cage he's in.
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