The first GOP popular vote win in 20 years, the Red Wave hit everywhere, 2024 realigned the electorate as much as 2016, less secure voters moved towards Trump, everything got more correlated
I was recently on YouTube watching parts of the full ABC broadcast of election night 2016, and it was *wild*. At the start of the evening the panel was talking about how the increase in Latino population (e.g. in Florida's I-4 corridor) would put Hillary over the top, how after Trump got embarrassed the Republicans would need to shift left on immigration, etc., etc. Makes you wonder how people will look back at last week's election in 8 years.
We can like this analysis and still quibble with its terminology, specifically The Atlantic's claim that the crucial division between voters is now the 'educated' vs. the 'uneducated.' Pretending that 'college degree' equals 'educated' simply commits the fallacy of logical equivocation. There's no reason to suppose that someone who spent three or four years on a college campus has a better general education than someone who spent the same amount of time learning a trade, reading books and browsing the internet.
The only way to tell how these two individuals' grasp of what's going on in the world, and of how things work, compare and contrast is by interviewing them; and what you'd likely find is what you'd expect: neither individual knows everything, and each knows things the other does not. What the degree-bearer can doubtless claim is to be better inculcated into a certain college-wide cultural ethos; but it doesn't follow that what the degree-bearer possesses more of is education. It would be entirely arbitrary to define education that way.
I'm credentialed to read Husserl's Logical Investigations and understand it, but not to build a house or repair a car engine. Don't fly in any plane for which the person attempting to rivet the wings to the fuselage was me.
I realize the times I have ventured out of my comfort zone have exposed me to many new things in life. I grew up in a rural area and now I'm a suburban dweller. I worked a blue-collar job for 14 years -> then earned a science degree in nursing. I can't tell if your comment implies college culture is the same for all.... and discredits that fact that it "educates" students because there's exposure to diversity. This usually encourages self-reflection and acceptance of those that are "different" - basically, students are required to critically think if they want to be successful. There is nothing wrong with that.
We are all complex human beings. It does a disservice to group anyone by their education/income as it does any other. People's knowledge and opinions are complex & multifactorial. It boggles my mind when I hear this idea that colleges indoctrinate students; hard science and mathematics do not lean...
Perhaps, traditional students experience a broadening of their views because they're so neuroplastic. Also, part of the brain that isn't fully matured (avg age of full maturity = 25 years) is related to the ability to rationalize, which seems to be a requirement for critical thinking.
Furthering my education required me to research, analyze and evaluate data knowing that my hypothesis can be proven or disproven. I stopped being lazy (as I refer to my 16yo that believes whatever he hears) and became hungry for understanding reasons for or how something is the way it is. Unfortunately, when you're talking about human choices or behaviors... too many factors and this is why grouping them cannot be justified.
“I can't tell if your comment implies college culture is the same for all...”
Not exactly the same, since no two individuals experience things the same way or are exposed to identical sets of things to experience. Still, we can legitimately distinguish between those who've gone to college and interacted with professors and fellow students and those who haven't, and make some general assumptions about the range of experiences to which they've likely been exposed. My quarrel was with the assumption that 'attended college' and 'is better educated' amount to the same thing. That's simply a logical equivocation—we can't substitute these two very different concepts for each other in a proposition without changing the proposition's meaning.
“... and discredits that fact that it "educates" students because there's exposure to diversity.”
Jim Goad somewhat sardonically notes in one of his books that the lower middle class neighbourhood he grew up in was much more ethnically, racially and culturally diverse than most university sociology classes. In any event, 'being educated' and ' being exposed to diversity' are also obviously different things.
“This usually encourages self-reflection and acceptance of those that are "different"...”
Claims like this are generally all the better for proof. Self-knowledge is the hardest kind of knowledge to come by, and I'm not sure an individual's capacity for self-reflection has much to do with his/her environment. As for whether confronting 'those that are different' is likelier to encourage acceptance or rejection, surely this will depend at least in part on how profound the differences are. Perhaps a survey would be in order before venturing an opinion either way.
“...basically, students are required to critically think if they want to be successful. There is nothing wrong with that.”
I'm all for critical thinking, though I don't think the kind of diversity you're talking about has much to do with it. Monocultures (Japan in the past, Finland and Denmark today) have certainly produced their share of acutely critical thinkers.
“We are all complex human beings.”
Not only that, as Huxley pointed out we're all 'island universes,' each inaccessible to the other; hence, when a person dies, “a universe dies.” Nietzsche said, “In the final analysis, we experience only ourselves.”
“It does a disservice to group anyone by their education/income as it does any other.”
I agree, if by this you mean that such grouping is no guide to their worth as human beings. This is the basic problem with all filing systems: any criterion used to group people or things one way (alphabetical, for instance) inevitably scatters them in all other ways. Nevertheless, we still find filing systems useful for all sorts of reasons. How, for example, are you going to devise and administer social assistance programs to help low income families if you can't identify 'low income' people in the first place?
“People's knowledge and opinions are complex & multifactorial.”
Which rather undermines the thinking behind identity politics, doesn't it? Your race or ethnicity aren't 'identifiers'—such classifications are far too broad. An identifier has to be something unique—your fingerprints, for example, or your social insurance number. Ironically, so-called 'identity politics' is ethically problematic for the very same reason racism is: it doesn't allow individuals to speak for themselves. If it's true 'diversity' you're after, you won't find it in the crude categories of identity politics.
“It boggles my mind when I hear this idea that colleges indoctrinate students; hard science and mathematics do not lean...”
When writers like Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff speak about indoctrination on campus they generally have the humanities in mind, though STEM subjects haven't proved entirely immune from ideological assault. But I think we're straying somewhat from the post to which you're responding here: whether we're more likely to be 'indoctrinated' on campus or off isn't really its concern. The issue is whether grouping people 'on campus' or 'off campus' reliably tells us how 'educated' they are. I don't think it does. It might reliably tell us something about the nature of the training they've received (you in nursing, for instance); but that's a different matter.
“Perhaps, traditional students experience a broadening of their views because they're so neuroplastic.”
It seems highly doubtful that the brains of 'traditional students' are more 'neuroplastic' than the brains of others the same age, or that such neuroplasticity has much influence on whether their views end up broad or narrow.
“Furthering my education required me to research, analyze and evaluate data knowing that my hypothesis can be proven or disproven.”
That's great. I'm glad things worked out for you and that you're managing to follow your dream. I suspect, though, that an ability to analyze and evaluate data is what led you to university in the first place, not something you discovered only after you arrived there.
“...and became hungry for understanding reasons for or how something is the way it is.”
You're on your way to becoming a philosopher, Michelle, like Susan Haack, whose advice I think can be usefully applied to any endeavour:
“The genuine inquirer wants to get to the truth of the matter that concerns him, whether or not that truth comports with what he believed at the outset of his investigation, and whether or not his acknowledgment of that truth is likely to get him tenure, or to make him rich, famous, or popular. So he is motivated to seek out and assess the worth of evidence and arguments thoroughly and impartially. This doesn't just mean that he will be hard-working; it is a matter, rather, of willingness to re-think, to re-appraise, to spend as long as it takes on the detail that might be fatal, to give as much thought to the last one percent as to the rest. The genuine inquirer will be ready to acknowledge, to himself as well as others, where his evidence and arguments seem shakiest, and his articulation of problem or solution vaguest. He will be willing to go with the evidence even to unpopular conclusions, and to welcome someone else’s having found the truth he was seeking. And, far from having a motive to obfuscate, he will try to see and explain things as clearly as he can.”
“I suspect, though, that an ability to analyze and evaluate data is what led you to university in the first place, not something you discovered only after you arrived there.” This is a very good point and one I wasn’t considering.
I agree filing systems are necessary… and identity politics are garbage.
I also see in your point that ignorant vs uneducated are two different characteristics -hence the “credentials” reference.
I’ve met some very worldly people and later found their education was not what I assumed.
While I have found it difficult to understand how people have become so politically polarized when I have friends/loved ones from both sides of the spectrum that are good, kind people. I believe social media and cable “news” networks have ruined any chance of closing the gap. Of course, there is an inability to discern between fact and fiction for many citizens - more now than ever.
My mother always said every politician lies, and here I am dumbfounded at the amount of verbal diarrhea I hear on a daily basis…
Thanks for your reply. If you had a wise, loving mother and father, you already had the best start in life anyone could hope for. My own mother had a truly remarkable career. Born in Ottawa to a family with little money (three generations sharing one house), she ended up hosting her own radio show in Toronto, was a panelist on a national television show, served on the governing council of the University of Toronto, served on several corporate boards (she was Canada's first-ever female board member of a major bank), became a Senator, and was an Order of Canada recipient, the country's highest civilian award for excellence; yet she also found time to read, golf, fish, and for her real passion—gardening—and was the kindest, most loving mother imaginable to four children. Don't ever let anyone tell you women can't have it all.
Many now share your skepticism about media (no one needs a graduate degree in information science to know when they're being lied to), and media failure is an ongoing concern of mine. Our judgment can't be more reliable than the sources that inform it; and the political polarization that's taken over the information commons—giving us a generation of would-be social engineers who masquerade their activism as objective journalism, while crafting narratives that bear no relation to reality, even as a negation of it—is a tragedy. The very people who fraudulently pose as champions of democracy now undermine the process of information diffusion on which democracy depends.
This is a realignment caused by the Democrats over a long period of time, which is why they will have such a hard time defeating it. It started with Bill Clinton moving the party to the right on economic issues in the 1990s, essentially adopting Ronald Reagan's economic philosophy with a few tweaks. That narrowed the gap between the two parties on economic issues to the point where they were nearly indistinguishable, and they began to attract higher income, higher education voters.
Then in the 21st century, in step with liberal arts departments at universities, they moved radically to the left on social issues, culminating in the election of one of those college radicals (albeit deceptively radical initially), Barack Obama. The nexus of economic globalization and higher ed cultural radicalism was Silicon Valley. San Francisco, which had been the birthplace of the 1960s Boomer counter culture, became the richest city in the world.
After the failures of Bush 43 and the 2008 crash, the Republican Party had collapsed, and the Democrats ran amok. The most radical cultural elements of the far left were now flush with cash from big donors. So while the pre-existing Republican establishment was completely discredited, the new Democrat machine was creating more and more exiles and enemies, damaged and terrified by its behavior, as there was no check on the left continually becoming more extreme. The Trump coalition is organic, consisting of everyone who does not like what the Democrats have been doing with all of the dominance and power they've had, while the Republicans stumbled around blindly, having lost credibility on their previous two biggest issues, the economy and national security, barely able to produce a whimper of protest against Obama.
In other words, the Democrats have been given enough rope to hang themselves. There has been no check on their ideology and agenda since 2008, and it has created massive casualties. They have the economic agenda of Silicon Valley and Davos, and the cultural agenda of Berkeley. If they now reject the cultural agenda without rejecting the globalist economic agenda, they will lose the only thing they had to hold on to middle and working class black, Hispanic and Asian voters, and be left with nothing but rich, college educated white women. If they reject the economic agenda, they will begin to lose their big money advantage, and college educated voters, who ultimately care most about their money. They have gone down a blind alley. They are at a dead end. They got the power they wanted, and when they used it, it was a disaster.
The hysterical reaction to Trump comes from knowing that they have no leg to stand on. They can't even debate issues, because their positions are incoherent and indefensible. They scream in order to distract people from the disaster of their governance. It is amazing that they still hold as much power as they do. When you look at a place like California, which has been utterly destroyed by Democrats in power, it is amazing that voters there still cling to them. Of course, many of the ones who wouldn't have left.
You can look at specific elections and see proximate causes for the outcome. In this case it is inflation, the economy in general, immigration, and "wokeness" that are most cited as reasons why people voted against them. It could be that they could make slight adjustments and win again in a more favorable environment. But in the big picture, it is clear that this realignment is happening, and Democrats have nowhere to go.
Excellent points. And what’s left of the old GOP establishment is still stumbling around blindly, unable or unwilling to admit their incompetence and the new coalition that Trump has created.
His early speeches, like the first one at the 2004 DNC, were all about "there's no red or blue America, blah blah". Empty platitudes that he knew would appeal rhetorically, read from a teleprompter. Anyone who actually looked into who he was could see the truth, but the media covered for him and worked for him in ways they never had before. Obama was where the legacy media abandoned any pretense of being anything other than propaganda for the Democrats. He signaled his intentions to the far left at times, saying things like, "we're going to fundamentally transform the United States!", but nobody wanted to know who he was. They just wanted to vote for the image.
In reality, Obama was immersed in the far left his whole life. He was "mentored" as a teenager in Hawaii by an unrepentant Stalinist, black racial communist named Frank Marshall Davis. He gave speeches at Harvard on behalf of Derrick Bell, the creator of "critical race theory". He spent 20 years in the church of Jeremiah Wright, whose agenda was called "black liberation theology" ("liberation theology" being a Marxist subversion of Christianity that had been fought tooth and nail by the Catholic Church), and who relentlessly spewed hatred for the US and Israel from the pulpit. He worked in Chicago as a "community organizer" (a far left activist), and served as a lawyer for ACORN, which was convicted of orchestrating voter fraud. When he announced his candidacy for his first political position, he did it at the home of William Ayers, the founder of the Weather Underground, a Marxist terrorist organization from the 1970s.
Within his first year in office, he started a racial controversy when he attacked police as "stupid" for questioning Henry Louis Gates, an elite academic radical, for breaking into his own home after he locked himself out. Which led to the pathetic "beer summit" between him and the cops. As the years wore on, there was Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, BLM, etc. The #1 most frequent visitor to Obama's White House was Al Sharpton.
What we now know as "wokeness" was and is Barack Obama's lifelong ideology, and that's how it became the massive disaster it is today. He was never questioned on anything, and never held accountable for anything, including his dismal economic record. He was given the Nobel Prize just for getting elected.
We can all wax eloquently and invent all sorts of charts, etc. to explain what happened but in my humble opinion it comes down to who do you trust more, a party that runs on BS and fearmongering or one that doesn't?
"Lesser-credentialed coalition" might be a better term to use, than "lower-education coalition".
For those within this coalition have been educated by experience and consequence, outside of the Petri dish of intellectual inbreeding that "higher education" has become.
I was recently on YouTube watching parts of the full ABC broadcast of election night 2016, and it was *wild*. At the start of the evening the panel was talking about how the increase in Latino population (e.g. in Florida's I-4 corridor) would put Hillary over the top, how after Trump got embarrassed the Republicans would need to shift left on immigration, etc., etc. Makes you wonder how people will look back at last week's election in 8 years.
We can like this analysis and still quibble with its terminology, specifically The Atlantic's claim that the crucial division between voters is now the 'educated' vs. the 'uneducated.' Pretending that 'college degree' equals 'educated' simply commits the fallacy of logical equivocation. There's no reason to suppose that someone who spent three or four years on a college campus has a better general education than someone who spent the same amount of time learning a trade, reading books and browsing the internet.
The only way to tell how these two individuals' grasp of what's going on in the world, and of how things work, compare and contrast is by interviewing them; and what you'd likely find is what you'd expect: neither individual knows everything, and each knows things the other does not. What the degree-bearer can doubtless claim is to be better inculcated into a certain college-wide cultural ethos; but it doesn't follow that what the degree-bearer possesses more of is education. It would be entirely arbitrary to define education that way.
Correct. It should be categorized as credentialed vs. non-credentialed.
I'm credentialed to read Husserl's Logical Investigations and understand it, but not to build a house or repair a car engine. Don't fly in any plane for which the person attempting to rivet the wings to the fuselage was me.
I realize the times I have ventured out of my comfort zone have exposed me to many new things in life. I grew up in a rural area and now I'm a suburban dweller. I worked a blue-collar job for 14 years -> then earned a science degree in nursing. I can't tell if your comment implies college culture is the same for all.... and discredits that fact that it "educates" students because there's exposure to diversity. This usually encourages self-reflection and acceptance of those that are "different" - basically, students are required to critically think if they want to be successful. There is nothing wrong with that.
We are all complex human beings. It does a disservice to group anyone by their education/income as it does any other. People's knowledge and opinions are complex & multifactorial. It boggles my mind when I hear this idea that colleges indoctrinate students; hard science and mathematics do not lean...
Perhaps, traditional students experience a broadening of their views because they're so neuroplastic. Also, part of the brain that isn't fully matured (avg age of full maturity = 25 years) is related to the ability to rationalize, which seems to be a requirement for critical thinking.
Furthering my education required me to research, analyze and evaluate data knowing that my hypothesis can be proven or disproven. I stopped being lazy (as I refer to my 16yo that believes whatever he hears) and became hungry for understanding reasons for or how something is the way it is. Unfortunately, when you're talking about human choices or behaviors... too many factors and this is why grouping them cannot be justified.
“I can't tell if your comment implies college culture is the same for all...”
Not exactly the same, since no two individuals experience things the same way or are exposed to identical sets of things to experience. Still, we can legitimately distinguish between those who've gone to college and interacted with professors and fellow students and those who haven't, and make some general assumptions about the range of experiences to which they've likely been exposed. My quarrel was with the assumption that 'attended college' and 'is better educated' amount to the same thing. That's simply a logical equivocation—we can't substitute these two very different concepts for each other in a proposition without changing the proposition's meaning.
“... and discredits that fact that it "educates" students because there's exposure to diversity.”
Jim Goad somewhat sardonically notes in one of his books that the lower middle class neighbourhood he grew up in was much more ethnically, racially and culturally diverse than most university sociology classes. In any event, 'being educated' and ' being exposed to diversity' are also obviously different things.
“This usually encourages self-reflection and acceptance of those that are "different"...”
Claims like this are generally all the better for proof. Self-knowledge is the hardest kind of knowledge to come by, and I'm not sure an individual's capacity for self-reflection has much to do with his/her environment. As for whether confronting 'those that are different' is likelier to encourage acceptance or rejection, surely this will depend at least in part on how profound the differences are. Perhaps a survey would be in order before venturing an opinion either way.
“...basically, students are required to critically think if they want to be successful. There is nothing wrong with that.”
I'm all for critical thinking, though I don't think the kind of diversity you're talking about has much to do with it. Monocultures (Japan in the past, Finland and Denmark today) have certainly produced their share of acutely critical thinkers.
“We are all complex human beings.”
Not only that, as Huxley pointed out we're all 'island universes,' each inaccessible to the other; hence, when a person dies, “a universe dies.” Nietzsche said, “In the final analysis, we experience only ourselves.”
“It does a disservice to group anyone by their education/income as it does any other.”
I agree, if by this you mean that such grouping is no guide to their worth as human beings. This is the basic problem with all filing systems: any criterion used to group people or things one way (alphabetical, for instance) inevitably scatters them in all other ways. Nevertheless, we still find filing systems useful for all sorts of reasons. How, for example, are you going to devise and administer social assistance programs to help low income families if you can't identify 'low income' people in the first place?
“People's knowledge and opinions are complex & multifactorial.”
Which rather undermines the thinking behind identity politics, doesn't it? Your race or ethnicity aren't 'identifiers'—such classifications are far too broad. An identifier has to be something unique—your fingerprints, for example, or your social insurance number. Ironically, so-called 'identity politics' is ethically problematic for the very same reason racism is: it doesn't allow individuals to speak for themselves. If it's true 'diversity' you're after, you won't find it in the crude categories of identity politics.
“It boggles my mind when I hear this idea that colleges indoctrinate students; hard science and mathematics do not lean...”
When writers like Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff speak about indoctrination on campus they generally have the humanities in mind, though STEM subjects haven't proved entirely immune from ideological assault. But I think we're straying somewhat from the post to which you're responding here: whether we're more likely to be 'indoctrinated' on campus or off isn't really its concern. The issue is whether grouping people 'on campus' or 'off campus' reliably tells us how 'educated' they are. I don't think it does. It might reliably tell us something about the nature of the training they've received (you in nursing, for instance); but that's a different matter.
“Perhaps, traditional students experience a broadening of their views because they're so neuroplastic.”
It seems highly doubtful that the brains of 'traditional students' are more 'neuroplastic' than the brains of others the same age, or that such neuroplasticity has much influence on whether their views end up broad or narrow.
“Furthering my education required me to research, analyze and evaluate data knowing that my hypothesis can be proven or disproven.”
That's great. I'm glad things worked out for you and that you're managing to follow your dream. I suspect, though, that an ability to analyze and evaluate data is what led you to university in the first place, not something you discovered only after you arrived there.
“...and became hungry for understanding reasons for or how something is the way it is.”
You're on your way to becoming a philosopher, Michelle, like Susan Haack, whose advice I think can be usefully applied to any endeavour:
“The genuine inquirer wants to get to the truth of the matter that concerns him, whether or not that truth comports with what he believed at the outset of his investigation, and whether or not his acknowledgment of that truth is likely to get him tenure, or to make him rich, famous, or popular. So he is motivated to seek out and assess the worth of evidence and arguments thoroughly and impartially. This doesn't just mean that he will be hard-working; it is a matter, rather, of willingness to re-think, to re-appraise, to spend as long as it takes on the detail that might be fatal, to give as much thought to the last one percent as to the rest. The genuine inquirer will be ready to acknowledge, to himself as well as others, where his evidence and arguments seem shakiest, and his articulation of problem or solution vaguest. He will be willing to go with the evidence even to unpopular conclusions, and to welcome someone else’s having found the truth he was seeking. And, far from having a motive to obfuscate, he will try to see and explain things as clearly as he can.”
--Susan Haack
“I suspect, though, that an ability to analyze and evaluate data is what led you to university in the first place, not something you discovered only after you arrived there.” This is a very good point and one I wasn’t considering.
I agree filing systems are necessary… and identity politics are garbage.
I also see in your point that ignorant vs uneducated are two different characteristics -hence the “credentials” reference.
I’ve met some very worldly people and later found their education was not what I assumed.
While I have found it difficult to understand how people have become so politically polarized when I have friends/loved ones from both sides of the spectrum that are good, kind people. I believe social media and cable “news” networks have ruined any chance of closing the gap. Of course, there is an inability to discern between fact and fiction for many citizens - more now than ever.
My mother always said every politician lies, and here I am dumbfounded at the amount of verbal diarrhea I hear on a daily basis…
I’m sorry…. I digress!
Thanks for your reply. If you had a wise, loving mother and father, you already had the best start in life anyone could hope for. My own mother had a truly remarkable career. Born in Ottawa to a family with little money (three generations sharing one house), she ended up hosting her own radio show in Toronto, was a panelist on a national television show, served on the governing council of the University of Toronto, served on several corporate boards (she was Canada's first-ever female board member of a major bank), became a Senator, and was an Order of Canada recipient, the country's highest civilian award for excellence; yet she also found time to read, golf, fish, and for her real passion—gardening—and was the kindest, most loving mother imaginable to four children. Don't ever let anyone tell you women can't have it all.
Many now share your skepticism about media (no one needs a graduate degree in information science to know when they're being lied to), and media failure is an ongoing concern of mine. Our judgment can't be more reliable than the sources that inform it; and the political polarization that's taken over the information commons—giving us a generation of would-be social engineers who masquerade their activism as objective journalism, while crafting narratives that bear no relation to reality, even as a negation of it—is a tragedy. The very people who fraudulently pose as champions of democracy now undermine the process of information diffusion on which democracy depends.
In a fair election this 2024 result makes perfect sense. I’m a Hispanic women suburbanite with an advanced degree. Harris had no chance for my vote
This is a realignment caused by the Democrats over a long period of time, which is why they will have such a hard time defeating it. It started with Bill Clinton moving the party to the right on economic issues in the 1990s, essentially adopting Ronald Reagan's economic philosophy with a few tweaks. That narrowed the gap between the two parties on economic issues to the point where they were nearly indistinguishable, and they began to attract higher income, higher education voters.
Then in the 21st century, in step with liberal arts departments at universities, they moved radically to the left on social issues, culminating in the election of one of those college radicals (albeit deceptively radical initially), Barack Obama. The nexus of economic globalization and higher ed cultural radicalism was Silicon Valley. San Francisco, which had been the birthplace of the 1960s Boomer counter culture, became the richest city in the world.
After the failures of Bush 43 and the 2008 crash, the Republican Party had collapsed, and the Democrats ran amok. The most radical cultural elements of the far left were now flush with cash from big donors. So while the pre-existing Republican establishment was completely discredited, the new Democrat machine was creating more and more exiles and enemies, damaged and terrified by its behavior, as there was no check on the left continually becoming more extreme. The Trump coalition is organic, consisting of everyone who does not like what the Democrats have been doing with all of the dominance and power they've had, while the Republicans stumbled around blindly, having lost credibility on their previous two biggest issues, the economy and national security, barely able to produce a whimper of protest against Obama.
In other words, the Democrats have been given enough rope to hang themselves. There has been no check on their ideology and agenda since 2008, and it has created massive casualties. They have the economic agenda of Silicon Valley and Davos, and the cultural agenda of Berkeley. If they now reject the cultural agenda without rejecting the globalist economic agenda, they will lose the only thing they had to hold on to middle and working class black, Hispanic and Asian voters, and be left with nothing but rich, college educated white women. If they reject the economic agenda, they will begin to lose their big money advantage, and college educated voters, who ultimately care most about their money. They have gone down a blind alley. They are at a dead end. They got the power they wanted, and when they used it, it was a disaster.
The hysterical reaction to Trump comes from knowing that they have no leg to stand on. They can't even debate issues, because their positions are incoherent and indefensible. They scream in order to distract people from the disaster of their governance. It is amazing that they still hold as much power as they do. When you look at a place like California, which has been utterly destroyed by Democrats in power, it is amazing that voters there still cling to them. Of course, many of the ones who wouldn't have left.
You can look at specific elections and see proximate causes for the outcome. In this case it is inflation, the economy in general, immigration, and "wokeness" that are most cited as reasons why people voted against them. It could be that they could make slight adjustments and win again in a more favorable environment. But in the big picture, it is clear that this realignment is happening, and Democrats have nowhere to go.
Excellent points. And what’s left of the old GOP establishment is still stumbling around blindly, unable or unwilling to admit their incompetence and the new coalition that Trump has created.
Fantastic historical analysis. Thank you! Curious to know why you say that the college radical Obama was “deceptively radical initially”?
His early speeches, like the first one at the 2004 DNC, were all about "there's no red or blue America, blah blah". Empty platitudes that he knew would appeal rhetorically, read from a teleprompter. Anyone who actually looked into who he was could see the truth, but the media covered for him and worked for him in ways they never had before. Obama was where the legacy media abandoned any pretense of being anything other than propaganda for the Democrats. He signaled his intentions to the far left at times, saying things like, "we're going to fundamentally transform the United States!", but nobody wanted to know who he was. They just wanted to vote for the image.
In reality, Obama was immersed in the far left his whole life. He was "mentored" as a teenager in Hawaii by an unrepentant Stalinist, black racial communist named Frank Marshall Davis. He gave speeches at Harvard on behalf of Derrick Bell, the creator of "critical race theory". He spent 20 years in the church of Jeremiah Wright, whose agenda was called "black liberation theology" ("liberation theology" being a Marxist subversion of Christianity that had been fought tooth and nail by the Catholic Church), and who relentlessly spewed hatred for the US and Israel from the pulpit. He worked in Chicago as a "community organizer" (a far left activist), and served as a lawyer for ACORN, which was convicted of orchestrating voter fraud. When he announced his candidacy for his first political position, he did it at the home of William Ayers, the founder of the Weather Underground, a Marxist terrorist organization from the 1970s.
Within his first year in office, he started a racial controversy when he attacked police as "stupid" for questioning Henry Louis Gates, an elite academic radical, for breaking into his own home after he locked himself out. Which led to the pathetic "beer summit" between him and the cops. As the years wore on, there was Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, BLM, etc. The #1 most frequent visitor to Obama's White House was Al Sharpton.
What we now know as "wokeness" was and is Barack Obama's lifelong ideology, and that's how it became the massive disaster it is today. He was never questioned on anything, and never held accountable for anything, including his dismal economic record. He was given the Nobel Prize just for getting elected.
We can all wax eloquently and invent all sorts of charts, etc. to explain what happened but in my humble opinion it comes down to who do you trust more, a party that runs on BS and fearmongering or one that doesn't?
"Lesser-credentialed coalition" might be a better term to use, than "lower-education coalition".
For those within this coalition have been educated by experience and consequence, outside of the Petri dish of intellectual inbreeding that "higher education" has become.