The Unsustainable Left

“Today, the Democratic Party may be the most ruthlessly organized and efficient political entity in the world,” the Wall Street Journal‘s Editor-at-Large Gerard Baker wrote. “We can denounce the activism and deplore the outcome, but we can only marvel at the political efficiency with which it has been achieved.”

The Democratic consolidation is the product of ideological, economic and cultural forces. The Left seized the commanding high ground of the entertainment industry and the educational system to cultivate generations that were culturally primed to accept its ideas.

The current state of affairs that Baker bemoans, in which Democrats have captured white college graduates and Republicans now hold the working class, were triumphs of culture over economic interest. The Left did not win a debate of ideas, it formed a tribe of elites. Behind the violence, the radicalism and the posturing are the daughters of CEOs and the Ivy League.

The Democrats became the party of elites. That elitism has been thinly disguised by an ideological identity politics coalition of white elites and minority activists.

Democrats as a party retain the rigidly organized machine that Baker describes as an “impressive willingness to band together” so that “in 2009 and 2010 many of them voted for ObamaCare well aware that it could cost them their political futures. Like kamikaze pilots cheerfully climbing up into their Zero fighters at dawn, they knew they had an obligation larger than their own survival, a duty that superseded their doubts.” That was because they knew that they owed their allegiance and their careers not to their voters, but to the movement.

Dissent has virtually vanished among the members of the party, and its allied organizations, including nonprofits and the media, but there are signs that the coalition is crumbling.

The Latino voters who were supposed to turn Texas and Florida blue have been acting like a swing constituency. In Florida, DeSantis even won the Puerto Rican vote that had been engineered to transform the state. In New York, Lee Zeldin’s close showing and the GOP’s House Majority was powered by Asian and Orthodox Jewish voters.

A New York Times article described how “Democrats are trying to determine how they can stem — and, if possible, reverse — the growing tide of Asian American voters drifting away from the party.”

The two policies that are alienating Asians, legalizing crime and dismantling educational standards, are championed by the black politicians who form the core of the Democrat minority bloc.

“Why should I support Democrats who discriminate against me? We see Democrats are working for the interest of African Americans and Latino communities against Asian communities,” one Asian voter told the paper.

State Senator John Liu, a career leftist, expressed the same idea cloaked in woke jargon. “Many of the social justice issues in this country are still viewed from a Black and white lens, and Asian Americans are simply undetected by that lens and therefore feel completely marginalized.”

The Democrats are even experiencing some turbulence among black male voters and gay voters who are, in small part, becoming more comfortable voting Republican.

Like the Asian and Orthodox Jewish vote in New York City, this has more to do with the inherent instability of the Democrat coalition than a newfound Republican genius for minority outreach.

The ‘rainbow coalition’ and the majority-minority vision for a takeover was built on denying the tensions between different groups. Intersectionality, meant to create a victimhood hierarchy, instead further alienated different members of the coalition with competing demands.

The coalition has become a house of cards that is always threatening to overturn.

When LGBTQ activists demand sexualized material in schools, Muslim activists protest at school board meetings. Black Lives Matter rioters demand an end to police and prisons, and Asian voters decamp. Transgender activists call gay men and lesbians transphobes and they head for the door. White woke elites demand lockdowns, Latinos shrug and vote them out.

A more accurate view of the Democrats is that they are rigidly organized at the top, but coming apart at the bottom. They have persevered by controlling the narrative, introducing distractions and juggling different demographics and causes to goose turnout their way.

But this game of political Jenga can’t last forever. A simultaneous defection by two minority groups in the wrong areas of the country or by one group and white college voters would be systemically devastating to the viability of the Democrats as a national political party.

The Moneyball dictatorship backed by Big Data, ballot harvesting, media propaganda and innumerable other tactics is a highly sophisticated operation that has so thoroughly corrupted the electoral system into an oligarchy that it has become indistinguishable from a tyranny.

Every effort is made to prevent voters from understanding that. And the vast majority don’t have an inkling as to how the machine works. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not increasingly aware that the Democrats have become the party of wealthy and powerful elites.

The white working class was the first to realize it. The machine blamed their defection on racism using Obama as its human shield. But the most salient fact about Obama was not that he was black, it was that he was the child of wealthy radicals whose worldview had been shaped, despite his memoirs, by his time in the Ivy League and the institutional elite Left. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, fellow members of that same set, have been met with shrugs by the country.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Instead of reclaiming the white working class, his original function on the Obama ticket, Joe Biden has overseen the growing gap between the elites and the working class. His signature policies like electric car subsidies or student loan debt dismissal pander to the Obama class.

Worse still, the party suffered record Latino and Asian defections as it focused on black voters.

“Ruthless organization” and the ideological consolidation that governs the Democrats has its limits. The Left got this far because it understood that the objective of the battles was to win a war. Now it is taking pride in surviving battles even as its ability to win the war is coming into question. The growing alienation of minorities may have had only a limited impact in 2020 and 2020, but it’s an existential threat to the long-term survival of the Democratic Party.

If this were the result of a Republican strategy, then the Democrats could counter it, but Republican outreach to minorities, outside of New York, Florida and Texas has been weak. The general state of minority outreach lacks resources, organization on the ground and sustained commitment, while communicating to minority voters in the crudest possible cliches.

The real problem is that the Democrat coalition carries the seeds of its own destruction.

The rigid ideological consolidation at the top has paved the way for a radical agenda that may seem logically streamlined on Capitol Hill, CNN or at the Aspen Institute, but looks like an endless civil war down at the bottom. And what Democrats are discovering is that most minority voters, unlike black people and secular Jews, are not especially committed to them.

They aren’t yellow dog Democrats. They vote that way for transactional reasons.

The majority-minority strategy is built on the myth that members of minority groups identify as Democrats on a cultural level. The evidence is ample that the majority of them do not.

The cultural cult that has usurped a historic national party boasts mostly white upper class members. These are the same people who can decide to deplatform you, cut up your credit cards or fire you, but they still wield far less power than those of most oligarchies. In their echo chambers, they have overestimated their strengths and ignored their systemic weaknesses.

And that has always been true of the Left.

Like all radical ideologies, the Left is unsustainable. It has a great aptitude for developing belief systems, spreading ideas, converting new members, seizing power and maximizing control. All of that is well underway in America. But its great strength of ideological convictions is also its fatal flaw. Like most fanatics, it cannot believe anything other than that it is destined to win because it is on the right side of history. It does not understand that power, no matter how it is monopolized and guarded, is ultimately cyclical and that people eventually tire of their rulers.

Even if the Republicans never defeat the Democrats, the Left is paving the way for its defeat.