Matthew Iglesias is onto something in his April 2019 Vox piece entitled “The Great Awokening”. While I don’t agree with everything that he has to say, he makes sense with his central point: white liberals have shifted far left.
Ronald Reagan was famous for having said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.” And oh how they have left many of the rest of us behind as well.
Shortly after Trump announced his infection with the coronavirus, Twitter, that cacophonous funhouse of the easily ignitable, was aflame with wishes for his death. From whence cometh the vitriol? It arose from the fever swamps of the comfortable, mostly white liberal Democrats whose militant views dominate today’s Party.
Iglesias mostly focuses on the Party’s embrace of the far left’s take on racial issues like the now-ritualistic censure of the esoteric “systemic racism” – which is carte blanche for federal government intrusion into all aspects of a person’s life and thus producing the clamor’s totalitarian flavor – and the snakepit of racial reparations. But it’s more than that. The rise of the hard left in the Party is apparent in the Party’s tolerance of socialism, with or without the modifier of “democratic” (AOC, The Squad, and Bernie), and the green socialism of The Green New Deal. Ideas once rejected out of hand in the Party’s leadership circles are now part of the coalition to be negotiated with.
Like COVID, these new risible ideological commitments were easily transmissible in the form of a green light from the Party’s elites to the base. Many Dems not already there, the more moderate core, were pulled like the gravity of a large planet further left. The rest may have kept their party affiliation but were no longer reliable, having been repelled by the Party’s leftward leap. Could this help explain 2016? Could be.
Interestingly, according to Iglesias, the beneficiaries of the new left-wing Party, the famous “other”, particularly “people of color”, don’t seem to be so enamored of this vision as Iglesias makes clear in his reading of a variety of social surveys. Here’s an opening for Trump and the Republicans.
This election is said by many to be a referendum on Trump. Yes, it is, but it is also a referendum on a new hard left Democratic Party. The question is, which referendum will win out? The first happenstance is only possible if the electorate is so ill-informed of the danger, or the Democrats’ succeed in their usual dirty tricks of stuffing the ballot boxes – or more accurately the mailboxes.
Now that possibility might produce a third option: a fraud election.
Please, be my guest, read the article.
RogerG
** Also on my Facebook page.