Progressive Elites Capture the Democratic Party
– By Howard Sierer –
Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me… They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are….” His description applies today to a small progressive elite, the 15% that controls the entire Democratic Party.
This elite intelligentsia sees itself as a moral champion of the oppressed. Therefore, anyone who takes issue with its woke, progressive narrative must, by definition, be immoral: a racist, a homophobic bigot, a misogynist or, encompassing them all, a fascist.
Because this small elite is drawn primarily from the 20% of Americans in the upper middle class, it is not representative of our society as a whole or even of the upper middle class, nor does it reflect mainstream values and concerns. The liberal Brookings Institution calls this separation “dangerous:”
“The American upper middle class is separating, slowly but surely, from the rest of society. This separation is most obvious in terms of income—where the top fifth have been prospering while the majority lags behind. But the separation is not just economic. Gaps are growing on a whole range of dimensions, including family structure, education, lifestyle, and geography. Indeed, these dimensions of advantage appear to be clustering more tightly together, each thereby amplifying the effect of the other.”
This progressive elite consists largely of affluent, college-educated professionals who migrated to the Democratic Party while large segments of the working class were leaving it. In 1960, Democratic President John Kennedy lost the votes of white college graduates by a 2-to-1 margin, but won the support of white voters without a college degree by the same margin. For Joe Biden, the results were the exact opposite.
In 1992, almost 60% of Bill Clinton’s supporters were whites without a degree, but for Biden the same was true of only 27% of his 2020 voters. In 2018 the top 10 wealthiest congressional districts were all held by Democrats.
Economist Thomas Piketty describes the remarkable worldwide evolution of left-wing political parties “from the worker party to the high-education party.” Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer crowed, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
The reason for this shift is clear: the Democratic Party has been captured by this self-proclaimed intelligentsia who have moved farther and farther left, adopting one radical position after another. Christopher Lasch’s book “Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” describes the thinly-veiled class war elites have been waging against their “inferiors,” that is you and me.
When its preferred policies run against the grain of opinion, as they frequently do, the elite initiates media campaigns to win over the “unenlightened” public. The leftist legacy media openly “cheerleads” progressive policies and disparages mainstream objections, usually calling them right-wing when they most often reflect the public’s majority values and opinions.
Increasingly and disturbingly, the progressive elite has been all-too-ready to trample on the very civil rights that it claims to support. It opposes resistance to its “enlightened” policies by adopting the authoritarian tactics that were the hallmarks of fascism: suppressing dissent and controlling the flow of information to the public.
The last six years have been replete with progressive media manipulation. For example, the left-wing media buried the mysterious disappearance of Hillary Clinton’s private email server during the 2016 campaign by concocting a completely bogus Trump-Russia collusion allegation. Ditto for burying the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election; his laptop is loaded with information about his father’s financial interest in Ukrainian and Chinese business deals.
During the COVID pandemic, progressive elected officials, bureaucrats and the legacy media put their authoritarian, “we know better than you” attitude on display. Lockdowns, school closures, and masking requirements issued by Pres. Biden and progressive governors and mayors were cheered by the progressive media and extended far beyond any medical efficacy. The progressive media refused to post or print any non-conforming views, even those from highly regarded scientists and doctors, calling them “deniers” or “anti-scientific.”
By painting itself as victims fighting against right-wing extremist oppression, the progressive elite rationalizes its own authoritarianism. In its mind, the cult of victimhood justifies blatantly repressive measures.
Trying to outdo each other, woke progressives have continued to propose ever-more extreme policies to maintain and extend their self-anointed role as the vanguard of the proletariat. Attempts to implement these policies have become increasingly dogmatic and undemocratic.
Pres. Biden’s 16 months of progressive policy failures, one after another, have soured voters on progressive governance in general. If the Democratic Party doesn’t find a way to moderate its policies and find candidates to match, the coming fall 2022 elections will set the stage for a dramatic break from woke progressivism and place the Republican party squarely astride the great moderate center of the nation’s politics for years to come.
Next week: a follow-up outlining some crazy policies of the looney left.
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