At The Liberal Patriot Ruy Teixeira, he of The Emerging Democratic Majority is looking at the currrent class memberships in US Politics. Used to be that experts agreed that the Democratic Party was the party of the working class and the Republican Party was the party of the middle class and the country club.
But today, he clearly shows, the Democratic Party is the party of the educated class and the Republican Party is the party of the working class.
Over time, they have shed both white and nonwhite working-class (noncollege) voters, while improving among college-educated voters[.]
Notice that “working-class” now means “noncollege.” So you can see that really, not much has changed. Used to be, back in th 1950s, that the middle class meant ordinary working Americans that didn’t work with their hands. Today it means any worker that didn’t go to college.
So really, not that much has changed. Back in the 1930s and FDR’s Brain Trust, educated people were Democrats, but there weren’t that many of them. And the workers were Democrats because they were lower class and didn’t feel they had “agency.” So they voted for politicians that would lead them and protect them against the economic royalists.
In the 1950s the middle class wasn’t college-educated except for the GI Bill graduates. And the working class was pretty satisfied with pension benefits and with high union wages. But then the Democrats went ape in the Sixties, with anti-war protests and the Great Society big government programs.
Let’s call the 50 years between 1968 and 2016 the transition years, with Nixon creating the initial disturbance in the force of the Democratic age when he identified himself as the President of the Silent Majority. Then we had the age of the fake moderate Democrats: Carter and Clinton and Obama who all went as hard left as they dared. And the transition ended with Trump, when the ordinary middle class — including the working class that once voted Democrat — decided that they couldn’t take it any more.
There’s a notion out there that since the Democrats get the vote of the educated class then their program must be better and more attuned with the experts and the science. If you’ve ever been on Bluesky you know that it ain’t true. All you see on Bluesky is hard left narrative. No education, no thinking, just narrative.
But that is politics: selling a narrative to the plebs.
In fact, I want to advance another idea. That nobody in public life has a clue: not politicians, not experts, not administrators, not activists. And that goes for voters too.
I am not saying this in a pejorative way. I just think that whether you are a chimpanzee troop or a hunter-gatherer band, or an agricultural empire or the US Empire, nobody really knows what they are doing; all we know, all we ever know, is that it seems to have worked, up to now. And when “it” stops working, then it’s sayonara and extinction and nobody hears from you again unless you managed to build big enough monuments for archeologists to unearth centuries later.
Do the educated in the western democracies know what they are doing? No, they do not. When the educated class rose to power in, say, the 18th century, it had no idea that concident with its rise to power was the development of machine manufacturing, and that the sudden colonization of the world by European nobodies would transform the world. Nor did the entrepreneurs that surprised us with their power looms and steam power, and cars and electricity and assembly-line manufacturing and electronics; they just did what they did, and look what happened.
It is a conceit of our educated-class rulers that the present prosperity is the result of “liberal democracy” or “capitalism” or “equality” or “justice” or the “welfare state.” All we really know is that “it happened.”
Right now, our liberal friends are going crazy because they see the reins of power, that they enjoyed over the last century or so, slipping out of their hands.
But this cannot be! This must not happen! Why? Because everything good that we enjoy happened because of educated liberals and liberalism. Everyone knows that!
But what if the good things that happened over the last 200 years had nothing to do with the ruling class, nothing to do with the right people being in charge. What if it happened despite everything?
Here’s an idea. Maybe the one thing any society needs is to have a ruling class and government that lacks the power to enforce its will in the moral and the economic spheres. Why? Because maybe moral enforcement and economic enforcement both Make Things Worse.
But when a ruling class feels that it is losing its grip its instinct is to double down. That’s what happened after the French and Bolshevik and Maoist revolutions.
And that, I think, is what is happening with our educated-class rulers across the West. They know that their “liberal democracy” is best. They know that Trump and populist nationalism is wrong and bound to destroy everything that they “carefully” created over the past 200 years. So Trump must be stopped! In the UK Farage must be stopped! In Germany the AfD must be stopped!
To me, the only queston is whether they have the power and the will to preserve their regime against the barbarian populist hordes. Or whether they will destroy everything as they try to retain their power.
But I am encouraged, because I feel that our liberal lords really don’t know anything, except to push their narrative. Narrative or Bust!