RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ever since the rise of Barack Obama, Democrats have seen themselves as destined to rule. With his presidential victory in 2008, they created a seemingly unbridgeable political empire. With the support of big cities, young progressives, universities, the media and an ever-expanding government workforce, the party – led by what Roger Kimball calls ‘the Syndicate’ – imagined it could stay in power indefinitely.

Given their advantages and the clear vulnerabilities of their only serious opponent, Donald Trump, Democrats should have expected an easy time in this presidential election. Instead, Trump won a convincing victory last night, with Republicans also winning control of the Senate and possibly the House of Representatives. Worse yet, from the progressive point of view, Kamala Harris was forced during the campaign to bow to Trumpian views on trade and immigration, a clear sign of her political weakness.

How did this happen? Much of it has to do with the imperiousness of the Democrats. The party elite and their financial backers live in a rarefied world where only their values and interests seem to matter. As Jacob Siegel has shown, they and their analogues in Europe are so convinced of their rectitude that they have grand plans to control the media and democracy for the long-run, through the control of election rules, mainstream media and, most critically, big social-media platforms.

These elites, like the financiers of the City of London or the landowning aristocracy during the height of the British Empire, have good reasons to want to keep the current imperial order. They did well financially under the rule of their frontman, Joe Biden, even if most Americans have not gained much since 2020. As even Ezra Klein, one of the few perceptive pundits in progressive media, has noted, these elites rule over the party with a ruthless sense of their dominion, while ‘ignoring the sentiments of legions of Democratic voters’. Only when they had no choice, did they whack Biden, despite his obvious frailty and plummeting popularity. They then gave the rank and file no role in the selection of the presidential candidate.

To these Democratic imperialists, like their equally deluded British antecedents, politics need only serve the most deserving – that is, themselves. They are adept at virtue-signalling about left-sounding causes, but are loyal to their class interests in all things. They are ultra-progressive on social and cultural issues, but are not keen on redistributing income or wealth, and are hostile to any constraints on their market power.

Of course, some in the oligarchy, notably Elon Musk, backed Trump in this election. But the bulk of the big money bankrolled Harris. When Musk began supporting Trump, the Atlantic – owned by Harris’s good buddy, Laurene Jobs – accused the X owner of ‘bend[ing] the knee’ to ‘strongman politics’. I guess when oligarchs like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, George Soros or Bill Gates get the cheque book out for Harris, they are acting for purely selfless, public-spirited reasons.

In its glory days, the British Empire had the best weapons and the most cash. But, as occurred in the American Revolution, it did not always know how to best use them. Similarly, despite the Democrats having near total control over the media, and raising three times as much money as the Trump campaign, their candidate failed to make much of an impression on what we used to call Middle America. Instead, Harris cultivated the support of the elite’s court jesters, as evidenced by her final Pennsylvania event with Lady Gaga, Oprah and Ricky Martin taking the stage. She would have been better off sharing the platform with, say, state governor Josh Shapiro or senator John Fetterman, Democratic politicians who can reach working-class voters.

Although they may see themselves as the natural leaders of the nation, the imperial elites have proven amazingly inept politically. Harris may be a favourite of the oligarchs, but she is also one of the most useless politicians ever to run for president.

Harris was never going to be capable of fending off Trump and dispatching him into oblivion as he deserves. This is largely because those who pull the strings in the Democratic Party have no idea whatsoever how to counter his appeal, without assaulting his supporters with charges of racism, misogyny and fascism. Unable to focus on the key issue of our time – the growing gap between the uber-elite and everyone else – they have tried to put all their eggs in the culture-war basket. They essentially whistled kumbaya as Trump took over as the working-class tribune.

Harris’s defeat last night is not a temporary setback but the harbinger of an ongoing imperial crisis. Simply put, the empire, dominated by the rich and those feeding off government largesse, whose ranks have burgeoned under Biden, simply has no comprehension of the economic fears, or concerns over crime and the border, that are felt in large parts of the country. The fact that Harris hails from California, and rose up the political ranks in San Francisco, a city of massive class divides that has fallen into dystopian ruin, did not help.

One of the biggest disconnects between the elites and the people is on climate issues, which have achieved an almost theological hold on progressives, particularly in Harris’s California base. Yet the fact remains that only a tiny number of Americans prioritise climate change over bread-and-butter issues. Of course, investors in economically inefficient solar and wind energy favour ever more public subsidies, even if renewables cause energy prices to soar and other industries to decline. The Democrats’ inner circles have no sense of how workers in impacted industries, like logistics, manufacturing or agriculture, feel about these things (to the Democratic elites, there are only three industries that matter – finance, tech and media, even if most Americans work elsewhere). Few voters were fooled by Harris’s attempt to back down on her former support for bans on fracking or for electric-vehicle mandates.

Perhaps the biggest evidence of elite delusion is the border. Wealthy businessmen, whether Democrat or Republican, have always favoured mass immigration, even illegal migration. But many Americans, including Latinos, resented the Biden administration’s total lack of border controls, thanks to the resultant rise in crime, stress on social services and impact on salaries. What works for the elites just doesn’t for most people.

While dreadful policies on the border, crime and climate have weakened the establishment’s hold on power, the behaviour of the imperial class has made things much worse. The media campaign against Trump and his support base has been relentless to the point of absurdity. The attempt to hide Biden’s senility and then foist Harris on the population was cack-handed and inept. Voters could see through it all too easily.

The attempts of the government apparatus to convict Trump also failed to bring him down. Indeed, they only succeeded in making the Democrats appear as the vengeful ones – a trait more readily associated with Trump himself.

Donald Trump’s resounding election win won’t have killed off the Democratic empire entirely. But it has given it a richly deserved whack.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.