by Victor Davis Hanson
Progressive overreach alienated the middle class, replacing working-class roots with elite dogmas—and now the Democrats are reaping the whirlwind they sowed.
Sometime after the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the American
Left began exploring, then embracing, and finally enacting agendas that
proved not only unhinged and unworkable but also fatal to the left-wing
project itself.
How did the party so alienate the middle classes when it once
professed it was the sole party and protector of those in-between? How
did the Democratic Congress sink to a 16 percent approval rating in a
current liberal Quinnipiac University poll? How could 63 percent of
registered voters view the Democrats unfavorably in a recent Wall Street
Journal poll?
In sum: despise the middle class, then lose elections.
At the turn of the millennium, globalization generated massive wealth
by opening a 6-billion-person consumer market to the rising global
powers of Silicon Valley, media, academia, law, finance, and
transnational corporations. The result was a Democrat Party increasingly
dominated by a new and different sort of “committed” left-wing
billionaire.
The Democrat Party, by the turn of the century, had become a home for
the ultra-rich, the upscale professional classes, and the subsidized
poor. And its new initiatives reflected the values, ideas—and
pretensions—of the globalized bicoastal elites, from reimagining a
sustainable green economy to “diversity” and apologetics for America’s
culpability abroad.
In the ancient days of the 1990s, Bill Clinton ensured that the
Democrat party was for strong borders, legal-only immigration, and
protection of union jobs from cheap imported labor. Abortion was to be
safe, legal—and “rare.” Now, abortion is often praised and worshipped by
the left, as if it is integral to saving a warming planet.
Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 Democrat Party platforms would have been written off as racist and xenophobic.
Once illegal immigration began spiking under Obama, and the old union
lunch bucket classes were nearly rendered inert by globalization, the
mainstream party began pivoting to open borders.
It assumed that impoverished illegal aliens would soon become new
progressive constituents to replace vanishing American working-class
voters. “Demography is Destiny” and “The New Democratic Majority” became
party mantras.
By 2020, the party was controlled by open-borders radicals. Illegal
immigration was seen as an adjunct to new Diversity/Equity/Inclusion
obsessions. Suddenly, an entire array of racialist compound nouns
appeared—white privilege, white rage, white guilt, white
supremacy—without any consideration that whites, in total numbers,
comprise the largest group of poor people, or that poor white people
usually have zero in common with elite white progressives.
In the Democrat bizarro world, the operating assumption seemed to be
that if an illegal alien from southern Mexico set foot into the U.S.,
then he was immediately branded as a “minority” with legitimate
grievances deserving of reparatory treatment from a country he scarcely
knew and with which he had no prior experience, good or bad. It became
so moral to break the law to welcome in illegal aliens and amoral to
enforce the law and try to return the unlawful to their homes.
In response, colleges began granting reduced tuition to foreign
nationals unlawfully residing in-state, while charging out-of-state
American citizens the full costs.
Joe Biden’s open borders that had allowed somewhere from 10–12
million illegal entries were the final manifestations of the Democrat
embrace of illegal immigration, as the foreign-born residing in the U.S.
reached all-time highs, both in real numbers and percentages of the
population. It was a suicidal party transformation—offending the middle
classes and alienating minority Democrats who were left to cope in
underserved communities with vast influxes of foreign nationals, half of
whom originated outside of Mexico.
The Democrat Party had always claimed credit for landmark civil
rights legislation that had morphed into affirmative action. And under
Obama, it went further into equality-of-result
“diversity/equity/inclusion.”
But in the process, the original paradigm of affirmative
action—reparatory treatment for black Americans dealing with the legacy
of slavery, Jim Crow, and what was increasingly now called “systemic
racism”—devolved into claiming all who were not so-called “white” or
“male” merited racial, ethnic, or gender-based preferences in hiring,
promotions, and admissions. Caricature followed as the antebellum racist
1/16 one-drop rule returned, and fakers like Elizabeth Warren gamed the
admittedly corrupt system.
The old relationship between class and race was forgotten. DEI
quickly became an albatross around the New Democrat Party’s neck when
the richest ethnic group in America, Indian-Americans (such as Zohran
Mamdani, the “African-American” college applicant), professional women,
upscale gays, and the transgendered were seen as making up the new
victimized majority who had suffered from the victimizing minority of
white males (many of whom were poor).
In short, under Democrat auspices, there were now too few victimizers
for the increasing array of victims. Affirmative action had sunk into
an absurd tribal caricature of civil rights that was not logical, fair,
or popular. Certainly, the entire binary idea of Marxist oppressed
versus oppressors was unworkable in a multiracial democracy.
Stranger still, as an offshoot of DEI, the left transformed the
ancient recognition of gender dysphoria (a rare biological condition by
traditional medical accounts affecting about .1% of the population) into
the new civil rights cause célèbre. For the elites, the trans cause
emerged as the unquestioned successor to civil rights, women’s lib, and
gay marriage—as if to assume in Soviet style, “Give me a new liberal
crusade, and then I’ll find an oppressed group.”
On some campuses, ten to twenty percent of students claim they were open to “transitioning.”
But what followed was incoherent. The transgendered were to be
defined as no different from their adopted biological kindred sex.
Indeed, transgendered biological males began competing in women’s
sports, though transgendered biological women rarely competed in men’s
athletics.
Biological men began undressing in female locker rooms, as students
and professors began listing their “preferred pronouns.” Few cared that
the trans sports movement was antithetical to the landmark efforts of
women to attain sports parity. It was transphobic to object to sexually
explicit transgender burlesque among audiences of teens and children.
Polls showed that 70-80 percent of respondents disapproved of biological
men competing in women’s sports and drag shows with underage audiences.
Bill Clinton had also once campaigned on “100,000” new police
officers and tough sentences for violent juvenile offenders. But as
liberals morphed into progressives and wokesters, crackpot “critical
legal theory” and “critical race theory” began to dominate left-wing
criminology.
In big blue cities, crime itself was suddenly defined as socially
constructed: it was illegal to shoplift sneakers or candy bars only
because rich white men did not need to steal either, and therefore
shoplifting itself was not really a crime.
Career criminals must not be indicted, convicted, and imprisoned for
their most recent violent crimes, given that a violent, racist, and
systemically unfair society itself was culpable for making them violent
and career criminals in the first place.
One result was a crime wave that hit major blue cities—exacerbated by
the COVID lockdowns, the death of George Floyd and the subsequent
four-month-long 2020 riots. “Defund the police” became a Democratic
mantra—at least until it threatened to wreck the party and alienate the
minority base itself.
Democrats used to talk about “ecology” and “conservation” and were
noted for “recycling,” saving “endangered species,” spearheading
“anti-pollution efforts,” and ensuring “open spaces.” Yet from the Obama
era to the end of the Biden administration, all that prior stewardship
was seen as little more than boring, so-so half measures.
Instead, civilization itself was now said to be near extinction, requiring Draconian measures from on high to save the planet.
So global warming morphed into “climate change,” as pollution was
redefined not as noxious fumes but as heat itself and the release of
natural carbon dioxide. And “climate change” demanded that the middle
classes would have to curb their appetites, transition to costly wind
and solar “renewables,” and forgo the formerly bountiful and cheap power
from natural gas, nuclear, and coal generation.
Stranger still, the elite architects of “fundamentally transforming”
society were themselves exempt. It was as if their big SUVs, private
jets, 5,000-square-foot homes, heated pools, and air-conditioned estates
were necessary accoutrements enabling our left-wing elite to hammer out
a new era of “limits” for everyone else. The high-flying
multimillionaire Al Gore and billionaire John Kerry, along with the
usual Hollywood celebrities and nepo babies, needed the old perks of
affluence in order to better reduce affluence for everyone else. As a
general rule, the most iconic pontificators about rising oceans and a
sizzling planet were the most likely to own a seafront estate or an
air-conditioned mansion.
Universities were always bastions of liberal ideology. But now they
also went with the new hard-left trend and became not protectors of free
speech, not refuges for oddball, unpopular, and eccentric thinkers, and
not custodians of age-old scholarship, the teaching of the Western
canon, and disinterested science. Instead, life was too short in the
woke mind to waste such a valuable progressive asset on real research
and apolitical instruction.
So rather abruptly, universities became extensions of the new
progressive Democrat woke project. Civil rights legislation and eventual
Supreme Court decisions were simply ignored as race and gender now
defined the identities of students, staff, and faculty. SATs and
comparative ranking of high school GPAs were deemed inherently racist
and unfair.
“Theme houses” became little more than racially segregated dorms.
“Affinity” graduations were unapologetically racially separated.
Israel was no longer a liberal Democrat’s admirable oasis in a sea of
Middle East autocracy, terrorism, and religious fundamentalism, but
became a “settler colonialist” oppressor. Jews on campus were harassed
with impunity and became inseparable from demonized “Zionists,” who
themselves were no longer immigrant generations escaping the trauma of
the Holocaust to the biblical land of the Jews but Western colonial
interlopers and oppressors.
Palestinian terrorists were “freedom fighters.” Foreign students were
no longer rare on American elite campuses, where once meritocracy had
made room for thousands of rural and small-town high schoolers to enroll
in bicoastal elite colleges.
Instead, one million strong foreign students—mostly left-wing and the
majority from illiberal regimes, like Communist China and Middle East
autocracies—often made up 20-30 percent of top college enrollments,
given they were gouged by campuses to pay 110 percent of costs. Some
often spearheaded pro-Hamas demonstrations and changed the campus
dynamics of protests.
For the new Democrats, the evolving university, like the new media
and new corporate boardroom, was seen as an invaluable extension of the
party itself, even as their new and woke explicit biases polled terribly
and offended the majority of still-silent Americans. It is no surprise
that in current polls, the Ivy League now polls as dismally as the
media, and its graduates seem to be less impressive to employers year by
year.
So, these same Jacobin transformations infected foundations, the
media, and corporations, rendering them deeply unpopular embarrassments
rather than enablers of the Democrat Party.
In sum, almost every new issue the new Democrat Party embraced proved
an anathema to the middle class. Yet the party seemed almost uniquely
prescient in foreseeing that progressive policies would bankrupt the
country, hopelessly divide it, and leave it unworkable. Being talked
down to by neurotic and dysfunctional elites only made the messengers
force multipliers of their toxic messages.
If the Democrats were not addicted to woke, they would relegate all
these suicidal policies to their graveyard of political misadventures,
alongside the failed visions of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Barack
Obama, and Joe Biden.
But like all addicts, they can survive neither with nor without their fixes.
Victor Davis Hanson
Source: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-862519
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