This growing number of both white and non-white working-class voters defecting from the Democrats in elections since 2016 is a growing threat to the party’s ability to achieve victory in upcoming nationwide elections starting in 2024. To win in recent elections, Democrat candidates have relied upon rolling up massive majorities among nonwhite voters in blue states and urban centers. As pro-Democrat demographics expert Ruy Teixeira has pointed out, working-class voters represent two-thirds to three-quarters of the total nonwhite vote.
However, the resulting Democrat national political advantage has been rapidly disappearing as more of those voters come to realize that the party’s ultra-liberal progressive economic, social and educational policies work against their long-term best interests. That is because the shared Democrat party’s and Biden administration’s aggressively “woke” policies are now being dictated by the leaders of the progressive movement, including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and Congresswomen Pramila Jayapal, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).
The political problem now facing the Democrats is that those extreme left-wing policies are supported mostly by white, liberal, college-educated elitist voters who are badly outnumbered by both white and non-white less well-educated working-class opponents of those policies.
This trend was documented in a recent survey conducted by the New York Times/Siena poll, and more detailed data compiled by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life (SCAL), the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), and a separate survey by YouGov sponsored by Teixeira’s own Liberal Patriot organization. They found that the nonwhite working class overwhelmingly define themselves as moderate-to-conservative, with fewer than a quarter identifying as liberals.
THE LIMITED VOTER BASE FOR “WOKE” DEMOCRAT POLICIES
As a result, a large majority of both white and non-white working-class voters say that they do not share the “woke” progressive Democrat party line on social and moral issues as well as issues as the dominance of structural racism in American society, defunding local police and abandoning the routine enforcement of law and order, the need to eliminate even nuclear, and relatively clean fossil-fuel based energy sources, the hysterical liberal approach to the potential long-term dangers of climate change, and the need to respond to them by forcing economically ruinous changes to the working-class American way-of-life, such as the elimination by edict of gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles and natural gas kitchen stoves.
While those polls show that 75% of white, college-educated voters approve of President Biden’s liberal economic and social policy agenda, that sentiment is not shared by most traditionally Democrat-voting moderate-to-conservative non-white working-class voters. According to Teixera, “these voters prefer Republicans to Democrats on building up America’s manufacturing capacity, on ensuring American energy independence, on maintaining a strong military and defense, on protecting American interests around the world, on being patriotic, on fighting crime and ensuring public safety and on standing up for free speech and freedom of religion.
“Moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters overwhelmingly believe the Democratic Party has moved too far left on both economic and cultural/social issues.”
As New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall recently observed, this is “not your father’s Democratic Party,” and the current party leadership shows no desire whatsoever to return to its original agenda which was dictated by the economic needs and policy concerns of its working-class roots.
WORKING-CLASS DEMOCRATS ARE SWITCHING SIDES
Edsall cites a recent paper written by political scientists Eitan Hersh and Sarang Shah which observes that “both the Democratic and the Republican parties have undergone a radical reorientation. The ongoing development of the Democratic Party as a party not of labor but of socioeconomic elites, and the ongoing development of the Republican Party as a party not of business but of working-class social conservatives, represents. . . perhaps the major, American political development of the twenty-first century.”
In an email to New York Times commentator Edsall, Hersh said that he agrees with the conclusion of demographer Teixeira, in a recent essay entitled, “Brahmin Left Vs. Populist Right.” He argues that the “socioeconomic elite, [consisting of] well-educated, largely white, liberals, are imposing damaging policies on the Democratic Party.” Therefore, in order to remain competitive in future national elections, he concludes that “Democrats need both to regain support from whites without college degrees and stop defections among working-class black and Hispanic voters.”
Teixeira writes that “the cultural left in and around the Democratic Party has managed to associate the party with a series of views on crime, immigration, policing, free speech, and of course race and gender that are quite far from those of the median working-class voter. . . These unpopular views are further amplified by the Democrats’ ‘shadow party,’ the activist groups, think tanks, foundations, publications and websites, big donors, and prestigious intellectuals who are not part of official party organizations, as well as within the Democratic Party infrastructure itself, all of which are thoroughly dominated by the cultural left. . .
“Voters are not sure Democrats can look beyond identity politics to ensure public safety, secure borders, high quality, non-ideological education, and economic progress for all Americans.
DEMOCRATS HEMMED IN BY THEIR IDENTITY POLITICS
“Instead,” Teixeira continues, “Democrats continue to be weighed down by those [progressive leaders] whose tendency is to oppose firm action to control crime or the southern border as concessions to racism, interpret concerns about ideological school curriculums and lowering educational standards as manifestations of white supremacy, and generally emphasize the identity politics angle of virtually every issue.”
Federal support for public education used to be a winning issue for Democrat candidates across the country, but that has changed since the Covid pandemic. Many parents became concerned after watching the Zoom sessions coming into in their homes during the school lockdowns about the radical liberal ideas in the public-school curriculum their children were being taught, without their knowledge or permission. Many parents were also upset by the political pressure that the teachers’ unions were able to apply to local elected Democrat officials to keep the public schools closed much longer than necessary, resulting in their children falling even further below the expected grade level in their studies.
DEMOCRATS ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE SCHOOL CHOICE ISSUE
After the lockdowns ended, many of these parents chose to take a more active role, showing up to local school board meetings to voice their objections to overly liberal curriculums. They also pressured their local officials to provide them with more options in choosing the best school for their child, by opening more higher-quality charter schools and by providing more families with school tuition vouchers.
Recent polling shows that 73% of Democrats, including black and Hispanic parents have a favorable opinion of public charter schools and many of these parents have grown frustrated with their local Democrat elected officials who have refused to provide more options for school choice due to the vigorous opposition of the teachers’ unions which traditionally have been major contributors to Democrat election campaigns.
This has provided an opportunity for Republican elected officials, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to capitalize on this issue by delivering universal school choice throughout his state, thereby gaining the support of a sizable number of Florida parents who used to vote Democrat. The school choice issue also worked well for Republicans in Texas during the 2020 election, by attracting a significant number of votes from the black and Hispanic parents of public-school children. School-related issues were also decisive in the upset 2021 victory of Virginia’s GOP governor, Glenn Younkin over former Governor Terry McAuliffe.
If Democrat candidates and their party leaders continue to ignore the growing concerns of parents over curriculum and school choice issues, in deference to the priorities of their teachers’ union supporters, they are likely to lose the votes of many more parents, including blacks and Hispanic, in the 2024 election.
Teixeira suggests that the current nationwide distribution of congressional seats is another indicator of the major realignment, along educational and economic lines, in the two-party system, with Democrats now politically dominant in the more affluent, college-educated congressional districts, while Republicans overwhelmingly represent the poorer, predominantly white working class-populated areas, and those living in more rural districts.
Teixeira’s recommendation for Democrats to restore their political competitiveness is to abandon their problematic progressive policies and “rebrand the party, making it more working-class oriented.” However, he also recognizes that the progressive domination of the party’s current leadership makes it very difficult, over the short term, “for them to shed much of their cultural radicalism and generally make the party more attractive to normal working-class voters.”
EVERY WORKING-CLASS VOTE WILL COUNT IN 2024
Democrats are being warned not to repeat in 2024 the mistake of overconfidence that they made in 2016, when they couldn’t imagine that Hillary Clinton could lose to such a flawed and media-discredited opponent as Donald Trump. That is especially true now that Trump is under indictment and awaiting trial on many state and federal criminal charges.
Nevertheless, the latest RealClearPolitics average of national polls has Biden and Trump virtually tied with one another, well within the polling margin of error. If those polling trends hold until Election Day, even a small, 1-point surge in Trump’s white working-class vote could make him victorious in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and return him for a second term in the White House.
Over 70 percent of white working-class voters say they are very dissatisfied with Biden’s performance, particularly with regard to his handling of the economy, which they believe, by a 63 to 16 percent margin, is getting worse instead of better. This has been frustrating for many Democrats because the latest government statistics show strong job growth, a subsiding rate of inflation, and the reduced probability of a recession in the months ahead.
AVOIDING A REPEAT OF HILLARY CLINTON’S “DEPLORABLES” MISTAKE
Some Democrats have been tempted to ascribe the stubborn resistance of these pro-Trump voters to the recently improved economic news to their fundamentally racist, reactionary nature. But this same group was galvanized for Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton when she made the mistake of publicly labeling them as “deplorables” during the 2016 campaign.
The demonization of that group of Trump voters by Clinton as racist and xenophobic was unfair and unjustified in 2016 and is just as unfair and unjustified by Democrat political analysts who are still using those pejorative terms today. Teixeira warns that if Democrats are not careful to avoid attributing the reluctance of this crucial group of voters to support Biden to their “racial resentment,” their negative reaction could lead to Trump’s victory in what is likely to be another very close 2024 presidential election.
As for the real underlying reason why most white working-class voters consider Bidenomics to be a failure, one need only consider the fact that since Biden took office in January 2021, most working-class families have lost economic ground due to the fact that inflation has far outstripped the rise in their wages, forcing them to draw down their savings and/or run up the charges on their credit cards in order to make ends meet at the end of each month.
WORKING-CLASS VOTERS LOST THEIR SEAT AT THE DEMOCRAT TABLE
Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO, told Edsall that the Democrat party’s gradual policy drift away from its original white working-class voter base has been underway “since the 1970s.” As a result, Podhorzer argues, “both left and right parties now represent different factions within the socioeconomic elites, [and in the process,] labor and working people have been demoted from a seat at the [Democrat party leadership] table to a constituency to be appealed to.”
But Podhorzer disagrees with the conclusion reached by Hersh, Shah, and Teixeira that the policy domination of “cultural elitism” imposed by the well-educated is at the heart of the electoral disadvantage faced by Democrats today. He argues that blaming cultural elitism is merely a way for “fascist politicians [to] mask billionaires’ collective influence over the political process [and] to shift the blame to intellectual and cultural elites, like liberals or people with college degrees, redirecting the inevitable resentments of the [working-class] losers in the winner-take-all economy …”
In Podhorzer’s liberal-progressive view of today’s world, “[they] affirm the fascist worldview in which ‘cultural,’ rather than economic or political, elites are the source of their disappointments,” but he also nonetheless agrees that “there is clear evidence of the demographic realignment of the Democratic Party,” which will inevitably work to the significant advantage of Republican candidates nationwide in future elections.
Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, also agrees that there “are pretty sizable shifts in partisanship which fit the narrative that [better educated] white collar workers are shifting more Democratic at the same time that [less educated] blue-collar [industrial workers] are becoming more Republican.”
IS IT TOO LATE FOR A BIDEN-LED UNION COMEBACK?
Administration supporters, such as Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, argue that President Biden’s often-expressed desire to become known as the most pro-union, pro-worker president in American history is the proper response to Democrats’ working-class voter problem.
However, Steve Rosenthal, another former political director of the AFL-CIO, believes that Biden’s efforts to bolster the organized labor movement come too late to change the electoral outcome in favor of the Democrats, especially in the crucial Midwest presidential battleground states.
That is because, Rosenthal claims, “In the mid-90s, between 30 and 40 percent of the electorate in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio came from union households and they were voting 60 percent-plus Democratic. . . [But since then] “their vote share has decreased precipitously, to a low of now something like 14 percent in Wisconsin to the mid-20 percent in the other states.”
Other political scientists cited in Edsall’s New York Times article, such as Matt Grossmann at Michigan State, David Hopkins at Boston College, and Sean Westwood at Dartmouth, also recognize the newly dominant role of socioeconomic elites in setting the agenda for today’s Democrat Party, and the growing support of white and non-white working-class voters for traditional conservative Republican economic and social policies.
The sharp decline in working-class support for Democrats, even among black and Hispanic voters without college degrees, is clearly evident from the results of the past three presidential elections. Among those black voters, Obama won by 97-3 or a 94-point advantage in 2012; Clinton by 93-6 or an 87-point advantage in 2016; and Biden won by 90-8 or an 82-point edge in 2020. Among those Hispanic voters, Obama won by 70-27 or 43 points; Clinton won by 68-27 or 41 points; and Biden won by 60-38 or 22 points. Furthermore, current polls indicate that such working-class voters shifts are likely to continue, and likely accelerate, in a 2024 presidential election rematch between Biden and Trump.
DEMOCRATS ARE LOSING MANY VOTES DUE TO THE FAILURE OF BIDENOMICS
A large part of that defection is due to dissatisfaction with the sharp spike in the cost of living, coupled with the reduced effective purchasing power, which has been keenly and painfully felt by most working-class households due to Biden’s economic policies. But beyond the economic issues, most working-class voters who describe themselves as moderates or conservatives are also unhappy with the aggressive imposition of the Biden administration’s radical social policy agenda on all other aspects of American society. These range from radical anti-climate change measures; the collapse of law enforcement against illegal immigration and drug smuggling at this country’s southern border; the imposition of race-based inclusiveness and diversity (DEI) policies on everything from the corporate boardroom to access to life-saving healthcare; and the curriculum being taught in the elementary public-school classroom.
But political scientists Grossman, Hopkins, and Westwood also told Edsall that they do not yet see sufficient evidence “showing that either party has abandoned its traditional base,” which consists of the business community for Republicans and organized labor for Democrats.
Edsall also cites a controversial op-ed piece published on August 2 by New York Times columnist David Brooks, entitled, “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?” Brooks dared to suggest that he and his fellow liberals are largely to blame for the fact that Trump “is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys [and] Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.” Not surprisingly, Brooks was harshly criticized for even suggesting that extreme leftist Democrat policies might be the problem by the self-appointed liberal censors on social media, because, in their only approved progressive narrative, “we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment [and] the Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians.”
Brooks also proved to be broad-minded enough to suggest consideration of another vantage point to the current situation “in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.”
HOW DEMOCRATS SQUANDERED THE WORKING CLASS VOTE
“This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.
“The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world ‘up here’ and everybody else is forced into a world ‘down there.’ Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.”
Brooks adds that “The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs, and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other, and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.”
WHY LIBERALS HAVE A DIM VIEW OF MERITOCRACY
Brooks quotes from a book called The Meritocracy Trap which explains how “meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”
Modern meritocracy rewards only the relative handful of children from rich families who can use their power and wealth to get them admitted to one of the 12 or so super-elite colleges in the country. Graduating from one of these schools becomes a ticket for lifelong success, because it qualifies them for top-level upper-middle-class jobs in almost every profession, ranging from law to medicine to academia to the corporate board room.
“Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural, and political power,” Brooks notes, “we [the elite] support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.”
In addition, Brooks notes that “members of our [liberal elite] class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin, and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent.”
HOW TODAY’S ELITES HAVE SEGREGATED THEMSELVES
Given this modern-day segregation of American society by education and social class, Brooks observes that “It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. He understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class.”
Brooks says that Trump’s working-class supporters have become even more fiercely loyal to him because they see the multiple criminal indictments that have been brought against him as “just another skirmish in the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of [liberal elite] lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them.”
In conclusion, Brooks writes, “We can condemn the Trumpian populists until the cows come home, but the real question is: When will we [the liberal elites] stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?”
Yet, at the same time, Brooks proved incapable of giving up his own liberal-elite anti-Trump prejudices by declaring that, “Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.”
However, Brooks’ column, despite its disappointing ending, was a source of encouragement for Sasha Stone, another self-described former Democrat and leftist, Stone is an entertainment industry journalist who “escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country and to take a more critical look at the left.”
Stone writes on her Awards Daily website in response to Brooks’ initial question, “‘Are we the bad guys?’ The answer is yes. You are the bad guys. You have systematically dehumanized half the country because they dared to want to be represented by someone you don’t like. You have gone along with a warped distortion of who Donald Trump actually is, and you have perpetuated that lie to your own detriment.”
GAINING AN UNDERSTANDING OF WHO TRUMP REALLY IS
“You’ve all been treating Trump like an elusive mob boss. . . but the evidence at hand does not bear this out. He’s a rule-breaker by nature, he always has been. He likes to upset people. He likes to antagonize, tease, and sometimes bully, but we can’t even get to Trump’s real problems because of your tsunami of hyperbole.”
Stone suggests that “the so-called charges against Trump will look ridiculous in time,” and that he is only being prosecuted because he “had the nerve to win an election and offend the ruling elite, and then had the nerve to protest the most corrupt election in my lifetime.”
She also faults Brooks for sticking with the New York Times after it betrayed its own journalistic principles by firing its executive editor, James Bennet, for publishing an innocuous op-ed by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, and unfairly forcing out its highly respected writers, Bari Weiss, and Donald McNeil.
Stone admits that in her case, “I’ve only recently gotten to know the Conservatives. . . I am a lifelong Democrat who voted for every Democrat that ever ran for president starting in the 1980s. I was a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter. I marched, I protested, and I wrote op-eds. I said Me Too. I supported and voted for Joe Biden. And yes, I wrote about race and gender for years on my website.
Stone is also willing to give Brooks some credit for noticing that, “Like so many times before, an aristocratic minority [such as today’s liberal elite] can only stave off its ultimate collapse at the hands of the discontented majority [working-class Trump supporters] for so long … even if it is too little, too late.”
However, she rejects “the false opinion of the ruling class” that Trump and his red-state supporters “are going to drag America back in time.” Instead, Stone believes that the current national political struggle “is about a new America waiting to be born once the establishment elite gets out of the way.”
EVEN TRUMP HAS THE RIGHT TO THE PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE
Stone ridicules Brooks for denying Donald Trump the presumption of innocence to which he is entitled and condemning him instead as a “monster” who deserves to “go to prison” without bothering to wait for a proper trial on each charge against him and for the juries in each case to render their verdicts. “Is that what we call innocent until proven guilty, Mr. Brooks? Or is that what we call trial by mob?”
She also writes that those who share Brooks’ opinion of the former president, “can’t be the good guys if you can’t even see that these investigations and indictments are designed only to stop Trump. Biden has said as much.”
Finally, in response to the question with which Brooks finished his op-ed, “When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?” Stone’s answer is, “Never. As with most aristocracies, power must be taken from you. No, not with a violent revolution, but when the American people realize what I finally did — that they can no longer trust the media, and that the media have become the bad guys. When that happens, it’s all over but the shouting.”
HOW BIDEN AND THE PROGRESSIVES HAVE BEEN “REMAKING” AMERICA
Meanwhile, widely respected conservative military historian and commentator Victor Davis Hanson writes that, due to Biden administration efforts to “remake” America to conform with radical liberal “woke” progressive principles, “every [traditional] aspect of American life and culture is under assault, including the very processes by which we govern ourselves, and the manner in which we live.”
In Hanson’s opinion, “We are in the midst of one of the most radical revolutions in American history. It is as far-reaching and dangerous as the turbulent years of the 1850s and 1860s or the 1930s …
“The Revolution began under the Obama administration that sought to divide Americans into oppressed and oppressors, and then substitute race for class victimization. It was empowered by the bicoastal wealth accrued from globalization, and honed during the Covid lockdown, quarantine-fed economic downturn, and the George Floyd riots and their aftermath. The Revolution was boosted by fanatic opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump. And the result is an America that is unrecognizable from what it was a mere decade ago.”
Hamson then lists 10 crucial areas of American life in which activists for the ideological Left have been able to seize control and create an upheaval.
THE FIRST CASUALTY IS FREEDOM OF SPEECH
The first casualty is freedom of expression. Hanson notes that “in large swatches of American society — particularly the corporation, the media, the government, the public schools, and the university — it is suddenly dangerous to speak freely.”
For anyone to suggest that “white racism” and a lack of “racial equity” are not at the heart of America’s problems today, or that man-made climate change and the necessary remedies for it are still the subject of serious scientific debate, or to have suggested in 2020 that the original Covid-19 virus was made in a Chinese lab, and that school and business lockdowns, as well as mask and vaccine mandates would ultimately do more harm than good, was to risk either being ostracized, publicly reprimanded or even fired.
Hanson observes that “the government, in league with social media, censors the news.” “Liberal” universities now forbid the discussion of any ideas that do not strictly conform to progressive ideals, and the Left now seeks to modify the First Amendment to the Constitution, to eliminate its protection of “hate speech,” which is defined as almost anything which deviates from accepted progressive principles.
HOW DEMOCRATS WEAPONIZED THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
Hanson cites the unprecedented number of criminal felony prosecutions of a former president, Donald Trump, as exhibit A supporting Republican accusations that Democrats have been weaponizing for partisan benefit in both state and federal criminal justice systems. He also notes that “No one believes Trump would have been indicted on such counts — most of them involving allegations from years past — were he not running for President.”
But while Trump has not been charged with bribery, which is the only crime, other than treason, specifically cited by the Constitution as an impeachable offense, Hanson notes that until now, there has been no FBI or Justice Department investigation of credible “accusations that Joe Biden and his family raked in millions from foreign governments due to the improper use of his prior Vice Presidency …”
Citing other signs that federal law enforcement agencies have forfeited their credibility, Hanson notes that, “The last four FBI Directors have either admitted they lied under oath, or preposterously under oath claimed ignorance or amnesia about events directly under their control. Or they simply stonewalled subpoenas and testimonies about alleged FBI crimes. The former CIA Director [also] admitted to lying twice under oath.”
Ever since the start of the 2016 election campaign, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI have acted as if they are political extensions of the Democrat Party by directly interfering in an attempt to influence the outcome of three consecutive presidential elections. The FBI gave its full support to the most successful political dirty trick in American history, the Clinton campaign-manufactured 2016 Trump-Russia collusion hoax. The FBI also helped the 2020 Biden presidential campaign persuade the American people that the evidence that it knew to be genuine of Hunter Biden’s influence peddling found on his abandoned laptop was Russian disinformation. With regard to the 2024 race, the Department of Justice and the FBI have already succeeded in indicting the leading GOP presidential candidate, with the goal of putting him on trial, convicting him, and putting him behind bars, all before Election Day.
In the process, the previous commitment of the FBI, DOJ, CIA, and IRS to providing equal justice under the law has been hopelessly politically compromised. In addition, Biden and his fellow Democrats have seriously undermined American democracy by unleashing the full power of the administrative state for the purpose of destroying the Republican frontrunner and ex-president who is still likely to be Biden’s opponent in the 2024 presidential election.
THE SUPREME COURT IS UNDER LIBERAL ATTACK
Hanson also cites the Left’s concerted attack on the legitimacy and authority of the U.S. Supreme Court, now there is a reliably conservative majority among its duly appointed justices. Under the guidance of prominent Leftist law professors, congressional Democrats have called upon President Biden to overcome the conservative majority by packing the court with additional leftist justice. That tactic was last tried, and failed, in 1937, by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his fellow Democrats.
Meanwhile, Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, has turned a blind eye toward the threat of illegal demonstrations consisting of mobs of Leftist protestors gathered outside the homes of judges, whose goal is to intimidate them into altering their upcoming court opinions. At the same time, the liberal news media has been filled with false or deliberately misleading reports alleging that two conservative Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, have violated the court’s ethical standards, while ignoring equally questionable conduct by the court’s liberal justices.
There have even been some Leftist law professors who have publicly called upon the Biden administration officials to openly defy the Supreme Court’s recent rulings overturning Roe v. Wade and striking down affirmative action college admission policies.
HOW THE NEWS MEDIA DISCREDITED ITSELF
Hanson also cites the decision by most of the major U.S. news media outlets to abandon the central principle of professional journalism, the objective and non-partisan reporting of only carefully verified facts to the American public. Instead, most of the large broadcast networks and news channels, including NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, and CNN, as well as the most respected newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, or the Los Angeles Times, have turned themselves into propaganda organs in the service of the Democrat party and its progressive agenda, even if that means knowingly issuing false or highly dubious reports to their audiences.
The organized Left has also succeeded in systematically undermining the efforts to maintain law and order in most of this country’s largest cities by spending millions of dollars to elect leftist district attorneys who refuse to prosecute any but the most violent crimes, and local politicians who will agree to leftist demands to defund local police departments, enabling individual criminals and organized gangs to prey on defenseless local businesses and individuals without fear of arrest or prosecution.
“As a result,” Hanson writes, “downtowns are after-dark, no-go zones, as once great metropolises resemble veritable combat theaters. Cities are becoming depopulated as consumers and businesses no longer find it safe to conduct commerce. Criminals and the homeless now routinely break the law with impunity.
THE DEMISE OF LAW AND ORDER IN THE STREETS
“The Left has redefined violent crime to such an extent that shoplifting is no longer actionable. Flash mobs that take over streets and swarm to loot stores are rarely if ever arrested. Security officers who apprehend thieves or intervene to stop violence are more likely to be prosecuted than criminals themselves. There is no longer any immigration law; it has been utterly destroyed by Joe Biden. Seven million illegal entrants flood into the U.S. and, along with the Mexican government, make demands on their hosts to accommodate their illegality.”
As a result, the decision by local police and prosecutors in Democrat-governed areas of this country on whether or not to enforce the laws against most kinds of criminal activity now depends primarily “on the race, class, or ideology of the perpetrator, usually in connection with the particular status of his victims. If asymmetry in race, class, or ideology is suggested, then the law must [be modified accordingly to treat] the crime and criminal as a victim rather than a victimizer. The result is the veritable destruction of law and order as we once knew it,” Hanson concludes.
THE DECLINE OF THE U.S. MILITARY
The Biden administration has also carried out the longtime goal of the Left by denying the Pentagon the resources it needs to defend this country against growing military threats to our NATO allies in Eastern Europe from Russia and particularly to our allies in the Asian-Pacific region from China. After years of underfunding, U.S. soldiers, sailors, and pilots around the world now find themselves critically short of both ammunition and modern weapons. As a result, the various armed services have been unable to recruit enough young men and women to fill their ranks, and the promotion of their officers is now more dependent upon their willingness to support the administration’s progressive social agenda than their military qualifications.
It is also likely that the deliberate weakening of the U.S. military presence in Europe, President Biden’s botched U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and his reluctance to provide Ukraine with the defensive weapons it needed to deter Russian aggression, were contributing factors to Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch the invasion last year.
BIDEN AND THE LEFT MAKING WAR ON FAMILY VALUES
On the domestic front, the Biden administration has supported the radical Left’s ongoing war against traditional family values. It has also deliberately undermined the vital roles of traditional marriage, parenthood and the nuclear family in the perpetuation of a healthy American society as we know it, while subverting the moral values of America’s children.
The Democrat rejection of traditional family values and religious codes has also accelerated the rate of defections to the Republicans among the many Hispanic voters who were raised as believing Catholics and take their faith very seriously.
SUBSTITUTING RACIAL EQUITY FOR RACIAL EQUALITY
The Biden administration has also sacrificed the traditional civil rights goal of promoting racial equality, giving everyone a fair opportunity to succeed, and substituted policies designed to promote what it calls “racial equity.” That means the abandonment of all previous requirements for achieving the American dream through individual merit, including hard work, motivation, promptness, ingenuity, physical fitness, and a sense of personal responsibility, because all such qualities are now viewed as essentially “white racist” in nature. The dominant factor in all decisions about hiring and admissions has now become the need to atone for prior generations of discrimination.
The previous civil rights goal of full racial integration has been replaced by new standards calling for “racial equity,” including the payment of monetary reparations to current descendants of members of minority groups who were victims of discrimination several generations ago. Racial equity also requires the watering down of the academic standards in our schools to accommodate the lowest common denominator of intellectual ability and achievement, and the elimination of standardized testing as well as advanced courses that would enable gifted students to achieve their full potential.
Instead of an individual’s merit, their racial identity and “victimhood” is now the governing factor in determining their fate. Individuals defined by liberals as “white” need not bother to ask for help. In the age of racial equity, they are the newly designated victims of discrimination as the rightful punishment for the misdeeds of their ancestors, real or imagined, while those defined as non-white victims are now the privileged, exempt from judgments based upon their merits, as well as the civil rights statutes which previously outlawed racially based quotas and preferences.
THE MYTHS OF MODERN MONETARY THEORY
Since the day Biden took office, his administration has eagerly promoted the basic concept of liberal “modern monetary theory,” which totally disregards the dangers of mounting budget deficits and accumulated national debts as meaningless accounting details.
If the poor are perceived as needing more money, a liberal government can just print as much more of it as needed to increase its welfare spending. If the expanded money supply naturally leads to runaway inflation, inflicting more pain on tens of millions of American working-class families, it can then be reduced by raising interest rates, punishing businesses, and ending the dreams of would-be new homeowners.
Biden would also seek to pass new taxes on the wealthy, who, liberals will argue, should be required to pay their “fair share,” but who will never be actually told by those liberals how much their “fair share” should be.
WILL THE U.S. DOLLAR COLLAPSE UNDER A MOUNTAIN OF DEBT?
Liberals would also argue that the eventual result of Biden’s free-spending monetary policy, which will be the collapse of the American economy and the value of the U.S. dollar under a mountain of debt that can never be paid back, is a fair price to pay in exchange for the pursuit of their goal of social justice, is it not? If you don’t agree, the liberals would say, you must be one of those evil people who still believe in free market capitalism as the path to achieving the American dream. How naive!
Finally, Hanson cites the fate which has now befallen this country’s finest colleges and universities, which had been, until relatively recently, “places of disinterested inquiry and inductive investigation,” and centers devoted to academic excellence, innovation, and discovery.
Now these schools have been reduced to become liberal indoctrination centers, teaching their impressionable young students that the United States is not a free democracy, which has long been the envy of the rest of the world, but rather that America is an evil country, based upon a long history of white racism. It must be condemned, and its constitutional government must be dismantled and then rebuilt based upon the amoral liberal progressive principles of racial equity, income redistribution, and a forced transition to green energy governed by the all-powerful socialist state.
A LAST CHANCE FOR THE COUNTRY TO CHANGE COURSE
What a sad fate, indeed, for the American people, but according to Hanson, that is the direction in which this country has been headed under the Biden administration and its utterly ruthless liberal/progressive political masters. The next chance that those tens of millions of working-class American voters will have to change this country’s course will be the November 2024 presidential election, and it could very well be their last chance.
