Okay, that’s a bit compressed, but here’s the deal: Democrats are in just a bit of a tizzy following the 2024 presidential election results, worried in particular about the fall-off of support for Kamala versus Joe in 2020 among Hispanic men, black men, and the “working class” in general. Should we go left, as Bernie and the AOC are saying? Should we go “center”, as a lot of boring old farts savvy old pros are saying? Or should we GET SMART, like I’m saying?
Well, the good news is that the loss of Democratic support among both Hispanics and blacks suggests that these groups don’t feel that they are suffering from racial or ethnic discrimination; the bad news is that they feel they are suffering from foreigners. Why do people—black, white, or Hispanic—vote for a thug like Trump? Because they feel they need protection. It is a classic belief among the working class that there simply aren’t enough “good jobs” around for everyone, so we have to make sure that “we” get them and “they” don’t. Increasingly, Hispanics and blacks don’t see whites as “the enemy”. It’s those damn foreigners! Those damn immigrants and their damn imports! They’re the enemy!
I think “everyone” agrees that if the Biden administration had kept the lid on immigration as Trump did, and as the Obama administration did for its first six years, Harris would have had a good chance of winning, although inflation obviously would still have been a problem. But the Democrats started swinging left on a lot of issues during the last two years of Obama and continued to do so under Trump. When Biden won in 2020 and more or less broke even in 2022, the party was unwilling to make any “tough” decisions and in 2024 they paid the price.
This means that neither the Bernie/AOC fantasies of a New New Deal (again!) or the old fogie rap of strong families and patriotism are going to cut it, most of all because both these “populist” pitches make the same error as Trump—contrary to what they’re pushing, we don’t need to return to the “good old days” because these are the good new days!
I don’t expect this “news” to percolate through the thick skulls of my Democratic compatriots—whose “tensions” have been brought to a boil by the decision of Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to let House Democrats make the tough (for some) decision to vote against the latest Republican “keep the government open” bill and then decide “no, we’ll fold”—which was actually the correct decision, but letting his brothers and sisters in the other body take the fall for him, and for nothing, was about as inexcusable for a politician as it gets.1 So I “understand” if leftie “socialists” like the Notorious AOC want to rage—and will rage—but when the raging’s done, the facts will still be the facts, and here are the facts, courtesy of the good folks at Pew Research, who provide data comparing household for Americans in 2022 versus 1970 that shows, surprise, surprise, these are the good new days!
There is one, but only one, piece of bad news: the percentage of Americans in the “lower income bracket” has increased from 27 to 30 percent (using data assuming a three-person household). However, the “shrinking middle class” that you hear so much about is doing most of its shrinking because people are getting richer rather than poorer. In 2022, the percentage of Americans in the “upper income” bracket has risen from 11 to 19 percent, causing the percentage of middle class Americans to “shrink” from 61 to 51 percent—which, as I say, is largely good news!
But the real kicker is that the rest of the news is entirely good! (This is the “italics” edition of Literature R Us, in case you were wondering.) Real incomes, calculated in 2023 dollars, for all three “classes” have risen dramatically, to wit: lower income, up from $23,000 to $35,000; middle income, up from $66,000 to $106,000; upper income, up from $144,000 to $257,000. All of this, it may be noted, was accomplished while the nations of the world were struggling through the worst recession in almost 80 years and the worst epidemic in a hundred years. So what’s not to like? Well, it would be “nice” if the lower income folks, instead of getting 50% increase (over 52 years), got a 60% increase like the middle class folks, and it would be really “nice” if they got a 178% increase, like the folks at the top! Unfortunately, that’s just the start of our problems!
Back in the day, circa 2000, I noticed the development of what I thought of as “BMW” TV—shows like Sex and the City that “unironically” celebrated life at the top—whose marketability I attributed to the fact that there were now so many rich people in the U.S. that it was financially feasible to cater to them via mass market outlets that previously only targeted the actual “masses”—aka “Chevy TV”. Which, if it led to nothing more than, well, Sex and the City, would be fine. But it didn’t. It led to the creation, wherever the upper income folks gathered, to a rampant and powerful NIMPYism, stimulating the property values of the rich and stunting the incomes of everyone else, effectively trapping ordinary folks in the economically declining flyover states—both the industrial Midwest and rural areas all around the country—and leading to the sort of frustration that finds its outlet, largely, in “rage” directed at imports and immigrants, who are not at all the cause of the problem.
The left-wing populists in the Democratic Party like Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez talk of their devotion to “kitchen table issues”, but they don’t really mean it. When Bernie was first running for president, he wanted a total ban of fracking all across the country, despite the fact that “fracking” creates exactly the sort of highly paid,2 blue collar jobs that Bernie supposedly treasures, while also lowering energy costs, which stimulates economic growth. Similarly, one of Ocasio-Cortez’s most treasured memories is helping to shut down the “Canadian pipeline”—because who needs blue collar jobs and economic growth? What really counts is pretty scenery! Priorities that didn’t work out so well for the Biden administration. We don’t need to stop the bulldozers, kids! We need to start the bulldozers!
It is the lefties’ continued, unshakable devotion to “the environment”—aka “summer homes”—plus their “woke” need to prove their unselfishness by identifying with and championing the most “out” of outgroups—principally transexuals and reactionary, “anti-Zionist” Muslims,3 it seems—along with their continued devotion to the now self-refuting fraud of “critical race theory”,4 embraced to explain away the failure of liberal policies and programs to overcome the negative impacts of slavery on black Americans5—that guarantee liberals' failure to “speak” to a majority of American voters, not to mention their inability to solve America’s problems, as sadly evidenced by the disastrous failure of “everything bagel liberalism” in the two liberal mega-states, New York and California.
The clash between the old Democrats and the new has been brought to a boil by Sen. Schumer’s late-breaking decision to support the Republicans’ “emergency funding” measure. I think Schumer was right to support the measure, because in the past the party that “shut down” the government always took the heat, and I don’t see how, in a pissing match between Chuck “who’s he?” Schumer and Donald “El Jefe” Trump, the Democrats can prevail. But it looks as though Schumer just didn’t do nearly enough spade work to prepare/convince House Democrats that this was not the “Defy Trump” issue that they’d been looking for.
The Democrats split over Vietnam back in 1968. They were not a “presidential” party again until 1992, and even then the split between the Clintonian neolibs and the Teddy Kennedy paleolibs never healed. The AOC progressives are full of bad ideas and “rage”. The neolibs, like me, have no voice among the young, unless Gavin Newsom is capable of reinventing himself as a “moderate” rather than a “Californian”. So, kids, fasten your seatbelts and keep your powder—and your martinis—dry. It’s going to be a bumpy flight.
AFTERWORDS
Both libertarian economist Veronique de Rugy and liberal stalwart Paul Krugman6 explain why a “return” to manufacturing is a stupid idea.
SPECIAL SCHUMER UPDATE AFTERWORDS
When I was putting the finishing touches on this post, I read an interview in the New York Times with Sen. Schumer, which, except for his explanation of his decision to vote against shutting down the govenment (discussed in the second paragraph below), was as bland and uninformative as one might expect. Times interviewers rarely get “pushy”, especially with “important” people. Among other things, Schumer said that the Democratic Party was the “working class party.” But this simply isn’t true. The Democratic “staff”, in the offices of federal and state legislatures and in the party itself, and the party’s donors, whether small or large, are overwhelmingly either “upper middle class” or “upper class”—aka “the super rich”. The party does kowtow to union leaders, who are either heads of aging industrial unions seeking protection from imports or automation, or the heads of public sector unions—the teachers’ unions most of all—unions that do not advance a “working class” agenda at all. This isn’t surprising, really, because as the data from Pew Research shows, only 30 percent of the country’s population count as “lower income”, while the percentage that is “upper income” is growing in both numbers and wealth—and, thus, political clout.
Schumer defended his “controversial” decision to continue to fund the government rather than shutting it down, arguing—correctly, in my opinion—that Trump would have taken advantage of the shutdown to seize complete control of the government—“if Congress won’t do its job, I’ll do it for them”. I think, with Schumer, that there was very real chance that a shutdown would lead to outright dictatorial rule—no Congress at all and a supine federal court system that would simply enforce whatever decisions Trump and his minions handed down from on high. This time, the old guy got it right.
1. Perhaps Schumer thought that the Republicans in the House wouldn’t be able to pass the bill—but that seems unlikely. If he did think that, well, maybe he needs to retire, because congressional leaders are supposed to know how to “count”—know how a vote will turn out before it happens. There was a time when Democrats could rely on bad boy Republicans in the House to make a mess of things, but now there’s only one bad boy in the Republican Party. The rest are slaves.
2. Highly paid because the jobs require physical strength and can be dangerous.
3. I suppose reactionary transexual anti-Zionist Muslims would be perfect, but apparently they’re hard to find.
4. I discuss the few virtues and many faults of “CRT” here.
5. I have written about “race” many times, most recently in this post, “The Message” of Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Good, the bad, and the Disingenuous, which contains links to many previous pieces.
6. The Krugman link is a freebie. If you want the “long” version, you have to pay.
