RUTHFULLY YOURS

The end of Joe Biden’s presidency also signals the demise of the old Democratic Party, with its roots in liberal ideals and advocacy for ‘the common man’. Although Biden, to his own detriment, chose to adopt the progressive views now dominant in the media and political apparat, he remained, at least superficially, a man of the old Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy Democrats.

With the ascension of Kamala Harris, the Democrats have made a full break from their historic roots as the party of workers and have gravitated towards the decidedly post-industrial politics of California-style progressives. Rather than worrying primarily about lifting up living standards, the party’s emphasis will now be on issues like climate change, abortion, reparations and trans advocacy.

Arguably the biggest winner will be identity politics. After all, Harris’s career was made possible by both traditional femininity – most evident in her career-boosting affair with a much older man, former California State Assembly speaker Willie Brown – and her identification with feminist causes. Her mixed-race background has been – forgive the expression – her trump card.

It’s highly unlikely that a politician of such modest gifts would have had such a meteoric career if she had been a man or a plain vanilla woman. Clearly, her elevation to vice-president was entirely based on her identity as the product of West Indian and South Asian parents, as well as her XX chromosomes. If elected, she would be America’s first DEI president.

Yet this trajectory also makes Harris a far better fit to the emerging, progressive-dominated Democratic Party than the sclerotic Biden. Lunch-bucket Joe from Scranton, Pennsylvania was never a natural fit in a party dominated by the professional classes, the federal bureaucracy and dependent voters. He was something of an anachronism in an era where the white working class, the supposed homebase of the Bidens, has been shifting inexorably away from the Democrats towards the GOP. This shift began even before Donald Trump, particularly under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Now some of the same dynamic is occurring among other ethnic groups, notably Latinos. Minorities make up over 40 per cent of the US working class and by 2032 will constitute its majority. Yet this should not be too comforting to Democrats. Trump was even or ahead of Biden with Latinos long before the debate debacle sealed the president’s fate. That represents a dramatic change. In recent elections, Barack Obama won roughly 70 per cent of the Latino vote.

Historically, Democrats kept these voters by focussing on bread-and-butter issues, like housing, wages, living and working conditions. But today’s Democratic Party base lies elsewhere, with the professional urban elite whose views differ enormously with the vast majority on issues like censorship, or rationing of gas and meat. This new party base, concentrated in a handful of cities, as beneficiaries of both government largesse and the stock market boom, has reason to love the current regime. But working-class people are doing less well. As a result, they are far less supportive of the Democrats in the key battleground states, such as Arizona and Michigan.

Dissatisfaction with the Democrats’ economic agenda has spread even to once-loyal younger voters. Recent polling suggests that young voters, particularly from the working class, are shifting away from the Democrats who won their votes easily in 2020, and towards Trump, who polls better on the economy.

Over time, the redesigned Democratic Party, epitomised by Kamala Harris, may be ill-prepared to deal with issues like homeownership, industrial growth or higher incomes not tied to government redistribution. The new Democratic mantra is not growth or upward mobility, but a ghastly agenda of weakening law enforcement and embracing draconian climate regulation. Harris once made the gaffe of arguing that we need to reduce the US ‘population’ in order to fight climate change (although the White House says she meant to say reduce ‘pollution’). Despite her purported image as a ‘tough prosecutor’, she endorsed sweeping progressive law-enforcement proposals in 2020 that were well to Biden’s left, including pardons for criminals after serving 10 years and police reforms including greater restrictions on the use of force.

She also has a more sceptical stance on Israel with a greater lean to the Palestinian cause. Although her husband is Jewish, Harris is deeply aligned with the faction in the Democrats that favours appeasing Iran. Her stepdaughter has campaigned to get money to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, despite allegations that its staff have participated in Hamas’s acts of terror. No doubt many Jews who are unfailingly loyal to the Democrats will back Harris. But many alarmed by the anti-Semitic surge inside the party, like investor Bill Ackman, have chosen to jump on the Trump train instead.

Overall, a Harris presidency would translate into a more unrestrained Bidenism. It will solidify the merger of elite-sponsored populism, party activists and, most critically, oligarch investors who, in large part, seemed to have engineered this weekend’s palace coup. Some have argued that the Democrats should hold an ‘open convention’ to give some choice to delegates over the nominee, but this is not in the nature of this increasingly Stalinist party. Ironically, just like the new Trumpian GOP they love to hate, the Democrats also seem to move in tandem on both issues and candidates. If there’s an appearance of an open convention, the reality will more resemble the supreme Soviet than a no-holds-barred open debate.

To be sure, there will be some immediate gains for the Democrats from Harris’s ascension, not least in that it takes away the age issue that plagued Biden. They would then be able to focus fully on the hulking mess that is Donald Trump. The big progressive donors are likely to turn on the spigots and flood her campaign with money, too. She will also gain the support of the mainstream-media claque, increasingly owned by progressive oligarchs. Plus, she can count on the full support of the never-Trumpers on what used to be considered the right – that politically negligible faction that is nonetheless ubiquitous in the media, offended by everything from Trump’s opposition to waging war, his plans to impose tariffs or his rude behaviour and lack of obeisance to the well-brought-up hierarchy.

Harris’s appeal helps the Dems somewhat in some sunbelt states that are heavily black, but also with lots of educated hipsters, like North Carolina. She may well make better headway with the pro-Hamas types in Michigan. Perhaps she could also reignite mass support from black women and feminists who, even if they were never going to back Trump, might otherwise stay on the sidelines or vote for a third-party candidate in November.

But Harris will not be a good fit with the party’s traditional voters east of the Sierra Nevada, particularly in the Midwest, where her identification with California may not be an easy sell. Her home state is in awful shape, with high unemployment, low income growth, mass outward migration and staggering inequality. Harris was district attorney of arguably the country’s most dysfunctional city, the once-magical San Francisco. Photos of homelessness, mass break-ins of stores, violent Hamas demonstrations are not a good look for a presidential candidate.

But the biggest problem facing Harris will be the failed Biden legacy. Despite the protestations of partisan crackpots like Paul Krugman and much of the Pravda media, Biden has not been seen by most Americans as the second coming of FDR, as his progressive worshippers like to claim. The traditional Democratic Party was focussed on helping both the working class and the economy, with bold infrastructure plans that both made America more efficient but also provided work for roughly eight million people during the Great Depression.

This is not what the Biden-Harris spending splurge has accomplished. It has done little to improve, at least in the short run, the lives of average people. Inflation since Biden has grown faster than incomes for most, and high prices are particularly felt most among the less affluent. The news from the small-business front is particularly grim, with bankruptcies running at the highest level since 2010. Rather than invigorating the private sector, most employment growth is now concentrated in government and largely publicly funded healthcare. Overall, one in four Americans fear losing their job in the next year.

And then there’s pervasive failure of Democratic policies elsewhere, namely in deep-blue states like California and New York. Almost all these states have been losing domestic migrants, underperformed economically and suffered significant budget shortfalls. The worst failures have taken place in deep-blue cities, like San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. All are suffering from low occupancy rates, homeless encampments, ineffective policing and the gradual erosion of high-wage jobs. In the period from Franklin D Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, Democrats could be proud of their control of the great cities. That is a much harder argument to make today.

The disconnect between progressive policies and the voters will be Harris’s biggest challenge. What manages to win in California and the old other deep-blue coastal states does not translate well once you cross the coastal mountains or the Appalachians. Bans on new oil and gas drilling may go down fine in California, even if they hurt some locales. But Harris’s support for a ban on fracking is unlikely to prove popular among working-class people in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

At the end of the day, this is all about power. As Biden leaves the stage, he takes with him some of the last traces of the old Democratic Party, although some figures like Montana’s Jon Tester, Kentucky governor Andrew Beshear and Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman keep that flame alive. But now these and other more traditional Democrats will be forced to swallow the progressive agenda whole. They, and perhaps their voters, will be upset.

Of course, nothing is set in stone. If the race were between Nikki Haley and Kamala Harris, you could probably mail it in. But when the opponent is the Donald, a man whose brashness and ill-considered utterances are only matched by the blatant dishonesty of his determined enemies, anything is possible. Harris could help her cause by tacking on one of the more traditional Democrats as vice-president. Perhaps, with the aid of the pliant media and a tsunami of cash, she could transform herself, à la Obama, into a sweet-smelling moderate.

Watching Harris rise in California affirms the notion that mediocrity in politics is no vice and failure no disqualifier. Faced with the choice of Trump or the new Californicated Democrats, the voters have an unpleasant choice to say the least. But whatever happens in November, the old Democratic Party may never be the same, and that is something of a tragedy.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, the RC Hobbs presidential fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and author, most recently, of The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, published by Encounter.