In baseball as well as in American football, there’s something called the “hidden ball” trick, where a player hides the round object in order to befuddle the opposition. American politics is experiencing something similar, with politicians, particularly on the progressive side, hiding often unpopular views before the poor voters cast their ballots.
Of course, no one can hope to beat Donald Trump in mendacity; he does not hide the ball but pushes it in your face. But Trump’s stance on many of the leading issues, according to Gallup, is actually supported by voters by a considerable margin. In contrast, progressive stances on issues from reparations, voter ID and race quotas to bans on fossil fuels, electric vehicle mandates and immigration are highly out of step with the voters.
So, what’s an aspiring progressive do? Outside of embracing abortion, their one winning issue, it’s best now to lie or bury past positions, hoping the voters will not catch on. The somewhat dispirited Kamala Harris campaign, now focusing on swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, is trying to deny many of her once firmly stated “beliefs”, such as ending fracking or supporting mandates for EV adoption.
Harris’ former positions may play well with her high-tech and progressive donors but not so much with people who work with their hands and produce actual products, voters seemingly ever more moving towards Trump. Members of the Teamsters Union, which refused to endorse Harris after a poll of members, fear that EV mandates would force them to buy more expensive and less reliable trucks. Harris panders to factory workers, announcing a $100 billion programme to boost US manufacturing, but has backed an EV strategy clearly failing and beginning to cost jobs.
Perhaps the best way to identify Harris’ real positions is to examine her record – and that of her fellow progressives – in California, a consequential state with an economy larger than that of Great Britain, France or Canada. As Attorney General in the state, she embraced extreme environmental policies, helping to create among the highest energy prices in the US.
The California record stands as a dire warning to industries like manufacturing, oil and construction – all of which have long been critical employers of working-class Californians, most of whom are minorities. Over the past decade, California has fallen into the bottom half of states in manufacturing sector employment growth, ranking 44th in 2022. This is not a record Harris wants to share with people around Detroit.
The usually hyper-sensitive progressives and greens have said little about Harris’ ideological turnaround. They will be counting on her changing once elected; she recently admitted she has no objections to any of Joe Biden’s initiatives. After all, her backers include investors in green technologies and her top environmental advisor, Camila Thorndike, not surprisingly, seems to be in favour of such things as banning gas stoves, electrifying everything and embracing the idea of not having kids based on climate concerns, an unwelcome idea as the West, including the US, faces serious demographic decline.
Read the rest of this piece at Telegraph.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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