This time around, Hillary Clinton is not lamenting Republican ‘deplorables’. She has chosen instead, along with Kamala Harris, to label Donald Trump and his supporters as out-and-out fascists. Different words but the same meaning: anyone who backs the GOP candidate in next week’s US presidential election is an enabler for modern-day blackshirts or stormtroopers.
But for many Americans, the real ‘deplorables’ are to be found among Harris’s backers, such as the tech oligarchs who dominate the economy, the financiers of Wall Street or the moguls of mainstream media. Think of the likes of Bill Gates, who just forked in $50million to the Harris campaign.
Even more detested by most of the public are the ‘progressive’ activist class that has embraced Harris and shaped her past record. This group, as the author Musa al-Gharbi writes in his new book, We Have Never Been Woke, constitutes ‘a new elite’. Trained as ‘symbolic analysts’, these often flailing graduates and professionals now represent a revolutionary class pushing the Democrats towards the ideological loony bin. As long as Harris and the Democrats remain in thrall to the activists’ progressive ideology, they will be tarred with their widely unpopular views on everything from climate change to transgenderism, race quotas and immigration.
Their numbers are not too impressive. Overall, the woke make up roughly eight per cent of the electorate. But they tend to be politically motivated and dominant within the party apparatus, newsrooms and schools. They have long dominated local politics in cities like Los Angeles, Oakland, Houston and Boston.
Progressive influence has been far more evident in the Biden administration than in preceding Democratic regimes, especially those of Bill Clinton and even of Barack Obama. The current administration has welcomed ideologues with strident progressive views on the environment, gender, race and the Middle East. Biden and Harris have focussed on these woke constituencies over more traditional Democratic policies that embrace broad-based economic growth and opportunity.
Harris, more than Biden, epitomises the current version of the ‘left’ that is rooted in an increasingly gentrified base, rather than working-class or middle-class people. This has been financially rewarding for the Democrats. The ultra-rich and their progressive foundations have consistently outraised and outspent the political ‘right’ by a margin of nearly two-to-one. For Harris, long supported by these same people, this has helped build up an unprecedented billion-dollar campaign war chest, as much as three times the size of Trump’s.
Leftists like Bernie Sanders admit that Harris’s apparent shift to the centre during the election is a mere pragmatic feint. But as her campaign has lost momentum, his political action group, Our Revolution, now warns even the hint of moderation could limit turnout among progressive voters.
Yet there’s a problem here. Outside of the biggest cities and college towns, progressives are thin on the ground. Their views are far from popular with the general public (abortion rights is the main exception). The progressive, mainstream media – such as the New York Times and USA Today – insist that wokeness poses no big problem. But, as former New York Times opinion editor James Bennet put it, the traditional media now serve as the place where ‘America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist’.
Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.
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: Harris rally at the ellipse, by Rob Pegoraro via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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