Youngkin has found the secret sauce for post-Trump Republicans (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The stunning defeat suffered by the Democrats in Virginia, a surprisingly close race in deep blue New Jersey and the defeat of a “police defunding measure” in Minneapolis represent a remarkable turning point in American politics. It is less an affirmation of a resurgent Trumpism than a rejection of what might be called Bidenism, an unnatural merger of traditional Democratic corporate politics with a radical, progressive agenda.
Appealing to what James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, has dubbed “faculty lounge politics” — with its emphasis on Critical Race Theory, racial quotas, transgenderism and defunding the police — has become an obvious flaw in their political strategy. These positions might prove popular in certain sections of the media, but not so much among the public.
The Virginia results made evident these failures, particularly on radical education and transgender policies. A state that was on the verge of becoming a deep blue bastion, largely based on the affluent Washington suburbs, moved to the Right in part due to resistance among parents to a new progressive education agenda that prioritised issues such as race, slavery and gender. State-wide polls taken just before the election showed Governor-elect Gregg Youngkin beat Democrat Terry McCauliffe by 15 points among parents.
Yet educational excess was not the only policy area that hurt the Democrats. Overall, the election was won in the Northern Virginia suburbs where the GOP reduced the large Trump deficit in half from 2020. Here, as across the state, the sagging economy and rampaging inflation will have dominated this election; exit polls show that taxes and economic worries were even larger factors than education, pushing voters towards Youngkin.
Not surprisingly the egomaniacal Trump and his minions will claim credit for the GOP gains — Republicans also won Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor race, the state Legislature and possibly the Attorney General — as their own. This is true in part, the Republican base in the state’s rural hinterlands overwhelmingly opted for Youngkin.
Some on the Right will no doubt view the elections an expression of “buyer remorse”, paving the way for a Trump restoration. Yet Trump, according to the national polls, remains barely more popular than the hapless Joe Biden, and would still likely lose Virginia. He would probably lose many of the affluent suburbs and, unlike Terry McCauliffe, would stimulate progressive voters and minorities to the polls.
In some sense Youngkin may have found the secret sauce for post-Trump Republicans — genuflect to Dr Demento, but don’t have him over for dinner, or brunch, or even in your state. While the Democrats focused on Trump — Biden cited Trump’s name 24 times during a campaign appearance on McAuliffe’s behalf last week — Youngkin sensibly zeroed in on the issues that matter most to your regular suburban family: public safety, schools and taxes. He realised that even moderate, liberal parents do not want racialism brought back into the schools, even if it’s introduced not by neo-Confederates, but impassioned social justice warriors.
His message helped him raise GOP shares, particularly among younger and middle aged voters, where Trump had been trounced in 2020, by double digits. He made a less impressive showing with minorities, who account for roughly a third of the state’s population, although he did win 30% more African-American votes — a key constituency in the former Confederate capital of Richmond in particular — than Trump. The GOP also was wise to nominate a former Marine and Jamaican immigrant, Winsome Sears, for Lieutenant Governor, who may have out-performed Youngkin in the race. Nominating and even electing racial minorities may be dismissed as “tokenism” by many, but ignores the fact that many minorities, and particularly immigrants, are more culturally conservative than the average American.
Yet Youngkin’s challenges, and those of the national GOP, remain enormous, including a national media which will follow and magnify every Gubernatorial misstep. His path to success could easily be thrown off-course by the extreme agenda of the Right, which too often matches in many ways the authoritarianism of the progressive Left. Texas, where the Right seeks to undermine local powers and is focused on issues such as abortion, could be a negative model in more centrist places like Virginia, and other bellwether states.
But these challenges are chopped liver compared to what the Democrats now face. Clearly the far-Left agenda is not popular even in safely blue areas. In a sharp reversal from early in the pandemic, the desire for more government has fallen to barely 40%, while support for the huge Green New Deal remains tepid at best. On Tuesday, Minneapolis overwhelmingly rejected a police defunding initiative and Eric Adams, a former cop and centrist-sounding Democrat, became Mayor, succeeding the unpopular Leftist Bill de Blasio while defeating his ideological heirs.
The problem the Democrats face is that the progressive agenda now increasingly dominates the party, with even the redoubtable Nancy Pelosi seeming to be led around by boisterously socialist members of the caucus. Along with their powerful allies in the public employee unions, they have tied Biden to a radical programme that would embrace CRT, undermine America’s still-large energy industry, support steps to densify the suburbs and turn against Israel. Suffice it to say that these are not winning positions in much of the country.
Increasingly, the progressives and Biden are increasingly desperate. They seem desperate to impose a radical agenda now, in part because they fear the country, which rejects many of their priorities, will destroy their tiny majority, itself a gift from Trump’s idiotic post-election behaviour, next year. Meanwhile, Biden’s assumed successor, Kamala Harris, has polled badly or worse than her boss.
Successful parties intuit when to shift Right or Left and focus on issues with wide appeal. But Biden seems intent on stumbling through his Presidency as he carries the agenda of those, like Senator Bernie Sanders, who opposed his nomination. McAuliffe may have run a bad campaign, but he also was a victim of the remarkable incompetence, and poor communications, coming from the White House.
If the Democrats are to succeed, what they need is an answer to GOP populism that does not focus on cultural issues. Rather than pin Donald Trump on his tail, they should have gone after Youngkin’s background as co-CEO of the ultra-connected private equity fund Carlyle group. Fundamentally, non-racial social democratic programs of expanding health care, an infrastructure programme focused on roads and bridges, a clear strategy to deal with China all could work to expand, not shrink, the party base.
But this is not the path they have chosen. They still hope that by reviving the Trumpian ghost, enough centrists will go their way. But this will never work: you can’t win the centre while clinging on to the least popular parts of the progressive agenda.
Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, the University of Texas at Austin.
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SubscribeBeing a child means every option is on the table.
That’s the joy of childhood.
Being an adult means having to make life choices based on your needs and wants tempered by your abilities.
You can’t have everything.
The David anecdote is a perfect example of transitioning from childhood dreams and expectations to hard adult choices.
David is now happy because he is satisfying his own personal priority list.
IMO, millenials, or whatever the current tag is for the younger generation, are really just suffering from stunted emotional growth.
I don’t blame them entirely because they’ve been lead to believe, mostly by doting parents and coffee bar communists, that not only can you have it all, the inability to tick every life goal box somehow represents a failure of the system.
You aren’t young and naive – you’re a victim. (I believe the neo-liberal corporate kleptocracy is the Voldemort du jour)
But don’t worry, we will rise up and fix it.
They aren’t victims.
They’re just not adults yet.
‘David, a youth campaigner in his twenties who moved to London after university to help found a new charity,’
Talk about a non-job. No sympathy whatsoever. Ah…upon reading further I see that David saw sense and got out of London. But we do not learn whether or not he left the non-jobbing behind.
Founding a charity seems quite impressive to me. Do please provide a list of real jobs that have your approval.
Law, accountancy, medicine, the armed services, the church, engineer, banker, plumber, electrician, fire brigade, police, sales & marketing, retail, manufacture, import & export, farming, university lecturer, university admin, gym instructor, sport, sport admin, archeologist, lab technician, actor, dancer, modelling, musician, grocer, delivery driver, haulier, shelf stacker … need I continue?
Thanks for your list of jobs. They’re all great in my eyes. It doesn’t really address my point though which was why the previous contributor was so dismissive of someone setting up a charity a ‘non-job’.
Not sure much has fundamentally changed- I graduated from a London University & started a professional training contract in 1979-for the first 5/6 years I lived in the outskirts of London in a room in a shared house whilst I run up a sizeable amount of debt.Eventually my earning increased but I was 30+ before I could buy a property and thatw as only because my employer lent me the deposit.
During a career in IT my Golden rule was never to look for a job inside the M25, no matter how much it paid. Although I occasionally had the misfortune to go into London for a meeting. In a lot of ways I’m an anywhere person but considered London to be a no-way-I’m-working-there place.
Is there anything smugger than those having left London for the Shires or small town life looking down in Millennials?
To paraphrase this nasty article: “Look at us and how clever and talented we are to have left the rat race. We have book clubs and artisan crafts and an excess of talent – and we don’t have coronavirus the way you city souls do. How dare Millennials be so arrogant as to sleep on sofas and commute long distances for no money.”
Should we all upsticks to the country and write columns for Unherd?
It seems to me everyday we find new ways to classify people, open verus closed, millenials versus genX, anywheres versus somewheres. In our ever finer dichotomy of society we are not valuing the individual, but resorting to a lazy and dishonest mental short-cut to classify them and dismiss them with all kinds of implied qualities (smart versus dumb, globalist versus bigoted, leavers versus remainers). We forget that individuals are infinitely more complex than these clever tags.
“The result, I argued last November, is a socially-liberal, economically aspirational graduate precariat, clinging to the big-city dream while scraping a hand-to-mouth existence in cramped, expensive shared housing.”
You’re talking about my kids. This middle-aged white conservative male thinks that millennials should go en masse to parks and, while scrupulously observing social distancing protocols, sunbathe to their hearts’ content, and tell any copidiots who harass them to keep their far king distance.
Not everyone is a nimby
Always lived in the shires as my family have for generations. Glad to say all my children do as well. Today I went to pick up my weekly supplies at the local farm shop. The whole yard was full of clearly London millenials on bikes all with those stupid helmets they wear. ignoring as they felt they had the right to all social distancing and yabbering away at each other. I live in an area where the richer ones have second homes ( or daddy does) . This puts the farm and the workers in peril and as the whole area is now under much more police surveillance puts the farmer himself under pressure he does not need. .
My small town does not want then here. Not now and not ever really.
No doubt your ‘small town’ is the beneficiary of far too generous farming subsidies? No doubt it also gleefully accepts the largesse handed out by ‘daddy’ and his pampered offspring?
Yet, both you and it remain chippy and envious. You should banish the green eyed goddess and count your blessings. The perpetual whining of the shires, most notably by such organisations as The Countryside Alliance is one of the most unattractive features of modern Britain and its chemically saturated landscape.
I think it’s s shame that a thought provoking article has elicited so many antagonistic responses. I don’t agree with everything in the article but the general thrust, identifying a clear and damaging societal split, is spot on. And I’d like to come to Boris Johnson’s defence regarding the author’s pooh-poohing of his aspirations for ‘levelling up’ the country. I think he’s referring to a general economic levelling up between our major population centres as much as between town and country but it strikes me he is on the same page as the author and deserves some credit for this ambition. Let’s hope he manages to turn it into a set of successful policies.
The English have long tended to celebrate the provincial and rural over the metropolitan. And smug metropolitan-hating parochialism and swaggering philistinism have long defined the shires, compelling many a bright young thing to escape to the big city. Some of those bright young things may return, as the provincial ‘somewhere’ is held up as a seedbed of community, meaning, the good life and authenticity against the emptiness and shallowness of city life. It is a persistent motif of a return-to-nature, back-to-basics counter culture, disenchanted with the excesses and false promises of liberal, urban civilisation. Yet can this somewhere be found in a hinterland, which is more a myth than reality? Is this ‘somewhere’ merely another car-dependent nowhere, an elevated suburbia of renovated cottages, identikit housing estates, out-or-town shopping centres, industrialised food production and farming, dingy towns, inadequate infrastructure, all repackaged by a bogus heritage culture and imported artisanal pretension? Life in the sticks may be an interesting counterpoint to frenetic, big city life, yet there needs to be some critical balance against London bashing and back-to-somewhere delusion and proselytising.
Yes, move to a small town, there’s no chance of finding small-minded, disapproving people who will never accept you as anything but a blow-in. And you won’t miss the bookshops, concerts, diverse restaurants, fashion choices and just being with other young people like yourself. It will be so easy to find a good music teacher etc. …..
why would you not be able to go to a concert just because you moved out of the city? fashion choices? everyone shops online so same choices unless you like weird clothes from Camden Market. Bookshops? Believe it or not people outside of cities also read as well, lots of towns have great independent bookshops. Same with food and believe it or not, there are young people outside of cities, shocking i know!
The best bit of moving out of London? Hell of a lot less crime, do i miss the high levels of crime and constant threat of danger? Not on your life! There is nothing trendy about the constant fear of someone pulling a knife on you, throwing acid in your face, stealing your phone/wallet/bike etc It is certainly no place to bring up a young child that is for sure.
Be trendy or be safe? No brainer for me really
I did just that; 40 years in London and finally got out. To deep rurality, but with a wonderful classical and modern music scene (and music teachers – starting right next door), lanes and barns full of artisans and creatives making all sorts of wonderful things, good food and much cheaper and less pretentious, and even bookshops. And publishers, writers, bookclubs… Amazing, there’s life out here, culture, creativity, and friendly people.