Taking back the Democratic party from the bullies

They don't have the moral high ground, are an extreme minority, and we can defeat them.

Jun 09, 2024

If you’re new here, welcome! You can read more about my raison d’être here. To others: I’ve been absent for a bit because I was participating in my first writing workshop, but I’m resuming and shifting to other topics. Essays may be sporadic, but I don’t believe in churning content for its own sake. Please take the survey so I can better direct my work. Reasoned critiques are always welcome!

Reader Survey

i. An immigrant at odds with orthodoxy

I’ve been trying to understand the views of everyone I come across these days, especially strangers. My Lyft driver from O’Hare to my hotel last week was a Colombian immigrant, Jose, who has been in the U.S. for almost a quarter century and has a green card. He cannot vote and only reluctantly told me it would be Trump if he could. The reasoning was sound and material, which should be unsurprising. But his being an immigrant from a country vaguely to the south of the Texas/Mexico border makes him ‘Latino’ and/or ‘Hispanic.’ He doesn’t see himself as falling into either arbitrary census category but as Colombian. Not Colombian-American. We forget that these categories have been imposed from on high by administrative elites when we speak about ‘racial’ groups as voting blocs.

Jose said his life was far better in the U.S. than in Colombia. He brought up immigration without prompt, noting that Chicago had been inundated with recent arrivals that had strained its public resources. He felt it unfair that he had to wait in line to come here legally while the recent people were being given lodging and insurance upon arrival (not a thing before this wave). He thought allowing anyone to enter the country without knowing their criminal background was unreasonable. This was a man who had no sense of being in racially-based solidarity with ‘Latinos’ just because they both happened to come to the same continent and spoke the same colonially imposed language, which is what college-educated Democrats imagine their ‘voters of color’ feel. There was no talk of white supremacy or of race at all. Black people in Chicago are similarly angry about their closed schools being used to house migrants and city resources being endless for the latter, while the former are told that there’s never enough to meet their needs.

Source: Pew Research, “**Latinos’ Views on the Migrant Situation at the U.S.-Mexico Border,” March 2024.**

Many Latinos might see themselves as white (‘white Hispanic,’ as in the census), because categories of race in the Caribbean and across South American countries work differently. Theirs are based on colorism rather than some innate sense of being of the same region, an undifferentiated mass of brown as Americans see them. Using race as a proxy for voting behavior has allowed an entire intellectual apparatus to take over the party, which ascribes race to every behavior, belief, and disparity. It should go without saying that immigrant groups from every continent see themselves foremost in terms of their country of origin, not in terms of racial groups. This is one of the most consequential mistakes made by the party's left flank.

Jose saw Trump as a better steward of the economy. While I disagree, I can appreciate his view. Inflation is unfairly blamed entirely on Biden. The correction for it hurt, too, so the overall economic mood shouldn’t be surprising. And yet, the polls are denied that show Biden bleeding Black and Latino people in battleground states. People’s experience of the economy is not based on abstract concepts like GDP or the stock market. Unemployment numbers don’t tell the real story on the ground, either, of people toiling away at two or three jobs to survive. Professional Democrats misunderstand the interests of their educated and salaried base as the interests of those earning an hourly wage.

By the new left’s logic, that makes the Black, Latino, and Asian defectors misogynistic at the very least, if not self-hating. But, of course, this assumes that people are motivated by the interests of their supposed racial group and that they identify as having a race in the white American sense in the first place. Ironically, in seeing themselves as white, white people have racialized everyone beyond where we were before Robin DiAngelo and BLM came along.

The furthest left group is the whitest, most affluent, and the highest educated and represents a laughably small fraction of the voting public. However, they have an outsized influence because they make up non-profits, politics, and media, which political analysts Ruy Teixeira and John Judis have called the ‘shadow party’ of the Democrats. The organizations of the shadow party are primarily female-dominated, and they are nonprofits and think tanks. These institutions are captured by elites, and as the philosopher Olúfémi Táíwò has noted, this has led to massive distortions of what a political project should be and has centered their preferences, even as this group claims to want a just society.

…instead of thinking about the class politics of racial studies, one could describe the race politics of class activism, where we might find that whites (racial elites) tend to capture the decision-making process of socialist organizations, labor unions, and the like.1

Source: Pew Research Center, “Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology,” November 2021

ii. Race and gender-based politics is a bourgeois class project

Race and gender identity politics are the new false consciousness of the educated class. This is not only because the ideology has taken on a religious valence but also because it disallows the formation of a majority that wins elections. Unlike what the white left thinks, people of color are not in some multicultural, progressive coalition against racial injustice. Every group either dislikes or is distrustful of all the other groups; indeed, Indians are some of the most prejudiced people you’ll ever meet. This coalition of ‘people of color’ exists in the imaginations of academics and the chattering class. Focusing on race, therefore, pits groups against each other even as white people imagine some multicultural utopia is being formed. There is no shared national identity; the idea of a class-based political project was abandoned in the 60s with the cultural turn. We need a shared identity if we are to, you know, make progress toward a more just society. It can’t be based on race and gender.

People without degrees don’t have racial identities the way college-educated people imagine and discuss in our conversations among ourselves. To see themselves as racial beings, they’d have to go through that formative experience of the bourgeoisie, college, in which they are assigned a racial identity and then programmed to identify as such. I went through such a consciousness shift in college when I realized I was Indian-American in terms of American notions of racial identity and South Asian American in terms of politics (because ‘Indian-American’ is exclusionary of Muslims). If I dissect it, I can’t fathom why I saw value in these labels. Perhaps it was because college is a default bourgeois experience, so you grab onto the thing everyone can see. The performance is for yourself and white people only.

Race and gender distracted me from my political commitments in deference to the wishes of women around me. College-educated people of color have also pushed this at the expense of class solidarity because being seen as oppressed is socially beneficial, especially among women. The most empowering step I took against this narcissistic feminine culture was to seize my agency at the expense of social capital I had accrued as a ‘woman of color.’

Nathalie Martinek PhD

does much work on this topic.

People of color with degrees are surrounded mainly by educated white people who have come to impose an ideology that is not in the interest of most disadvantaged groups but does further a class project that’s obscured by immutable (race) identity politics. It also makes us feel good because we are given elite status contingent on not questioning the class project. They made even gender mutable so they would have a locus of oppression to reach for themselves. White people disallowed themselves to be white without guilt, so gender is the following logical identity with which to claim victim status.

White leftists and liberals tend to see Black and Latino people in terms of race first and only white working-class people in terms of class. This is amusing because white leftist women have also spent a lot of time making sure they themselves feel their whiteness through DEI training, which is counterproductive. But non-degree holders are the only white people with a class; the liberal elite itself doesn’t have a class because our identities are based on our professions and degrees. The white working class doesn’t have careers, and their work is undignified, so they have no professional identity in the minds of the affluent or any dignity.

Thus, people like me are first members of the managerial class and the bourgeoisie second because of the guilt involved in recognizing one’s affluence. All that can be done is deny one has a class at all to escape the guilt. It’s why we never discuss money and still consider it crass. To discuss money would be to admit others have less and that disparities exist, and to accept that would be to acknowledge that the focus on race over class might be incorrect. It’s why we call rich people ‘high net worth individuals’; the word ‘rich’ is gauche. We’re obsessed with disparities that appear to be caused by racism when the most obvious source is money. It is the one thing we need to survive in this country with a frayed social safety net, and it’s the one thing we don’t discuss with each other even as we try to one-up our friends. Money does buy happiness, speaking from experience.

The erasure of class is essential if this faction is to maintain power, so they must deny their class project. This class project prevents us from reducing our advantages to help enable the social mobility of the bottom 50%. The economist Richard D. Kahlenberg showed this tendency in his book Excluded by examining the effects of liberals resisting the reformation of zoning laws to maintain their property values, thus harming the very people they claim to want to help. It makes my blood boil.

This holy trinity (class, race, gender) of social analysis requires prioritization, and class must come first. Academics have privileged race and gender since the cultural turn of the 60s, which has seeped into society such that a mass political movement cannot be built. The lines of race and gender create too fragmented of a society to form a majority, and maybe that’s the point. Barbara Ehrenreich has masterfully painted a picture of twentieth-century bourgeois anxieties in Fear of Falling, an essential reading for anyone who sees this erasure of class.

This denial of class position as a driver of inequality, even while professing to want equality, has led to an internal psychodrama among the liberal white elite. The philosopher Liam Kofi Bright has observed that this results from the contradiction of desired versus actual conditions around us. This dissonance leads them to repent about their role in the massive disparities and assign the wrong causal forces to them - race, gender, and sexuality. I quote him frequently because his essay has great explanatory power for the cultural moment.

One cannot reconcile oneself to this society because it constantly pulls in two directions - it presents one with an ideological narrative that speaks of equality and a material structure that witnesses rank inequality. At some level this society just does not make sense to itself, its ideology out of whack with the plain facts of its existence. Some are tempted to focus only on the positives and see in this a story of triumphant progress towards racial justice or a post-racial future. And some are inclined to see in it a story of eternal recurrence, racism ever reinventing itself. However, both of these perspectives are too tidy to capture the phenomenon. This story is of a world and a nation in contradiction with itself.2

iii. The false premise: Democrats are the natural party of the working class and people of color

It is conventional wisdom that people of color must naturally align with the party because Democrats are the party of the New Deal, the cultural left (forget the economic left), civil rights, and the working class. But when your ‘natural’ voters start to turn against you, the level of cognitive dissonance is so great that I can’t blame people for not wanting to discuss it. Professional-class Democrats seem to be fine with their contempt for the working class as long as it was assumed the plurality of working-class Black and Latino people would still vote for the party. People of color are seen first in terms of race. However, the implied class position of people of color is what grants Democrats the legitimacy of still being the party of the working class despite losing the most significant chunk of them repeatedly. The conception of the white working class is the opposite.

But if people of color and most of the working class bleed, the party's claim to be the party of racial or economic justice is shattered. Thus, it can no longer extort our votes by appealing to morality. Perhaps one mode of liberation from the political binary is to cease assigning moral weight to the choice.

My own supposed side insists that the ethical choice is Biden because Trump will, of course, destroy democracy. But plenty of arguments can be made about elite Democrats suppressing democratic principles like freedom of speech and equal protection under the law (for their disfavored groups like Asian Americans). In that case, we have a choice of which is the least shitty, but still, this is driven by the desire to make the ethically upstanding choice. There isn’t one. We would do well to stop imbuing politics with morality so we can vote without being extorted like many of us are today. If we want them to change, it’s illogical to continue bending to the illiberal demand for fealty cycle after cycle without demanding something. I’ve had a hard time breaking out of this myself.

A permanent majority is impossible.

Since the early aughts, white Democrats of the professional variety have assumed the party will have a permanent majority because of the coalition of college graduates and the multiracial working class (including a chunk of white people). This morphed into the false notion that they’d be able to do without the white working class, who are considered morally bankrupt and against democracy. This conceit is how we got Trump and why we’re in danger of him retaking power.

The notion of a permanent majority has proven laughable as Democrats appear to be bleeding Black and Latino voters such that I question the party’s claim to being the one for advancing justice for people of color.3 The authors of the original theory emphasized that Democrats must get a majority of the white working class. Still, this latter group came to be considered expendable by the party elites. As a result, those authors recently released a book lamenting the authoritarian left’s extreme social positions driving away working-class people of all races.

If Democrats don’t get a plurality because they bled working-class people of all races, they can’t claim to speak for the undistinguished mass of people with melanin and/or the foreign-born, not with the confidence they do today. The rhetoric doesn’t match the reality of the coalition, so when will we stop pretending it does? Suppose the small minority of progressive white people (women) who dominate the rhetoric repel even people of color. In that case, they cede the moral high ground and have no basis on which to extort the votes of people who hold their noses year after year to vote for the lesser of two evils. We don’t have to vote for someone just because someone called us racist.

iv. The reality: the left doesn’t have the moral high ground

By their illogical paradigm, white people have been centering themselves and standing in the way of racial justice by imposing the most extreme views of race on the rest of us who lean Democratic. The leftists say that white people should step back and let people of color lead them. Well, here they are, the most minor faction of the Democratic Party’s voters, dictating our priorities and repeatedly showing themselves to be far to the left of the median person of color and working-class person.

Forget the latter; the former alone disqualifies them from setting the party’s agenda if they were to decenter themselves truly. We homeless liberals have no reason to bend if their position contradicts their stated beliefs, and we have to call their bluff, which bullies never expect. The majority doesn’t subscribe to this faction’s extreme social positions. Still, the faction will not cede their power because they see themselves on the right side of history - moral certitude is a potent drug. They’re too busy fulfilling their narcissistic need to be morally superior by guilting and screaming at people who think for themselves.

When I came of political age, Democrats were my natural party because they were against foreign wars and for a stronger welfare state. But they didn’t deliver during Obama’s presidency. Still, I will vote for the party that didn’t jail a single banker responsible for a massive upward transfer of wealth or do anything to help regular people. I do this because Biden moved to the left on economic policy and because Lina Khan is the chair of the FTC.

v. Class first politics as justice

To truly represent working-class people, the party must become more hospitable to social conservatives who favor redistribution - these people have the proper political inclination to support a robust social safety net, a group with which a majority can be built. A striking example of social attitudes of most of the voters being at odds with white people is illustrated by people of color, particularly Blacks, being far more conservative than anyone else regarding gender identity. Bernie was so successful because there was a hunger to punish elites for abandoning the working class and transferring wealth upward during the Obama administration. The people they detest voted for Trump, Stein, and Bernie, but many also voted for Obama. Many didn’t vote because this crowd might not have had a party affiliation in the first place. The narrative that working-class white people are all racist has been thoroughly debunked. Still, it persists because it’s easy to understand and gives Democratic voters a sense of in-group pride for being against racism.

This tension between social conservatism on the one hand and liberalism on the other is revealed by the steady shift of people of color away from Democratic orthodoxy in the past decade, even Asian Americans. In my state, I’ve watched Latinos become increasingly Republican, even near the border. This may seem paradoxical, but it makes perfect sense when viewed through the lens of class politics. Many Latinos don’t see themselves as brown, and neither are they automatically in support of unfettered immigration, primarily because it affects their communities the most in terms of economics and culture, straining already limited resources and creating an opening for the owners of capital to drive down wages and working conditions.

A caveat: I agree with Freddie DeBoer’s argument that Republicans are worse for the working class, but I can’t square it with how wrong the other side has been for the working class in its rejection of class politics writ large. If working-class people feel that Democrats have affected their self-esteem and dignity in their work, I cannot blame them for wanting radical change, even as I will do the thing in November. I can hold two thoughts in my head.

Class-first politics and earning back the trust of the working class of all races is the only path to an actual majority, which means we must stop thinking of conservatives as immoral people. Letting people we think are terrible into our tent can seem impossible, but I argue, in the vein of Marcus Aurelius, that no one is evil, merely ignorant. Of course, we’re often clueless and capable of acting immorally, regardless of who we vote for. Personal morality should be detached from political decisions.

Many people think doing whatever they want is an ethically sound decision at any given moment, especially the college-educated women who drive the party’s priorities. Their position is an amoral one. In particular, we need to wrest control back from the most leftist of women who vote for Democrats; they, and what I once was, are the problem with their marked unwillingness to compromise on social issues or even have a good-faith argument.

I think the illiberal left has fallen into the trap of seeing themselves as essentially good because they are in favor of creating a more just society, as though everyone else on their side of the spectrum isn’t, such as the heterodox liberals. Anything not in agreement with the identity left is right-wing, and we’ve let them win in casting everything in a political binary.

But in the name of that justice, they are helping to poison the body politic along with the far right’s extremism. This extremism must be defeated on both sides, but it can only be done from within. Criticism of the other side only leads to their doubling down, which is why the heterodox liberal movement is so fervently anti-leftist instead of focusing on Trump like many leftists want them to do instead. The result is heterodox writers are wrongly considered the New Right.

I want to save my party from this illiberal faction, and it is worth saving. I suspect my audience is more likely to agree than disagree with me because most people don’t seek out arguments contrary to their opinions. If this is true, I speak to every disaffected liberal who tends to vote for Democrats. I am optimistic about creating a better society, but we must defeat the illiberal left rhetorically and politically. Small steps can help, such as getting involved at the local level, where illiberalism tends to slowly seep in under the radar in bodies like school boards and city councils.

vi. A call to action for disaffected liberals

The argument is usually that the Republicans are worse, and I agree with this while holding the other thought in my head. But it frankly doesn’t matter that Republicans turned around and gave rich people a tax cut because they don’t claim to be anything else; Democrats have claimed to be the party of the regular person for the past century, and we have a right to be angry when they don’t deliver, regardless of what the other party does. To keep deflecting to how Republicans are worse is another fallacious argument white and educated leftists love deploying to keep an iron grip on everyone’s votes.

We have to call them out on this, too. It will mean that they’ll call us racist, but we need not to care. They’ve also destroyed many a livelihood by leveling charges of racism, one of the more immoral actions in my book. That’s the only argument they have, and their power depends on ceding ours in the face of their ad hominem attacks and charges of racism when all we’ve done is question their orthodoxies. I’ve lost count of the amount of friends I’ve lost over ideological differences, but good riddance.

So, if you’re a disaffected Democrat considering not voting or voting for a third party, don’t feel guilty about it, but consider the effects carefully. We need a two-pronged approach: most people must work from within, and others might defect to send a message. It may mean electoral defeat in the short term but may earn back people’s trust in the long term if the elites actually realize the error of their ways.

Our foremost action should be to get involved in local politics and consistently vote in local elections so we can prevent identity leftists from infiltrating education and city government bodies, like they’ve done in every major city, and every major city is controlled by Democrats. This is where people start to accrue power, and school boards are especially important to watch even if yiu don’t have children.

I’m assuming my readership isn’t the leftists I’m critiquing but rather those who think they’re constantly shouted down for making reasonable arguments against leftist excesses. As the campaign takes over what remains of our lives and people come to guilt you into voting, feel free to remind these good Democrats that there is no moral high ground to be holding.

For those of us who will still give them our vote this year, I hope some of the above can aid you in debating the illogical faction that has cast everything in a right/left, white/black binary.

These people are not deep thinkers; they don’t make logical arguments, and most don’t even read! These are not people to bow to, regardless of their racial identity. Their worldview is easily shown as incoherent, but we shy away from saying what should be noted because they constantly play the racism card to shut us up. We can’t care. Just like the bullies took over by shouting and weaponizing emotion, we can take it back by not cowing to their unreasonable opinions in the fear they’ll attack our character. We tried simply waiting and being quiet; it’s time to shout back.