[guest post by JVW]
Over at the New York Times, the house conservative has some very interesting thoughts on why the traditional left continues to lose ground:
In Australia a week ago, the party of the left lost an election it was supposed to win, to a conservative government headed by an evangelical Christian who won working-class votes by opposing liberal climate policies. In India last week, the Hindu-nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, won an overwhelming electoral victory. And as of this writing, Europeans are electing a Parliament that promises to have more populist representation than before.
The global fade of liberalism, in other words, appears to be continuing. Right-wing populism struggles to govern effectively, but it clearly has a durable political appeal — which, as Tyler Cowen points out in a Bloomberg column, has not yet been counteracted by the new socialism, the new new left.
Mr. Douthat then pivots to the United States, where Democrats have taken it as an article of faith that they are the true majority, their ideas are broadly popular, and they are only being denied power because of institutional quirks particular to our system, a theory that he finds lacking:
The strategic flaw in this reading of the liberal situation is that politics isn’t about casually held opinions on a wide range of topics, but focused prioritization of specifics. As the Democratic data analyst David Shor has noted, you can take a cluster of nine Democratic positions that each poll over 50 percent individually, and find that only 18 percent of Americans agree with all of them. And a single strong, focused disagreement can be enough to turn a voter against liberalism, especially if liberals seem uncompromising on that issue.
Because the left dominates the culture, argues Mr. Douthat, they fail to grasp that their political coalition consists largely of voters with narrow interests which often don’t naturally overlap with each other. This makes it harder for the party to expand their influence beyond the base of true blue believers and attract independents. That voter who believes strongly that we need to make an almost immediate switch to renewable energy may not be too keen on confiscatory tax rates being used to subsidize “free” college and single-payer health care. The voter who believes that the government should mandate higher wages may be turned off by the party’s kowtowing to intersectional grievance-mongering interests. Mr. Douthat suggests that the uncompromising hard line taken by the left is causing the shrillness of tone that is currently de rigueur among party stalwarts:
. . . [I]nstead of recognizing populism as a motley coalition united primarily by opposition to liberalism’s rule, liberals want to believe they’re facing a unitary enemy — a revanchist patriarchal white supremacy, infecting every branch and tributary of the right.
In this view it’s not enough to see racial resentment as one important form of anti-liberalism (which it surely is); all anti-liberalism must fall under the canopy. Libertarianism is white supremacy, the N.R.A. is white supremacy, immigration skepticism is white supremacy, tax-sensitive suburbia is white supremacy, the pro-life movement is white supremacy, anxiety about terrorism is white supremacy … and you can’t compromise with white supremacists, you can only crush them.
If you read the comments to Mr. Douthat’s piece, you won’t be surprised to find that New York Times readers strongly reject the notion that the party’s current obsessions are counter-productive, so once again wise counsel falls upon deaf ears.
– JVW
