Self-deception loses elections
The psychological turmoil under the Democratic loss
Greetings. Welcome to those new here, nice to have you. I don’t always write about politics, and this publication isn’t solely about that; I promise to switch gears after this.
Race is Trumped by class
The aspect of the election that has me transfixed is the sudden, stark relief of realignment along class lines. This is only possible because enough people of color rejected the cartoonish identities affluent, professional-class whites have projected onto them.
I wrote about the Democrats’ crisis of legitimacy a few months ago (linked at the bottom) due to their slippage in the percentage of votes from those people who appeared to be purely racially motivated - the ones we so easily put in buckets. But people of color tend to be socially conservative and contemptuous of those getting ahead at their expense. They want to climb like anyone else. They don’t share the concerns of elite black and brown creatives; there’s a diploma and class divide in every community.
They used these historically Democratic votes as an excuse to claim a monopoly on morality, which has finally broken. And I’m genuinely glad to see it break. No party that purely represents elites has the moral high ground. If the voters that party leaders derived legitimacy from don’t trust Democrats anymore, they don’t deserve power.
But, as my friend,
quipped, “Reflection is fascist" (go read her writing).I’m saddened by the functional demise of a party that brought much positive change to the country. It’s a damn shame but over fifty years in the making. The journey to the current version of the party began when Democrats took the morally correct step of ending segregation, allowing (less racist) immigration, and fostering economic mobility during the LBJ administration. Their support from black voters since has been used to excuse what has essentially been a class war. But Democrats, Inc. doesn’t deserve a blank check forever for something done sixty years ago.
Many black and brown people decided to break with their racialized voting blocs for rational reasons, the Civil Rights movement being a distant enough memory. We also cannot expect all people in the broad bucket of black (which includes immigrants from the Caribbean, South American, and African countries with divergent experiences from the descendants of American slaves) to behave as a singular voting bloc. Much like the rest of America, the definition of ‘black’ in its racial sense erases the origins and experiences of what is now as culturally a diverse group as those we see as ‘Asian’ or ‘Latino.’ We know the impact of this diversity in Florida, which is more representative of the country than most states, and trends rightward.
I still remember when Hillary Clinton uttered this absurd and maddening statement: “If we broke up the banks tomorrow, would that end racism?”
An insult to my intelligence that I had to swallow at the time in the name of ‘anti-racism.’ No more.
Looking in the mirror
I wrote recently about Democrats’ legitimacy being at stake as the party of people of color. We usually say ‘working class’ and ‘people of color’ in our conversations as though they are separate groups, but most of the latter are also working class. But, the below unrepresentative demographic thinks it has a monopoly on morality and controls the Democratic orientation on key issues. This chart doesn’t show the heavy influence of feminine modes of communication on this group’s behavior.
People with degrees are not workers but managers with different material interests. Think about the difference in experience between Wal-Mart’s hourly workers in stores and their salaried office workers. We, as managers, vote for our class-based interests like anyone else. This should be self-evident. Downwardly mobile millennials started seeing themselves as the 99%, somehow representative of the two-thirds of the country working in manual labor or service without a college degree.
But Democrats are the party of the wealthy, not the 99%—that was always a lie we told ourselves to feel less guilty. The problem isn’t just the 0.1% or even the 1%. Instead, the top 10%, the people in high-level white-collar jobs, deliver the desires of the capital owners. We are the problem. The language of Occupy Wall Street, obsessed with the top 1%, obscured this class war.
In his book We Have Never Been Woke,
named the liberal/leftist professional class ‘symbolic capitalists’ after sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s moniker for the French bourgeoisie.1 Symbolic capital can be academic, political, or cultural. We make a living through our communication skills and by producing purely virtual products.The masses came for us, symbolic capitalists (no longer downwardly mobile) and everything we hold dear. They want to tear us to shreds. It doesn’t have a moral valence; it just is. From the dawn of civilization, those without resources eventually came for those hoarding them—those doing the hoarding today self-regard as morally upstanding people who couldn’t be so nakedly self-interested. So, we don’t see the pitchforks coming or why they’re justified.
Our professed ideals are too dissonant with our actions, and the mirage was rightly punctured.
What do Democrat voters value?
I’ve been grumbling for years about how class matters more than race, and reality has finally confirmed this. I sensed this coming since Bernie reawakened my class warrior soul, which had been deadened by the nonsensical theories I learned as a graduate student (Foucault, Butler, etc.).
The only socially accepted form of prejudice that remains is class prejudice. According to this logic, those who don’t have economic security are to blame for their condition. Indeed, that’s what meritocracy is often used to do.
It matters not that Democrats have policies better for the working class; it’s that their attitudes and rhetoric cancel out the policies.
People without degrees have been invalidated repeatedly over the past decade, especially the past four years. Statistics have been thrown at them as though aggregate numbers reflect individual experience. This is amusing because there is nothing professional-class women want more than validation of every emotion, especially in contentious political discussions.
The tension this whole time has been that the Democratic Party doesn’t listen to or prioritize the working people it purports to represent and who lend it legitimacy. That refusal to listen translated into lost votes from every group other than the educated and affluent. Trump has a multiracial working-class coalition, and it feels gross to put those words on the page.
If election results so dramatically fly in the face of the Democrats’ self-image, how long can the facade remain whole?
If the Democratic Party were personified, she would be the arrogant, performatively nice girl who stabs people in the back to gain social status. She’s popular among the rich kids, who have their cliques. She doesn’t understand why anyone would reject her because she’s on the right side of history and is a fundamentally ‘good’ person. In the background, she destroys other female competition while maintaining this false identity. Reality cannot be so out of step with one’s sense of self.
There was a kerfuffle in 2020 between Warren and Sanders, with the former’s supporters gnashing their teeth over the latter’s campaign scripts correctly pointing out that Warren’s ‘base’ was disproportionately college-educated, white, and rich; only Harris beat her among the wealthy by winning the billionaire primary.
The need to see ourselves as ‘middle class’ determines our self-description but not our actions. The person pointing out the uncomfortable truth about the Democratic coalition becomes The Problem.
The incident with Sanders and Warren shows a psychological need for moral absolution: if we can win at least people of color, we can call ourselves good people. We don’t need to change or give anything up about our way of life to make it better for those with less. Because if we want to live our politics, symbolic capitalists would have to make material sacrifices and live less convenient lives.
Social justice language was never about anything but being at a tenuous peace with this contradiction between our professed values and everyday karma (meaning action; karma means simply this and not a facile concept of retribution for immoral behavior as it’s used in popular parlance).
Psychodrama of elite guilt
Self-delusion lays the ground for many harmful actions toward ourselves and others. We’re not morally upstanding or evil by birth but by action - a lesson from Indian philosophy that shaped me indelibly.
I, therefore, judge myself and others by the yardstick of lived principles and values.
Professed values aren’t always aligned with one’s actions. Many people conflate political beliefs and values and think values are static and asserted rather than revealed by one’s choices throughout life. The sturdiest pillar of the college-educated's self-delusion is racially determined morality.
The essential morality of the person of color can be seen as a post hoc justification for their longstanding alignment with the party. Without tangible results, symbolic capitalists diversified the elite and rhetorically gave people of color an exalted position but nothing materially. So, a multiracial working-class coalition finally rejected the symbolic capitalists, especially the elites who purport to share their racial identities but don’t share their material interests.
Whites who need their racialized worldview validated have a set of people of color from whom to derive authority, as do the anti-woke who have their own favored black and brown intellectuals.
This struggle that white people are in with each other is aptly called a ‘psychodrama’ - in which they attempt to absolve themselves of the guilt of acting in their material interest.2 Leftist identity ideology is the vehicle for absolution even as it permits the accumulation of wealth. The bottom 60% are responsible for their fates because they didn’t attend college. Symbolic capitalists absolve their guilt, and we brown people who uphold the ideology get to advance in our careers. This is the game I’m playing right now - advancement among the symbolic capitalists means fitting into their box for me. There is no dissent in polite company.3
Tips for the second Trump presidency
I’ve leaned heavily into volunteering and diversifying my social contexts this year. Find an organization that aligns with your values and give some of your time. How we engage in our communities is probably the only thing we have control over.
Secondly, if you’re a disaffected Democrat like me, stay strong and help your depressed friends understand why this happened (if they want to hear it). We must resist the urge to see Trump voters as evil.
That will make the impasse worse.
I do see far fewer histrionics this time around because several of us realized something is deeply wrong if our ‘natural’ consistencies are abandoning Democrats. We can only reflect on our collective behavior and ‘do the work’ in social justice terminology. These attitudes are why Democrats lost, not because any single politician ruined the party’s brand.
We cannot be kind, as evidenced by the dismissive and condescending reactions from many corners of my social life. Every woman who’s said such things thinks of herself as kind. But these people confuse ‘niceness,’ which denotes politeness and manners, with kindness, a virtue one must cultivate. It’s similar to conflating values with political preferences and social attitudes.
Kindness and niceness are different.4 Women around me imagine themselves as kind, but they’re actually hiding contempt without kindness. Cultivating kindness is a cultivation of virtue - exercising temperance in your emotions. This is what Dems need to do to win people back because we’ve chased them away by being assholes. And before you throw back a rejoinder in your head about how Trump voters are also assholes, consider how you might react if your kid said being an asshole was justified because some other kid was an asshole to him.
Thirdly, men are not our enemies. From where I’m standing, attitudes widespread among college-educated women have led to this moment, particularly our disdain for men. Plenty of men likely voted to enshrine abortion rights while also voting for Trump. The damage has been done federally; wringing our hands further will only make us miserable.
Fourth, please let’s talk to each other in good faith. The online tenor will always be pedestrian, but talking one-on-one is better. I’ve been afraid to push back against my distraught friends because they need to vent. Eventually, it has to give way to self-reflection, and many of us are well-placed to encourage it. Women of color (another ridiculous category but helpful shorthand, unfortunately) who are sick of this shit are essential in this process to help people understand why this happened and how to move forward.
Fifth, we should stop pathologizing people of color who voted for Trump. Part of the problem with the Democrats’ hegemonic ideology was that it created sacred victims who were imbued with moral superiority by their physical racial characteristics. When sacred victims don’t behave as the congregation expects, they turn on the victim and blame him or her for all the group’s ills. That happens today frighteningly often, and it’s gross because it resembles how colonial elites once saw their subjects as naive and childlike, unable to make the right decisions for themselves.
I refuse to be angry or upset. These last couple of weeks, I’ve been quite zen, focusing on my life and what I can control.
Finally, I encourage folks to explore philosophy if none of the above sounds appealing. Doing so not only helped me solve my depression but also taught me to think more deeply and better understand the thorny issues that shaped the election.
The philosopher king Marcus Aurelius advised:
Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.5
It’s up to us, mainly the losers, to live our professed values and make the public sphere a place of honest discourse rather than what passes for it today. Everyone saw that our actions and stated ideals were misaligned, and they rightly rejected us. Those yard signs have all sorts of principles Democratic voters claim to hold dear, and it’s time to align our actions.
Appendix A: How I’ve changed (according to an establishment liberal understanding of politics)
My political typology moved from progressive left (the richest and whitest end of the spectrum noted above) to ‘Ambivalent Right’, just to the right of center (‘Stressed Sideliners’). I’m curious now where my readers are politically.
Related posts
Musa Al-Garbhi; We Have Never Been Woke, 25-27.
For more information, read philosopher Liam Kofi Bright’s essay, “White Psychodrama.” He advocates for people of color to opt out entirely.
I don’t want to do this, but white managerial-class women control who advances and why. HR departments are overwhelmingly women, and we’re reaching a gender tipping point in the representation of women in upper management (white and Indian-American women, primarily).
Marcus Aurelius, trans. Gregory Hays; Meditations: A New Translation, epub loc 1033.
"Those who have abandoned God cling that much more firmly to the faith in morality."
Nietzsche described and intuited the Social Justice project (for lack of a better term) as another of the results and consequences of "the death of God"—how instead of collapsing into amoral nihilism, culture and politics would become even more centered around morality, esp for the moral priesthood and moral entrepreneurs in the intelligentsia.
I don't think there's any denying that there's an intense and punitive moralism at the base of our modern Left politics—moral policing around language (pronouns etc), moral contagion (everyone denounce the people who won't wear masks! suddenly instantly switched to everyone denounce white supremacy! as the herd shifted), moral pollution (cancellation, refusals to talk to certain people in case they are "normalized") and what used to be traditional political concerns and debates around govt policy transformed into an arena for moral exhibitionism—we must defund the police and open the borders and allow tent camps in public parks, all because criminals/migrants/the unhoused are sacred victims who all good people worship and adore.
I have friends and family all over the political spectrum, and my feeling is that maybe the main difference today bw liberals and conservatives is that conservatives usually get their religion elsewhere whereas for liberals, POLITICS IS THEIR RELIGION. Our "symbolic capitalist" class may see themselves as atheist materialists but they crave the sacred as much as anyone and Soc Just is their sacred project—a neo-communism where "marginalized identities" replace the proletariat, and who they lead to a new society based on "socialist liberation".
I don't think losing one election is going to change this. Left-moralism seems to be a permanent aspect of Western liberalism (it is sort of a permanent opposition and Church of Transgression centered in academia) and maybe the best we can hope for is that it transforms from something socially toxic (dividing us all by racial markers and oppression scores) and becomes something actually tangibly helpful.
Thanks!
Good luck getting anyone on Team D to acknowledge any of this.
If the educated are good at nothing else, they are good at manufacturing narratives that support their priors, aka "cognitive dissonance".