Jimmy Carter’s pollster Pat Cadell wrote a memo arguing that the party’s best bet was to capture the ballooning cohort of college-educated professionals emerging from the country’s transition to a post-industrial economy. Caddell called for the development of an agenda that catered to this cohort’s liberal cultural sensibilities and moderate economic views, one that eventually came to be known as neoliberalism.
I found this to be one of the most troubling parts of the article, because it implies that the powers-that-be in the Democratic party are willing to change what they stand for just to get into power; I always thought that you want to get into power to push through the policies that you believe to be best for the people and the country. This is not the same as realising that one policy is not popular and dropping that one, or slightly ameliorating another policy, if only temporarily until the people wise-up and realise the benefits of all your policies; if your policies change just to get a majority then you stand for nothing.
‘I found this to be one of the most troubling parts of the article, because it implies that the powers-that-be in the Democratic party are willing to change what they stand for just to get into power; I always thought that you want to get into power to push through the policies that you believe to be best for the people and the country’.
The economic rationalism of the neoliberals means exactly this. They do not stand for nothing. They stand for money and power as the only rational choices
You must be either joking or seriously naive.
The definition of the modern day democrat: “the powers-that-be in the Democratic party are willing to change what they stand for just to get into power;”
Viz: Lenin – “Socialism is not a political philosophy. It is a path to power.”
Last edited 1 year ago by nigel roberts
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Would be interesting to see how quickly and commonly the Hispanics come to the realisation that the Democrats they largely vote for, hold their class in contempt.
That may well be the biggest challenge for Democrats long term. The upper middle class voters will continue to virtue signal, Asian immigrants might continue to be turkeys voting for Christmas and support the party of affirmative action, blacks will still vote for the party of Jim Crow and slavery even if Democrat leaders grind down large black cities with poverty and crime….but Hispanics and white conservatives together are still the majority in the country.
Alright, I know this might shock some people, but most Hispanics in America are not illegals fresh over the border. Few of them are even coming from Mexico anymore. Most illegals are coming from places like El Salvador now. Some of them have been in the country for generations at this point and they have other concerns and problems to deal with. For more than a few of them, that even includes cracking down on illegal immigration. Oh and on a side note, I have yet to meet one who does not get pissed when being referred to as “Latinx”.
My point is that one of the biggest reasons that the Democrats are failing is that they treat Hispanics as one giant interchangeable group and their obsession with “social justice” and open borders has blinded them to how culturally and politically diverse of a group they really are.
It’s because the left treats ALL people as one giant interchangeable group. To the left, people are commodities and you deploy them as you would any other resource. There is no human connection or empathy.
Not the Left I grew up in, which had roots in Fabian socialism, Methodism, unionism and Irish Catholicism. It was always concerned that communities should be fostered and protected, and individuals allowed to live lives of dignity. Perhaps you’re confusing the social democratic Left of the west with the communism of the east.
No confusion. The mistake most people make is to think the Labour Party as founded in the early twentieth century was socialist. It wasn’t. It was actually based on Christianity, as your post implies, particularly Methodism and, latterly, Catholicism. However, people like the Fabians — who actually WERE socialists — attached themselves to the movement like parasites. When I use the word “socialist”, yes, I am thinking of the communism of the East. The thing you regard as socialism — which never had a proper name of its own — no longer exists. For all his blather and windbaggery, probably Neill Kinnock was the last representative of it. It was a bearable philosophy which had its points, but it wasn’t socialism.
I had this exact thought earlier today: that socialism without Christianity often tends to become parasitical.
Your comment puts me in mind of this quote by G. K. Chesterton:
“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
“The thing you regard as socialism — which never had a proper name of its own — no longer exists.” I think it does, though it doesn’t have a clear home. I didn’t refer to socialism, but ‘the left’ and ‘the social democratic left’. Though it isn’t well represented, organisationally, I think there are a lot of we social democrats around.
I agree that the left is baseless when it comes to human beings, in general, but they certainly select various groups of people to exploit from time to time when it is politically convenient. How else can you create oppressed groups and the oppressors?
Emre 0
1 year ago
Glimmers of sanity seem to be coming back to the American Left, this can only be a good thing. Just before this, I came across a bizarrely reasonable article in The Atlantic about ACLU having lost its way, that they’re ignoring their core causes.
This is a good article covering a complex topic that’s the emergence of neoliberalism despite steering mostly clear of hot-button cultural issues that came to represent the Democrats these days.
I’d argue the election to look at to understand Sanders’ potential would be the 2016 primaries against Clinton. This is because the Democratic political machine (with the rest of the establishment) went into a cultural issues overdrive following 2016 which gave us the “fiery but largely peaceful protests” that tore down American cities for weeks. You don’t often get the CEO of JP Morgan bending the knee on camera. This was meant to refocus politics away from the economic issues Sanders championed into cultural issues which were seen as vote winners (while avoiding socialism). Therefore 2020 election is an imperfect representation Sander’s potential soon after the whole liberal political apparatus turned against him.
It is easier for corporate types to be concerned about “social issues” than pay decent wages or improve working conditions The same goes for highly paid professionals; make the “right” noises on the” right” issues and let’s not even think about economic inequallies, thank-you. This is what this is all about, why the rich are so on-board with all this, why the young are encouraged in their nonsense, the elite keep their economic power. I don’t want to come acoss as a consipacy theorist, but I find this the only explanation that fits the facts that I have, I’ve tried giving them the benefit of doubt and assume that they are genuine believers but, if they are, then their “social conscience” seems to have very large holes in it.
I believe you are correct. It’s a classic case of the red herring.
Warren T
1 year ago
I think another factor is that as the professional class stays so busy, they have no time to think about and discuss what is happening on issues and simply receive sound bites from their long-time sources, which have made quantum moves to the left over the last 20 years.
How else can we explain why so many formerly reasonable people have become so intoxicated with far left propaganda?
I think it’s the opposite. The professional class are bored in their office jobs, all day long they are scrolling through Twitter feeds, reading Buzzfeed articles, and getting into online flamewars about the definition of “woman”. That way they have been radicalized. Meanwhile, working-class people whose jobs require them actually to work all day don’t have time for this nonsense.
In America the working man listens to the radio thru the day. The laptop class scroll thru their feeds and stream cable news at their desks. So they both get information and news but from different technologies and with different politics.
There is some truth to this, although I went the other way i.e. less progressive. During the pandemic the faculty at my college were forced to stay on-campus even though no face-to-face classes were being given. Except for grading papers, I had very little to do so ended up doom-scrolling through sites like Reddit and Quillette. I quit my job soon after. Sitting in my office all day doing nothing worth-while is worse than being unemployed.
ARNAUD ALMARIC
1 year ago
What a splendid caption photograph! It looks like the Biden Beast is about to start a brawl in a pub in Castlebar!
Typo alert: Democrats have forgotten their history, and now believe they are the party of the white woking class.
Andrew Horsman
1 year ago
“Liberal” professionals with bullpoop jobs that don’t add value drive the left towards increasingly absurd collectivist nonsense and away from compassionate liberal progressivism. Like bad money driving out good, they push working people with hard jobs that actually add real value in the real world (like fixing toilets or moving furniture) away from compassionate liberal progressivism and towards a reactionary conservatism that can be manipulated by the worst kinds of populist liars. This hardens the liberal professionals’ self-righteousness and licenses them to unleash hatred against their supposed enemies, who they demonise with any of a variety of labels (deplorables, anti-Vaxxers, racists, transphobes, whatever) whether or not they actually match reality. This reflects the liberals’ (very real fears) that the stories they tell themselves about how conscientious, altruistic, and healthy (in all senses of the word) they themselves are might well not be true. And they have no or little religious faith to give them stoicism, so they seek comfort in the soft soap of signalling their virtue by whatever faddish means is available. On the other side, the real world workers feel increasingly alienated from the mendacious, parasitic liberal, virtue-signalling professionals and irritated that many of the latter earn so much money, but many don’t feel resentful because life is too short and they’ve got kids to feed. But they don’t feel particularly inclined to vote for the politicians parroting inauthentic lies and affirm the liberals’ shaky beliefs about themselves and the world. Better to vote for the bigot who at least says what he thinks, and can crack a half decent joke even if he’s obviously a shallow charlatan. The centre collapses. In fact politics itself collapses into a cesspit because there is no longer an honest debate to be had between people with competing interests and worldviews, it’s just the exchange of lazy insults hurled within a paradigm that has detached itself from reality. Good, intelligent people with integrity from the left, right and centre have no incentive to wade into the cesspit; and those few left in it try separately to climb out of it.
The only thing that puts the whole sorry show to an end are the barbarians at the gate, ready to conquer and devour a society that has forgotten what it values and what it is good for.
Allison Barrows
1 year ago
“Execute the disabled … to mollify conservative white workers”. You’re obviously referring to Bill Clinton’s ordering the execution of Ricky Ray Rector (the link you provided is behind a paywall, but I remember the incident vividly). Clinton ordered the execution of that mentally disabled man (to the horror of most decent people) for the same reason he ordered the bombing of an African aspirin factory: to look tough and to distract from his sordid persona as the scheming lowlife he is. That single sentence made rest of this piece not even worth skimming.
Tom Krehbiel
1 year ago
Correction to what was said in the article: LBJ didn’t win two presidential elections with a majority. He only won one. He won the Vice-Presidency in 1960 with a plurality of the vote, won a landslide victory in 1964, and chose not to run for re-election in 1968. FDR was the last Democratic presidential nominee to win two consecutive majorities – indeed, four consecutive majorities – prior to Obama.
Last edited 1 year ago by Tom Krehbiel
Christopher Gage
1 year ago
The Democrats’ problem is one of 1990s narcissism and fantasy. Theirs is the politics of that hokum book, ‘The Secret.’
Just look at their fantasy of an ’emerging Democratic majority.’ Had they bothered to read past the hubris, they’d have found the ‘declining’ white population is more than covered by the rise in the White Hispanic and White Other population. Indeed, white America is going nowhere. By some (more sensible imo) definitions, America is actually whitening. Their racial obsession appeals to fewer and fewer Americans.
Throuple that with their embrace of oligarchy and the social colonialism that is Wokeness, and you have a broken elite and a deservedly doomed party.
Last edited 1 year ago by Christopher Gage
Will Cummings
1 year ago
Mr Thomas asserts that executing the disabled from time to time will “mollify conservative white workers”. This is a strong indication that there are no conservative white workers within his circle of acquaintance. Academic detachment is all very well, but before undertaking his analysis, Mr Thomas might have opted to mingle a bit with the deplorables before accepting the judgement of their deplorers as an axiom.
Douglas H
1 year ago
I love this line : “what else did he expect from the professional class? They always prefer to push the envelope on culture rather than pay a nickel more in taxes.” That nails it, unfortunately
Sounds just like the Labour party’s problems here in the UK!
same blueprints, proivided from the powers above.
Jimmy Carter’s pollster Pat Cadell wrote a memo arguing that the party’s best bet was to capture the ballooning cohort of college-educated professionals emerging from the country’s transition to a post-industrial economy. Caddell called for the development of an agenda that catered to this cohort’s liberal cultural sensibilities and moderate economic views, one that eventually came to be known as neoliberalism.
I found this to be one of the most troubling parts of the article, because it implies that the powers-that-be in the Democratic party are willing to change what they stand for just to get into power; I always thought that you want to get into power to push through the policies that you believe to be best for the people and the country. This is not the same as realising that one policy is not popular and dropping that one, or slightly ameliorating another policy, if only temporarily until the people wise-up and realise the benefits of all your policies; if your policies change just to get a majority then you stand for nothing.
‘I found this to be one of the most troubling parts of the article, because it implies that the powers-that-be in the Democratic party are willing to change what they stand for just to get into power; I always thought that you want to get into power to push through the policies that you believe to be best for the people and the country’.
The economic rationalism of the neoliberals means exactly this. They do not stand for nothing. They stand for money and power as the only rational choices
You must be either joking or seriously naive.
The definition of the modern day democrat: “the powers-that-be in the Democratic party are willing to change what they stand for just to get into power;”
A well-meaning cri-de-coeur but, sad to say, a perfect description of politics in the modern world – from Putin through Tony Blair to Boris Johnson.
Viz: Lenin – “Socialism is not a political philosophy. It is a path to power.”
Would be interesting to see how quickly and commonly the Hispanics come to the realisation that the Democrats they largely vote for, hold their class in contempt.
That may well be the biggest challenge for Democrats long term. The upper middle class voters will continue to virtue signal, Asian immigrants might continue to be turkeys voting for Christmas and support the party of affirmative action, blacks will still vote for the party of Jim Crow and slavery even if Democrat leaders grind down large black cities with poverty and crime….but Hispanics and white conservatives together are still the majority in the country.
Alright, I know this might shock some people, but most Hispanics in America are not illegals fresh over the border. Few of them are even coming from Mexico anymore. Most illegals are coming from places like El Salvador now. Some of them have been in the country for generations at this point and they have other concerns and problems to deal with. For more than a few of them, that even includes cracking down on illegal immigration. Oh and on a side note, I have yet to meet one who does not get pissed when being referred to as “Latinx”.
I think he’s referring to things like (social justice) discrimination against Asians such as in university admissions.
My point is that one of the biggest reasons that the Democrats are failing is that they treat Hispanics as one giant interchangeable group and their obsession with “social justice” and open borders has blinded them to how culturally and politically diverse of a group they really are.
It’s because the left treats ALL people as one giant interchangeable group. To the left, people are commodities and you deploy them as you would any other resource. There is no human connection or empathy.
Not the Left I grew up in, which had roots in Fabian socialism, Methodism, unionism and Irish Catholicism. It was always concerned that communities should be fostered and protected, and individuals allowed to live lives of dignity. Perhaps you’re confusing the social democratic Left of the west with the communism of the east.
No confusion. The mistake most people make is to think the Labour Party as founded in the early twentieth century was socialist. It wasn’t. It was actually based on Christianity, as your post implies, particularly Methodism and, latterly, Catholicism. However, people like the Fabians — who actually WERE socialists — attached themselves to the movement like parasites. When I use the word “socialist”, yes, I am thinking of the communism of the East. The thing you regard as socialism — which never had a proper name of its own — no longer exists. For all his blather and windbaggery, probably Neill Kinnock was the last representative of it. It was a bearable philosophy which had its points, but it wasn’t socialism.
Agree on Kinnock. Last time I voted Labour.
I had this exact thought earlier today: that socialism without Christianity often tends to become parasitical.
Your comment puts me in mind of this quote by G. K. Chesterton:
“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
“The thing you regard as socialism — which never had a proper name of its own — no longer exists.”
I think it does, though it doesn’t have a clear home. I didn’t refer to socialism, but ‘the left’ and ‘the social democratic left’. Though it isn’t well represented, organisationally, I think there are a lot of we social democrats around.
I agree that the left is baseless when it comes to human beings, in general, but they certainly select various groups of people to exploit from time to time when it is politically convenient. How else can you create oppressed groups and the oppressors?
Glimmers of sanity seem to be coming back to the American Left, this can only be a good thing. Just before this, I came across a bizarrely reasonable article in The Atlantic about ACLU having lost its way, that they’re ignoring their core causes.
This is a good article covering a complex topic that’s the emergence of neoliberalism despite steering mostly clear of hot-button cultural issues that came to represent the Democrats these days.
I’d argue the election to look at to understand Sanders’ potential would be the 2016 primaries against Clinton. This is because the Democratic political machine (with the rest of the establishment) went into a cultural issues overdrive following 2016 which gave us the “fiery but largely peaceful protests” that tore down American cities for weeks. You don’t often get the CEO of JP Morgan bending the knee on camera. This was meant to refocus politics away from the economic issues Sanders championed into cultural issues which were seen as vote winners (while avoiding socialism). Therefore 2020 election is an imperfect representation Sander’s potential soon after the whole liberal political apparatus turned against him.
It is easier for corporate types to be concerned about “social issues” than pay decent wages or improve working conditions The same goes for highly paid professionals; make the “right” noises on the” right” issues and let’s not even think about economic inequallies, thank-you. This is what this is all about, why the rich are so on-board with all this, why the young are encouraged in their nonsense, the elite keep their economic power. I don’t want to come acoss as a consipacy theorist, but I find this the only explanation that fits the facts that I have, I’ve tried giving them the benefit of doubt and assume that they are genuine believers but, if they are, then their “social conscience” seems to have very large holes in it.
I believe you are correct. It’s a classic case of the red herring.
I think another factor is that as the professional class stays so busy, they have no time to think about and discuss what is happening on issues and simply receive sound bites from their long-time sources, which have made quantum moves to the left over the last 20 years.
How else can we explain why so many formerly reasonable people have become so intoxicated with far left propaganda?
I think it’s the opposite. The professional class are bored in their office jobs, all day long they are scrolling through Twitter feeds, reading Buzzfeed articles, and getting into online flamewars about the definition of “woman”. That way they have been radicalized. Meanwhile, working-class people whose jobs require them actually to work all day don’t have time for this nonsense.
In America the working man listens to the radio thru the day. The laptop class scroll thru their feeds and stream cable news at their desks. So they both get information and news but from different technologies and with different politics.
There is some truth to this, although I went the other way i.e. less progressive. During the pandemic the faculty at my college were forced to stay on-campus even though no face-to-face classes were being given. Except for grading papers, I had very little to do so ended up doom-scrolling through sites like Reddit and Quillette. I quit my job soon after. Sitting in my office all day doing nothing worth-while is worse than being unemployed.
What a splendid caption photograph! It looks like the Biden Beast is about to start a brawl in a pub in Castlebar!
That’s a photo of him trying to hold in a fart.
I should have guessed! Thank you.
Typo alert: Democrats have forgotten their history, and now believe they are the party of the white woking class.
“Liberal” professionals with bullpoop jobs that don’t add value drive the left towards increasingly absurd collectivist nonsense and away from compassionate liberal progressivism. Like bad money driving out good, they push working people with hard jobs that actually add real value in the real world (like fixing toilets or moving furniture) away from compassionate liberal progressivism and towards a reactionary conservatism that can be manipulated by the worst kinds of populist liars. This hardens the liberal professionals’ self-righteousness and licenses them to unleash hatred against their supposed enemies, who they demonise with any of a variety of labels (deplorables, anti-Vaxxers, racists, transphobes, whatever) whether or not they actually match reality. This reflects the liberals’ (very real fears) that the stories they tell themselves about how conscientious, altruistic, and healthy (in all senses of the word) they themselves are might well not be true. And they have no or little religious faith to give them stoicism, so they seek comfort in the soft soap of signalling their virtue by whatever faddish means is available. On the other side, the real world workers feel increasingly alienated from the mendacious, parasitic liberal, virtue-signalling professionals and irritated that many of the latter earn so much money, but many don’t feel resentful because life is too short and they’ve got kids to feed. But they don’t feel particularly inclined to vote for the politicians parroting inauthentic lies and affirm the liberals’ shaky beliefs about themselves and the world. Better to vote for the bigot who at least says what he thinks, and can crack a half decent joke even if he’s obviously a shallow charlatan. The centre collapses. In fact politics itself collapses into a cesspit because there is no longer an honest debate to be had between people with competing interests and worldviews, it’s just the exchange of lazy insults hurled within a paradigm that has detached itself from reality. Good, intelligent people with integrity from the left, right and centre have no incentive to wade into the cesspit; and those few left in it try separately to climb out of it.
The only thing that puts the whole sorry show to an end are the barbarians at the gate, ready to conquer and devour a society that has forgotten what it values and what it is good for.
“Execute the disabled … to mollify conservative white workers”. You’re obviously referring to Bill Clinton’s ordering the execution of Ricky Ray Rector (the link you provided is behind a paywall, but I remember the incident vividly). Clinton ordered the execution of that mentally disabled man (to the horror of most decent people) for the same reason he ordered the bombing of an African aspirin factory: to look tough and to distract from his sordid persona as the scheming lowlife he is. That single sentence made rest of this piece not even worth skimming.
Correction to what was said in the article: LBJ didn’t win two presidential elections with a majority. He only won one. He won the Vice-Presidency in 1960 with a plurality of the vote, won a landslide victory in 1964, and chose not to run for re-election in 1968. FDR was the last Democratic presidential nominee to win two consecutive majorities – indeed, four consecutive majorities – prior to Obama.
The Democrats’ problem is one of 1990s narcissism and fantasy. Theirs is the politics of that hokum book, ‘The Secret.’
Just look at their fantasy of an ’emerging Democratic majority.’ Had they bothered to read past the hubris, they’d have found the ‘declining’ white population is more than covered by the rise in the White Hispanic and White Other population. Indeed, white America is going nowhere. By some (more sensible imo) definitions, America is actually whitening. Their racial obsession appeals to fewer and fewer Americans.
Throuple that with their embrace of oligarchy and the social colonialism that is Wokeness, and you have a broken elite and a deservedly doomed party.
Mr Thomas asserts that executing the disabled from time to time will “mollify conservative white workers”. This is a strong indication that there are no conservative white workers within his circle of acquaintance. Academic detachment is all very well, but before undertaking his analysis, Mr Thomas might have opted to mingle a bit with the deplorables before accepting the judgement of their deplorers as an axiom.
I love this line : “what else did he expect from the professional class? They always prefer to push the envelope on culture rather than pay a nickel more in taxes.” That nails it, unfortunately