Divorcing the Democrats: hollow gestures & shallow morals
Credentialism, elite capture, and the rejection of truth; plus Substack live video
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I’ve always wanted to be part of a group, but haven’t been able to fit in despite my best efforts. Now, after thirty-five, I realize that I never will be, and I couldn’t have started writing without accepting this.
This is the story of how political belonging, once my compass, became a trap—and how I saw that class betrayal defines the modern Democratic Party.
At every stage of my life, Democrats’ refusal to stand up for the average person without fancy credentials thwarted me. The most offensive, however, is the disdainful and illiberal attitude of the average Democrat voter, which discourages the utterance of uncomfortable truths. This identity was dear, and its loss saddens me.
I. Youthful hope for class politics (2003-2007)
As a teenager, my political identity suddenly formed as a Democrat and liberal while the latter was still a dirty word. The Iraq War galvanized me and many other old millennials. I recall a chemistry teacher flagged me down in the hallway in tenth grade to share a leaflet about the abomination of it all. Teachers with advanced degrees indoctrinated me into the International Baccalaureate program to be a good Democrat. It was an early form of control I didn’t recognize.
I earnestly believed in the power of the social safety net and the possibility of climbing higher than my parents could. Many might recall that Dems officially ran away from ‘liberal’ throughout the Clinton and Bush administrations. They continued cutting the safety net during the Obama administration, indirectly, while hiding behind the Affordable Care Act. They reluctantly accepted the charge to at least defend it rhetorically because of Warren, Sanders, and other class-first Democrats.
Elected Democrats only came to accept ‘liberal’ during the Obama administration, and it’s now been muddied again because of social justice culture. What is a liberal today? Some say it defends classical liberalism like I try to do. Some say they’re defenders of capitalism. The word is empty. “Progressive” Democrat politics, or social justice, have swallowed liberalism as a concept.
Even as I started to feel part of this Democrat tribe, I knew I still was on the outside with many other unabashed liberals. Michael Moore was one of the few espousing class politics at the time. He came to Gainesville twice, when I was sixteen and twenty, filling the University of Florida’s basketball dome with a raucous crowd delighted by his zingers about Bush and Cheney. Standing in line with my parents and cheering with thousands every two minutes, I felt electrified.
It was the era of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Al Franken's bestsellers, which profoundly affected the tribe and me. Back then, Democrats were still obsessed with proving themselves to be more reasonable hawks than Republicans, but never questioned why their center-right stance in most areas might have lost two elections in a row. This was when they didn’t pander to college-educated women’s social justice hangups, only the military-industrial complex.
Sanders took up Moore’s populist brand, which culminated in repeated disappointment. Franken made it to the Senate before he was cynically defenestrated by female politicians who wanted him out of their way. He was a threat to Gillibrand’s career to be removed, the only lever an assassination of character, like women have evolved to do.1 Social justice is a cover for the bourgeoisie to suppress competition.
II. Hope and naïveté (2007-2010)
By 2008, I was a senior in college, and the economy was melting as my cohort entered the working world. I still remember when I realized something was wrong: I was in French class in the computer lab reading the New York Times story about Lehman Brothers collapsing, and our instructor chided us for browsing the web.
Occupy Wall Street was older millennials seething at being downwardly mobile despite having done everything right that Democratic elites had told us: we got degrees in hopes of being employed in the new knowledge economy.
After reading We Have Never Been Woke by Musa Al-Gharbi, I realized that OWS wasn’t a demand to address historical wealth inequality; elite millennial professional class aspirants sought to replace the people at the top. Elite overproduction occurs when a society produces more people with elite aspirations than jobs to absorb them.2
Corporate America is rigged to give outsize rewards to the already privileged through degree requirements that seldom inform the work being done. This is naked suppression of competition and elite capture. The upper middle class, the top twenty percent, is responsible.
My parents’ finances were in terrible shape because my mother had just suffered a stroke in 2007 and was still partially paralyzed. Before her stroke, we were dependent on her commissions from real estate. Right as her health deteriorated, our sole source of income dried up. At the same time, our house had a sinkhole requiring foundation work. The insurance money kept us afloat for a few months while my mother recovered, but they struggled for over ten years afterward because they don’t have degrees and have only ever had small food businesses.
Their credit was ruined after a car accident in 2003, followed by bankruptcy in 2011. I was the only one with access to credit. It was a microcosm of the situation for most people: credit froze and interest rates skyrocketed for everyone other than the top of the pyramid.
I maxed out my student loans, and my credit cards got us from 2008 to 2011. I mortgaged my life before entering the working world to save my family from destitution. I got a master’s in history partially to wait out the recession, like many elder millennials.
I dragged my mother to Jacksonville one day in the spring of 2008 for an Obama rally while he was still in the thick of it with Clinton. I decided, without deliberation, to vote for him in the primary because I didn’t trust Clinton, despite having identified as a feminist at the time; women who don't support women have a special place in hell. Obama being black allowed me permission to abandon Clinton without tarnishing my feminist credentials. Most importantly, he had a paternal, masculine presence that was comforting.
Like most peers, I fell into the same trap of seeing his charisma as substance. He was just so damn cool and handsome, and his rhetoric made me feel a part of something real. I bought his promises of the public option in particular. I had just lost my government-sponsored insurance from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for children with chronic illnesses (asthma) because I turned twenty-one.
Thankfully, my mother was on disability, so she had Medicare, and that covered my sister. Even beyond healthcare, my family also needed TANF and food stamps intermittently through my early life.
My family owes our achievement of the American dream to what little social safety net we have. I wouldn’t be here without TANF, Social Security Disability, public health insurance, Pell Grants, and lottery-funded state scholarships (I know, these are morally dubious). It is worth defending, though both Republicans and wealthy leftists (and most of the professional class are social justice aligned) are committed to tearing it down.
The defense of social safety net programs is tepidly done to preserve Democrats’ self-image as morally upright. At the same time, they capture the rewards at the top in their corporate jobs and hoard goods & services like housing, education, and healthcare.
III. False hope (2008-2015)
We all know how things went after the meltdown - Obama subsidized banks and mortgage lenders over helping regular people who would lose their houses. He gave away the public option without fighting for it, even as Pelosi ensured its inclusion in the House version of the Affordable Care Act.
He listened to serious people, over-credentialed elites like Summers, Bernanke, and Geithner, whose primary constituency was bankers, CEOs, and lobbyists. Ron Suskind shows how Obama outsourced the crucial decisions about the recovery to elite men who prioritized the health of the financial industry over that of human beings.3
These men are contemptuous, and Obama proved himself an ambitious climber whose elite origins were obscured by his handful of years as a community organizer.
My family got nothing in the immediate aftermath other than a stimulus check, once. I got nothing because my parents listed me as a dependent, though I was their only conduit for money and the only one with a job.
In 2013, right as the sequester happened, I had hoped to leave my dead-end job in a call center helping financial advisers at Merrill Lynch transact from retirement accounts.
I was a finalist for a prestigious program, the Presidential Management Fellowship, and was interviewing for government positions reserved for the cohort. I would have become ensconced in civil service and fulfilled my desire to do something good for the world, laughably so.
The jobs dried up in the wake of the sequester, and the few jobs open in federal agencies went to the most elite resumes. Mine had a call center and a degree from a state school. To be fair to Obama, there are no clean faults here, and it was in the aftermath of a debt ceiling crisis that forced a commission. However, the White House determined the specifics and slowed job market recovery.
Even when working-class people get degrees, they continue to face discrimination in the working world if they go to less prestigious colleges or state schools, despite the University of Florida having been considered a top public university. It was still public, so it was not elite.
Some in my fellowship cohort tried to fight for more of us to get jobs, but I didn’t bother after being rejected from the first five, including, depressingly, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created by my hero at the time, Elizabeth Warren.
I tried for the following decade to get a job in government or adjacent organizations but never succeeded, partly because I had no connections. The liberal NGO world is an elite and exclusive one. I am now grateful I failed when I interviewed for federal employment, the ACLU (finalist), or any other prestigious NGO jobs I was locked out of.
I didn’t know the right people, nor did I have an elite degree. It’s one of the several sectors elite college-educated women have entirely captured, and I now see it as a jobs program to absorb the excess elites we produce.
Only well-connected millennials who could live in expensive cities and make nothing were getting these scarce jobs at the time. The NGO industrial complex is not meritocratic. It’s a soft-power job placement system for elite women who disguise competition suppression as solidarity and credentialism as justice. Behind its equity language lies a machinery of exclusion—deliberate, aestheticized, and invisible.
IV. Woke Bernie bro (2015-2020)
After the disappointing Obama years, I thought there was a hope for class-first politics in 2015 with Sanders.
That history is so well-explored that I will not go deep here. It is less about Bernie himself and more about how college-educated people in general and women in particular smeared his supporters as unwashed. It was class discrimination wrapped up in concern for policy. A historic opportunity was squandered, and their candidate lost anyway.
His campaign had masculine energy in its insistence on clarity about who’s responsible for the malaise. His biggest sin was correctly identifying Clinton as a stooge of the financial industry, not because of misogyny, but because she was untrustworthy in comparison and refused to answer any substantive critique directly.
I still remember how it was seen as misogynistic among my mainstream Democrat peers to question her motives in giving speeches to Goldman Sachs, an obvious fallacy.
I once tried to get a group of women to debate about her ties to financial industry, and one immediate response was from a woman in the NGO industrial complex saying “I just want Bernie bros to stop sending me rape threats on Twitter.”
We were required to be credulous of Clinton or keep our mouths shut.
Scarcity was engineered. Warren didn’t run—not because she couldn’t, but because only one woman was allowed, and the party had already chosen. It’s the same tactic elite women use in corporate America: suppressing female competition while cloaking it in equity language. I’ve experienced it myself, repeatedly, as I moved from female-dominated to male-dominated fields. The more male-dominated the field, the more meritocratic it was. Hard truths, aren’t they?
People partly trust Trump despite his lies because they see him as authentic, and one need not tell the truth to be perceived thus. But even after Hillary lost, I recall sobbing the next day watching her concede in the purple suit. I put the Hamilton soundtrack and mixtape on repeat as a salve for the racism and misogyny I saw pervading society.
It was an easy explanation, and the brain latches onto them in times of crisis.
V. Post-tribal (2020-present)
Today, I’ve found that most of my professional class peers came from upper-middle-class and above backgrounds. This was a culture shock for me at my first elite corporate job at Google in 2014. I had to learn a new language to hope for social acceptance.
Mannerisms, tone, and linguistic register - code switching, but the difference is invisible. This code switching also applies, ironically perhaps, to my experience in the Indian diaspora, as most are wealthy and educated in the United States4.
Being a Democrat was based on my values naturally aligning with a faction that still had purchase in the party. I had naive hope that the party would preserve its commitment to workers regardless of credentials and income.
However, appealing to people on the other side of a class and culture chasm requires understanding their motivations and daily pressures. Someone raised in a household with two parents with degrees and white collar jobs will have a vastly different experience than someone like me. I didn’t understand how to behave in the bourgeois context.
The invisibility of class leads to a poor appreciation of one’s fellow citizens, and someone who may not have come from the educated class. The Democratic Party has systematically erased class politics in favor of symbolic gestures palatable to its credentialed donor base. We saw them double down on this in 2024, yielding the material to the MAGA movement. I squarely blame them for what happened, even as I look at the Trump show with horror. They once again suppressed competition for an empty pantsuit. Now that I’ve gotten close to the top of my field, I see women trying to stifle competition from other women.
I learned ultimately that adopting a group identity is an intellectual trap. The current party’s dedication to the symbolic over the material leaves many like me without a home. A child born in the bottom fifth is far less likely to climb to the top fifth than a child of the top quintile falling below his station at birth5.
There’s no incentive to listen to anyone on the inside born as an outsider by class. A great many Democrat voters would rather be comfortable and self-deceive than face hard truths about how they treat people. College-educated women, in particular, use invisible social control mechanisms to cut down their competition in the name of social justice and convince themselves and others of their virtue.
I hope for a realignment and emergence of class politics, but the influence of wealth and female social control in today’s party and voters is too strong to allow it. The conditions are ripe. This means the return of masculinity, and I plant my stake in the ground as one of its defenders.
This means defending men and the world's need for structure, order, and logic. Democrats have entirely abandoned logos to please their base, which is almost wholly driven by emotion and demonizes logic as white supremacy. I’ve written at length about how this rejection of logos prolonged my depression and encouraged fragility instead of resilience.
I no longer belong—and I no longer want to. I’ve traded tribal identity for clarity, which demands I name what others refuse: that groupthink, credentialism, and feminine-coded control have replaced material politics. I reject them all.
If this resonated, the highest compliment I can receive is sharing it with others.
Some of you asked for the recording of my first Substack Live. It started as an interview with
and ended—as usual—with a monologue on women, control, and competition. The video froze toward the end, so enjoy the abrupt exit. I haven’t watched it; I dislike watching and hearing myself.The high cost of class-climbing
Exploring the psychological toll of my journey from working class to professional class.
Campbell A. The evolutionary psychology of women's aggression. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2013 Oct 28;368(1631):20130078. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0078. PMID: 24167308; PMCID: PMC3826207.
Musa Al-Gharbi, We Were Never Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, 93-94.
Ron Suskind, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, 157-160.
Sanjoy Chakrabarty et al., The Other One Percent: Indians in America.
Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Kline, P., Saez, E., & Turner, N. (2014). Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility. American Economic Review, 104(5), 141–147. https://doi.org/10.1257/AER.104.5.141
Convincing ourselves of virtue… this is the biggest thing I see. Our local city council member in NYC just posted about the importance of having an “anti-capitalist” policy agenda… she represents Bushwick / Cypress Hills in Brooklyn (super far left). I chuckled to myself like, “what does it mean to have an anti capitalist policy agenda in our neighborhood?” As a small business owner who helps other people start small businesses of their own, I was kind of bewildered. I think we need more investment in the neighborhood. More money coming in. More people climbing the ladder… along with a bunch of practical things like less trash, good schools, safe streets, etc… But alas! The priority for our neighborhood is anti capitalism.
Once you understand that Team D is the political manifestation of the class consciousness of the PMC, with various grievance groups as junior partners, while Team R plays a similar role with regard to Local Gentry, with white evangelicals as sidekicks, everything they do makes total sense.
To give an example: when goodthink liberals say "Defund The Police!(R)" what they mean is "take money from the undeserving (blue-collar cops, mostly less educated and famously unwoke) and give to the deserving (white collar degreed social workers who can be counted on if nothing else to uphold up-to-the-minute standards of Political Correctness).