Liberals are starting to lose their shit as they contemplate the return of the Orange Menace.
“How not to have a psychic meltdown when you see new Trump-Biden poll numbers” [MSNBC]. “In The Wall Street Journal’s latest poll of the 2024 election, President Biden and former president Donald Trump are locked at 46% each. Other recent polls have shown essentially the same thing. While there will be many twists and turns before next November, at this point the race is a toss-up. If that makes you feel like your country has gone mad, you’re not alone. While political reporters obsess over the anger and resentments felt by blue-collar white men in Rust Belt diners, liberals’ emotions are seldom considered worthy of the same kind of exploration. Part of me looks at those polls and wants to respond not with calm and reason, but with a blood-curdling scream of rage. My informal canvas of liberal friends reveals that this feeling — something like incredulous despair verging on panic — is not unusual. We tamp it down and joke about it, but it never disappears. Like many on the left, I will never again be seduced by the inspiring feeling of hope and belonging we felt when Barack Obama was elected in 2008. But the emotions of 2020 were supposed to be less naïve. When Biden won, it felt like a return to sanity.”
Liberals are not “on the left” but this screed is a clear window inside the Blue Bubble.
Donald Trump’s surprise win in 2016 coupled with Hillary Clinton’s disappointing loss was a traumatic event for liberals and it has only gotten worse in the 7 years since. But the dynamics of this trauma operated at many levels. At the most superficial level was the hysterical response of Democratic Party rank-and-file women who regarded Donald Trump as the most extreme and horrifying embodiment of that boyfriend stalker or the proverbial “bad daddy.” Of course, for those of us who remember, Hillary did not simply fail to reach out to the working-class voters that the New Democrats had turned their backs on for decades, she infamously attacked them as “deplorables.”
Unfortunately, liberals cannot allow themselves to be conscious of this. Their whole worldview–livelihoods, careers, and legacies depend on this not being true. Since Trump’s election, and like the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forgeten nothing. Instead, as we have seen, they will double-down on the very arrogance that helped them lose the first election to Trump.
When I first read Listen Liberal by Thomas Frank, it was before Trump was elected and looking back on it I realize Frank was only scratching the surface. There are historical reasons that Americans voted for Trump that makes the liberal’s cries of victimhood ring hollow. As Frank recounts–“From the middle of the Great Depression up until 1980 the lower 90 percent of the population, a group we might like to call the American people, took home some 70 percent of the growth in the country’s income. Look at the same numbers beginning in 1997—from the beginnings of the New Economy boom to the present–and you find this same group, the American people, pocketed none of America’s income growth at all. Their share of the good times was zero. The gains they harvested after all their hard work were nil. The upper 10 percent of the population–the country’s financiers, managers, and professionals–ate the whole thing.”
The result was the massive inequality plaguing America but liberals/Democrats have shown little interest in fixing it and their inability is hardly accidental. The Democrats version of liberalism is solely related to the fortunes of the professional/managerial/class PMC’s, who make up the top 10 percent. This cohort forms a privileged class with an interest in furthering its own influence and grabbing more than its share of wealth and privilege, and in their minds it’s the best of times–gay marriage is legal, we have had a black president and woman increasingly make up the ranks of CEO’s. Unfortunately for the rest of us liberals/Democrats have morphed into a failed managerial aristocracy that can’t lead but won’t get out of the way.
I’ve come to believe that the Democratic Party’s turn away from the New Deal and pander to the professional/managerial/class PMC’s was partly due to the end of the Cold War. The Democrats could simply take working-class Americans for granted. After all, as Margaret Thatcher proclaimed–There is no Alternative.
On that note, the Democrats are still insisting that Biden is their candidate–“What’s behind the nonsensical campaign to replace Biden-Harris in 2024” [MSNBC]. “He remains broadly popular among Democratic voters, even if he clearly has work to do in order to reassure wayward party members. …”
Man! I want to know what they are smoking at MSNBC. Anyway, if this sort of behavior sounds familiar, it’s akin to the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, where Democrats are stuck at denial. It’s why Thomas Frank remains persona non grata at MSNBC or any other liberal media venue.
Put simply, Trump and his MAGA supporters are a class based rebuke to the PMC’s and their sense of superiority. This phenomenon points to the ability of the PMC and elites to rationalize that their self-interest is somehow morally virtuous and then to act in very herd like and performative ways. Liberalism needed, above all, a sense of moral superiority, to heal an imperfect world, to be ahead-of-the-curve in mankind’s implacable march of progress toward perfection, and especially to set an example for how to live for all those “deplorables” residing in “flyover America who dared vote for a caricature like Donald J. Trump.
Psychologists have found that people who perceive themselves as good are more likely to do bad things. Indeed, the affluent and financially comfortable liberals engage in almost all of the same elitism, sexism, ableism, and racism as their political opponents–as Trump. Then there was Russia-gate, the Mueller business, Impeachment No. 1, and 2 which were all efforts by liberals and the deep state to deny Trump legitimacy and effectiveness. We could go so far as to characterize all of these efforts as an “insurrection”.
But liberals refuse contemplate any of this from inside the Blue Bubble.
Update: Again, just to make clear, I’m not a Trump supporter but I am fascinated by the economic, political and social conditions that give rise to his popularity. While liberals believe all kinds of nonsense, conservatives and Republicans are even more ridiculous. They’re constantly going on about a hostile takeover of the United States by socialists and communists, as though the Democrats are anything other than the same neoliberal capitalists that Republicans are. The only thing that makes liberals more annoying is the rank hypocrisy.
Update 2: While liberal PMC Democrats inhabit the Blue Bubble here is what a working-class Democrat has to say about it. Kim McCarthy, the Democratic chair in Greene county, which includes part of eastern Dayton, Ohio, said her party struggles to shake the perception that, at a national level, it is not interested in working people. “It’s not a secret that our country is run by corporate USA Inc. I feel that limitation stops Democrats from fighting for things that would bring people over to their side, like universal healthcare,” she said. McCarthy said that remained a good part of the reason for Trump’s continuing support in her county. “The appeal of Trump ultimately is that people recognize that our federal government is failing us as a society, as a nation. I’m from Australia and I think one of the most profound things that I’ve realised over my 25-odd years of living here is that the US government doesn’t care about me and my life,” she said.
camelotkidd 