Check out David Brooks’s New York Times piece, “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?” A taste:
The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. I guess it’s hard to focus on class inequality when you went to a college with a multibillion-dollar endowment and do environmental greenwashing and diversity seminars for a major corporation. Donald Trump is a monstrous narcissist, but there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself.
As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet. His Queens-born resentment of the Manhattan elites dovetailed magically with the class animosity being felt by rural people across the country. His message was simple: These people have betrayed you, and they are morons to boot.
In 2024, he built the very thing the Democratic Party once tried to build — a multiracial, working-class majority. His support surged among Black and Hispanic workers. He recorded astonishing gains in places like New Jersey, the Bronx, Chicago, Dallas and Houston. According to the NBC exit polls he won a third of voters of color. He’s the first Republican to win a majority of the votes in 20 years.
The Democrats obviously have to do some major rethinking. The Biden administration tried to woo the working class with subsidies and stimulus, but there is no economic solution to what is primarily a crisis of respect.
There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again.
The rest of us need to look at this result with humility. The American voters are not always wise but they are generally sensible, and they have something to teach us. My initial thought is that I have to re-examine my own priors. I’m a moderate. I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.
Read the entire piece here.
OK–So Biden (University of Delaware), Harris (Howard U.), and Walz (Chadron St.) went to universities with multi-million dollar endowments and have done DEI for a living? Brooks is phoning this in, recycling his Bobo stereotypes and applying them to a mass political party that doesn’t resemble them in any way, shape, or form. He also relies on notoriously unreliable exit polls. I don’t think there’s much of a secret here–Americans, like people in every other part of the developed world, are in a sour mood coming out of the pandemic, and are taking it out on the incumbent party, just as their counterparts are doing everywhere else in the world. They’re not acting out Brooks’s obsessions (well, some are, but frankly I think better of them than that).
David, not bad points! Also, both Trump and Vance are Ivy League grads. So, despite the Kabuki of it all, the elites playing as populists are still in charge, and the regular-folk-strivers have been given the heave-ho by their regular-folk-peers!
Jeeze… talk about ‘white innocence.’
There was no ‘surging support’ among Black voters for Trump. He got the same low percentages of their votes that he has always got from that community. That non-existent ‘surge’ in no way legitimates the white vote for the tiny mustache speaking Trump.
Why Kamala Harris lost, explained
OPINION: Did white women, Hispanic men or the Democrats’ messaging failures doom the Harris-Walz campaign? Or were we just crazy to believe this country was ready to elect a Black woman as president?
Michael Harriot
Nov 7, 2024
https://thegrio.com/2024/11/07/why-kamala-harris-lost-explained/?fbclid=IwY2xjawGbVq9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHUe9lyC5Mma-866MuK234KVQOdRjB82f8A-WNIhNIw5mht-GWHLvHDYa8A_aem_lasnEnaLEr-2_9OpqYLRvQ
“There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people.”
When Trump and I were young, the ‘Bible Belt’ was digging in to defend exactly that by most any means possible. The ‘Lilly-White Republicans’ were doing their part. All that is still within living memory and endlessly documented. The rest of the country was pretty racist, too.