Realignment

 

Matthew Sitman (co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast) has argued that the story of this election is "the story of Western politics over the past fifty years: class dealignment and education polarization, which is to say the continued abandonment of center-left parties for the political right by working-class voters." 

It is hard to argue with that almost obvious assertion, which Sitman amplifies as follows: Trump "told people who to blame for the problems in their life, real or imagined, and promised to fix it all. ... Working class Americans didn’t turn out for Trump because he threatens democracy. They did so because our democracy, such as it is, didn’t seem worth defending. Any arguments about the way forward need to begin with this depressing reality."

Sitman may be expressing a more ideologically jaundiced feeling about American liberal democracy than the average contemporary Democrat would easily identify with, but what may be hard to identiy with may need to be at least considered. An important reality is that, while the Democrats are increasingly vulnerable on issues the majority of voters care about and are, therefore, diminishing, the Republicans have been building a growing, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, working-class, non-college-educated coalition. 

The fact is also that that coalition also includes tech billionaires and other super-rich who stand to benefit from Trump's policies, likely to the detriment of the "working-class" components of the coalition. It remains to be seen whether those components of the emerging Republican coalition will hold the party accountable for its failures or - more likely, based on recent history - whether they will remain loyal, contrary to their immediate economic interests, because of their cultural identity politics.

Cultural identity politics remain the Democrats' Achilles Heel. The infamous ad about Harris supposedly endorsing tax-payer-funded gender surgery for illegal immigrant prisoners may well have been the single most successful Republican ad, one which effectively symbolizes the wider cultural dissonance at the heart of so much of the Democratic party's present problems.

It is not that Democrats don't offer policies which would be beneficial for members of the new multi-racial, multi-ethnic, working-class, non-college-educated coalition. But voters can usually discern what matters most motivate and inspire a candidate. And at present that perception is that an array of counter-cultural (even counter common-sense) identity politics positions may be what most motivate and inspire many elite, college-educated Democrats.