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The Liberal Patriot: The Left Is Blowing Its Big Opportunity
And They’re Taking the Democrats Down with Themhttps://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-left-is-blowing-its-big-opportunity
For forty years or so the left has been preaching against neoliberalism—the view that capitalism and markets should mostly be left alone to generate prosperity with only modest regulation and a frugal welfare state. For forty years the left has polemicized against this economic model, frequently despairing that they could ever get through to ordinary voters, particularly working class voters, who, the left said, were duped by political elites who either promoted this model or were afraid to challenge it.
Well a funny thing happened in the wake of the Great Recession, a worldwide pandemic and persistent, maddening economic inequality: ordinary voters, including working class voters, are sick of neoliberalism. They’ve had it and they’re ready for something different. The answer to the left’s prayers right? The opportunity—finally!—to push the American economic model in their preferred direction by building up the mass support the left has always lacked.
A great opportunity, yes, and also an opportunity that’s being impressively blown by today’s left and, in the process, is taking the Democratic party down with them. At the very moment when neoliberalism has been comprehensively discredited, the left has become more and more associated with unpopular sociocultural issues and less and less with solving the problems of working class people. This has branded the left as a movement out of touch with the concerns and language of ordinary voters—a movement that is using its increased influence within the Democratic party to promote pet causes and interfere with effective governance. This is undermining the Democrats’ ability to garner mass support for the very economic transition the left has been promoting for forty years.
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These commitments are increasingly driven by what is now referred to as identity politics. This form of politics originated in the 1960s movements that sought to eliminate discrimination against and establish equal treatment and access for women and for racial and sexual minorities. In evolving to the present day, the focus has mutated into an attempt to impose a worldview that emphasizes multiple, intersecting levels of oppression (“intersectionality”) based on group identification. In place of promoting universal rights and principles—the traditional remit of the left--advocates now police others on the left to uncritically embrace this intersectional approach, insist on an arcane vocabulary for speaking about these purportedly oppressed groups, and prohibit discourse based on logic and evidence to evaluate the assertions of those who claim to speak on the groups’ behalf.
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related
Ten Things We Now Know About the Nonwhite Working Class Vote in 2020
Danger Signs for Democrats
https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/ten-things-we-now-know-about-the-62a
The Democrats’ Hispanic Voter Problem
It's Not As Bad As You Think—It’s Worse
https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-democrats-hispanic-voter-problem-dfc
The Democrats’ Coming Asian Voter Problem
It's Not Just Hispanics Anymore
https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-democrats-coming-asian-voter
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Democrats, Not Republicans, Need to Defuse the Culture Wars
Because It’s Republicans Who Benefit
https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/democrats-not-republicans-need-to
It’s not exactly a secret the Republicans are running hard against the Democrats on sociocultural issues like crime, immigration, ideology in the schools and cancel culture. Their strategy is to combine attacks on these perceived vulnerabilities with an indictment of Democrats’ failure to return normalcy to the economy and thoroughly contain the pandemic. The goal is to paint a picture of the Democrats as an incompetent party distracted by secondary issues out of step with normal voters.
The Democrats’ standard response to Republican sociocultural attacks is to insist that the problem areas identified by the GOP aren’t really problems. They are fake issues cynically pumped up by right wing media to scare voters who would otherwise be responding favorably to the Democrats’ superior performance and policy ideas. The apotheosis of this was Terry McAuliffe’s robotic pronouncement of voter concern about schools in the Virginia gubernatorial contest as responding to “racist dog whistles”.
This seems unlikely to work. Crime is a genuine problem; voters care about it and think Democrats are doing a terrible job. Ditto for immigration. As for schools and education, an area where Democrats are rapidly losing their traditional advantage, they seem incapable of engaging with the actual concerns that are animating voters. In Virginia, voters who were already upset about parental burdens and academic deficits from extended school closures became additionally concerned that an emerging focus on “social justice” pedagogy and policies was detracting from learning traditional academic subjects and rewarding high achievement. As a memo by ALG Research on focus groups with suburban Virginia Biden-Youngkin voters noted:
.
Thinking about these concerns as responses to racist dog whistles seems inadequate. But it is emblematic of the default Democratic response to Republican attacks in sociocultural areas. The primary impulse is to engage these attacks on the level of the worst possible interpretation of how they could appeal to voters (racism, etc.) and push back on that. But that leaves the concerns of most persuadable voters unaddressed and the field open for Republicans.
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Because It’s Republicans Who Benefit
https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/democrats-not-republicans-need-to
It’s not exactly a secret the Republicans are running hard against the Democrats on sociocultural issues like crime, immigration, ideology in the schools and cancel culture. Their strategy is to combine attacks on these perceived vulnerabilities with an indictment of Democrats’ failure to return normalcy to the economy and thoroughly contain the pandemic. The goal is to paint a picture of the Democrats as an incompetent party distracted by secondary issues out of step with normal voters.
The Democrats’ standard response to Republican sociocultural attacks is to insist that the problem areas identified by the GOP aren’t really problems. They are fake issues cynically pumped up by right wing media to scare voters who would otherwise be responding favorably to the Democrats’ superior performance and policy ideas. The apotheosis of this was Terry McAuliffe’s robotic pronouncement of voter concern about schools in the Virginia gubernatorial contest as responding to “racist dog whistles”.
This seems unlikely to work. Crime is a genuine problem; voters care about it and think Democrats are doing a terrible job. Ditto for immigration. As for schools and education, an area where Democrats are rapidly losing their traditional advantage, they seem incapable of engaging with the actual concerns that are animating voters. In Virginia, voters who were already upset about parental burdens and academic deficits from extended school closures became additionally concerned that an emerging focus on “social justice” pedagogy and policies was detracting from learning traditional academic subjects and rewarding high achievement. As a memo by ALG Research on focus groups with suburban Virginia Biden-Youngkin voters noted:
.
Thinking about these concerns as responses to racist dog whistles seems inadequate. But it is emblematic of the default Democratic response to Republican attacks in sociocultural areas. The primary impulse is to engage these attacks on the level of the worst possible interpretation of how they could appeal to voters (racism, etc.) and push back on that. But that leaves the concerns of most persuadable voters unaddressed and the field open for Republicans.
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