The Worst Idea of the Decade
#47: It's Awards Season ...
Here, in handy clip-and-save form, are the 14 reasons why the “Coalition of the Ascendant” (a “left-leaning coalition centered on millennials, minorities, and socially liberal whites (especially college-educated and single women,” all “growing within the electorate, boosting Democrats”) is the worst idea of the decade:
It’s wrong. The ascendant failed to ascend.
It’s obnoxious. Those non-ascendant conservative rural losers are headed for history’s dustbin!
It’s wrong in part because it’s obnoxious. The non-ascendant could smell the contempt. They voted for Trump
It encouraged Dems to play identity politics. How else to get ascendant blocs to vote as blocs? Always Be Playing the Race Card.
It encouraged Democratic complacency. After all, victory—powered by all that demographic growth — was inevitable. “The Next America”!
In particular, it discouraged Dems from reaching out to outsiders or opponents. Who needs ‘em? No cause for rethinking. Certainly no need to listen to culturally backwards Republicans, who could be safely demonized as bigots etc. (which helps hold the mighty CofA together). …
It encouraged epic misjudgment. (I.e., RBG can wait to let Hilary replace her.)
It encouraged Dems to move left. The only question became who would win within the invincible coalition. Progressives easily convinced themselves that a majority of the new majority was within reach. Why not load up with as full an agenda as possible? UBI, transgender rights, CRT, defund the police. Ration health care by race? Doesn’t matter if doomed GOPs object. No border? No problem.
It treats the political evolution of society as basically set, which seems like a false, reified view: There’s an arc of history. It leads to "transformation.” What could go different? Or wrong?
It encourages an unearned moralism. The arc bends toward justice! Are you against justice? Turning every political issue into a remake of the Civil Rights Movement exacerbates problem #3.
Because of #2 and #10, it encourages social inequality (in the form of increasingly open liberal sneering at the un-college-educated white laboring class).
Because of #11 and #5 (identity politics) it in itself helps divide the nation — along racial lines, most obviously, and educated vs. uneducated, but also urban vs rural, sophisticated vs. deplorable,
Unlike Brit Michael Young, who coined the term “meritocracy” while presciently outlining the dark consequences, it encourages politicians to embrace the policies that help further all these divisions (free trade, free movement of immigrants into non-brainwork jobs, etc.) Why wouldn’t Democratic leaders want to accelerate the trends that were bringing them into permanent power?
It encourages an unhealthy obsession with process. After all "any accessible, fair and honest system will give the majority of votes to Democrats" by definition-right? Eventually: if they lose it must be rigged — Russia, Facebook, insufficient drop-boxes. Instead of talking about onshoring industrial jobs and expanding Medicare, speculate about Alfa Bank and expanding the definition of “misinformation.”
Know any other reasons? Send them in …
The theory that a large oppressed class will inevitably overwhelm its oppressors and seize power, led by an enlightened educated vanguard that will maintain absolute rule as it restructures society to cater to the formerly oppressed, is--shall we say--not exactly novel in leftist circles...
Perhaps this is implied among the first couple reasons listed, but to me there is a deeper, related reason this rhetorical and strategic tack is so wrong, beyond it being obnoxious or leading in part to alienated/backlash votes for Trump. You could be a fifteen year old white kid raised by a single parent living in a more rural area, trying to figure out how you’re going to afford community college, and, unless you march to the cultural left tune without missing a beat and celebrate all the people more worthy than you from birth - whether raised in highest-wealth zip codes or conferred deeper dignity and nobility by approved identity group membership, you’re trash. Bill Clinton, for all phoniness, all the neoliberal policy sellouts, would’ve told that kid, biting down earnestly on his lower lip: don’t you let anyone tell you you’re worth any less, that you belong any less, just because you grew up without two parents in your home. Clinton knew what that kind of upbringing was like, said something very much like that in 1992 Convention speech, and probably mostly meant it. I heard it and it meant something to me. The Obama re-elect was more like a young black woman raised by two professional parents in an comfortable suburb standing up and introducing herself to fellow activists by saying “my parents both always told me that as a young African American woman I’d need to work five times as hard and be five times as good as the next person”. Uh…no. And by the time, it’d already been a good ten years since every single Dem and activist left organization followed every single job ad with a litany of identity characteristics they most encouraged in applicants - white and male and straight was the only one never included. But there was likewise zero focus on class or actual lived hardship or any other marker of real diversity in background or experience, other than the litany of mostly immutable, inherited identity traits. The effective message that only the recipients of those preferred-identity-shoutouts counted, of course came at a time when much of “flyover” America and so many of the profoundly struggling residents of those NYT “highest misery index” counties - people and places that RFK and MLK and even Jesse Jackson in the 1980s were both decent and shrewd enough to care about, were in economic free-wall, becoming ever-more geographically isolated and sorted, and simultaneously becoming the butt of every joke and the acceptable scapegoat for every problem. It came at a time when drug addiction and social breakdown and deaths of despair - endemic feelings of hopelessness were soaring. I guess what I’m saying is that more than even obnoxious or alienating electorally, the CoTA was cruel and wrong and anathema to who and what the Democratic Party had always claimed to stand for.