A few points.
First, the people I listen to who have talked about ‘walking away’ from the left are not walking away from ‘liberalism’. In fact, they are leaving the left because they are enlightenment liberals who believe the left has become illiberal, abandoning traditional left-wing beliefs like free expression, free speech, free trade, staying out of people’s bedrooms and tolerance of intellectual diversity, and instead have embraced hard left socialist economics and identity politics.
These people are most certainly not running to the Republicans. And most of them can’t stand Donald Trump. But they are sick of watching academics being destroyed by left-wing twitter mobs over an intemperate comment or a political stance not entirely aligned with the outrage du-jure, or hounded off of campuses because they are white people who won’t participate in a ‘white people get out’ day on their campus.
The people I’m talking about are people who have generally been on the center or even fairly far left like Sam Harris, Bret and Eric Weinstein, Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin. You may want to hand wave these people away, but they have a HUGE audience. And unless auditoriums are being filled by Russian bots, that doesn’t explain it. These guys are doing speaking tours and selling out almost everywhere they go. Harris has such a large, dedicated audience that he is the fourth most popular podcast on Patreon, earning between $8K and $10K per podcast. Those Russian bots sure have a lot of money. He does sell-out speaking tours across the country. Dave Rubin has 800,000 youtube followers. Jordan Peterson’s book has been on the best seller charts for many weeks. Joe Rogan, who has allied himself largely with this group of people, has 3 million subscribers. And those are just the people I happen to listen to.
Collectively, these people pull in bigger viewership numbers than CNN. And they have an audience that is far more engaged. There are many, many others. Ignore them at your peril.
Not quite. Try this:
- The Democrats have tried to build a coalition of aggrieved identity groups, then lock them together through ‘intersectionality’ so that they are all forced to support each other and vote as a bloc for left-wing candidates.
- These identity groups do not always agree with each other, leading to conflict. Feminists are colliding with transgendered people. Black issues are colliding with the policy of unrestricted open immigration. Muslim immigrants have values directly opposed to most other Democrat identity groups. The coalition is cracking.
For example, the black community as a whole is more socially conservative than the white community. 70% of black voters voted for proposition 8 in California to ban gay marriage. Obama himself opposed gay marriage before a national election forced him to change his views. Blacks are also more likely than whites to support traditional roles for men and women in the home and the work force. And black people tend to be more religious than white people, so when Democrats are seen as being anti-religion (or at least anti-Christian), it’s a problem.
Black people voted Democrat because Democrats were the party of the civil rights act, and because in the 70’s and 80’s Democrats fought for affirmative action for blacks, housing for blacks, forced busing to get blacks out of the worst schools, etc.
Fast forward to today, and the housing projects aren’t looking so good, and the inner cities are being neglected. The Democrats’ focus on gay rights, feminism, global warming and open borders are not ‘black’ issues, but rather the issues of white educated liberals in coastal cities.
Educational choice (widely supported by blacks) is now supported by Republicans and opposed by Democrats because Democrats are in the pocket of the teacher’s unions.
The worst cities for blacks to live in are all one-party Democrat-run cities, and they’ve been that way for decades. They’re starting to notice that. For example, from WWII until the 1960’s there was a huge migration of blacks from the south into Northern cities, which helped those cities and states turn blue. Historically, about 90% of America’s blacks lived in the south from the start of the country until 1920. by 1970 only slightly more than 50% of blacks lived in the South, and that number stayed relatively fixed for two decades. But as the inner cities collapsed and violence and poverty rose, blacks started moving back to the south - mostly from states like New York, California, Illinois and Michigan.
Politically, there was a huge tidal shift in the 60’s when the Democrats captured working class blacks along with other blue collar workers in the civil rights era. They shifted again when Reagan split off many blue collar workers from the Democrats, who became ‘Reagan Democrats’. Then they shifted again with Bill Clinton, who recaptured blue collar workers including many black families from George HW Bush , who was seen as an out-of-touch elite who didn’t care about the working class.
The Democrats better hope that another shift doesn’t happen and blacks walk away from a party that seems to have abandoned working class issues in favor of ‘social justice’ for groups blacks aren’t particularly fond of. The Secret of Trump’s success is that he unexpectedly turned the blue collar working vote back to the Republicans. If he does the same with black people, the Democrats are in deep trouble.
Open immigration is also a problem for low income black voters, as they are disproportionately affected by the influx of low-income workers who are now in a new preferred minority.
But the #Walkaway movement isn’t really about blue collar black voters. The really scary thing for Democrats is that a lot of it is coming from highly educated people, including university professors who still believe in the old 60’s radical values of free speech and free expression. Watching their colleagues on the left being destroyed by some outrage archaeologist pouring through twitter histories for something to be outraged about is pushing some of them away from the Democrats.
In the case of the Weinsteins and Dawkins, they are sickened by what they see as the abandonment of science on the left - particularly in evolutionary biology, where you can now have your career destroyed for citing well established science regarding gender roles and the genetic, physical and mental differences between men and women.
The James Damore situation at Google has also ‘woken up’ a lot of left-leaning techies, who watched that guy have his career destroyed for citing the actual science regarding how men and women tend to differ in what jobs they want to do.
It’s easy to get them back. Find another Bill Clinton, except without the sexual baggage. A moderate governor from a mid-western or southern state who can speak to the poverty there and who is willing to have a ‘Sister Souljah’ moment and take on his own side when it gets crazy. Someone who believes in Capitalism, but with a stronger safety net. Someone willing to take on the teacher’s unions and admit that the educational system is failing minorities, and not just because teachers don’t make enough money. A politician like that would destroy Trump.
Instead, the Democrats will probably run someone like Elizabeth Warren, Keith Ellison or Bernie Sanders, and lose again. Or they’ll wind up with a cadre of young know-nothing socialists like Alexandria ocasio-Cortez in the party, and they’ll drive it off a cliff.
But by all means, just assume that #walkaway can’t possibly be real and all things negative for Democrats can be hand-waved away as Russian interference. Because that’s how you get more Trump.
On the bright side, you’ll always have the Russians to blame. Who would have guessed that the Democrats would morph into the John Birch Society so quickly?