POC liberal Fareed Zakaria knocks down the idea that there's a "Crisis of Democracy" in the west.
No, he says. It's a crisis of progressive governance, which is a catastrophic failure.
Turning out these deplorable authoritarian failures is the correction to the crisis, not the crisis itself.
The crisis of democracy is really a crisis for the left
Why is the left flailing? Look at New York vs. Florida.
Countries with more than half of the world's population went to the polls last year. And the basic message they sent to their governments was one of dissatisfaction and anger with the status quo. Their frustration seemed to be particularly focused on the side that has traditionally been identified with big government, the left.
Almost everywhere you look, the left is in ruins. Of the 27 countries of the European Union, only a handful have left-of-center parties leading government coalitions. The primary left-of-center party in the European Parliament now has just 136 seats in a 720-seat chamber. Even in countries that have been able to stem the rise of right-wing populism, such as Poland, it is the center-right that is thriving, not the left. And in the United States, of course, the breadth of Donald Trump's victory -- nearly 90 percent of U.S. counties moved right -- suggests that it is very much part of this trend.
The crisis of democratic government then, is actually a crisis of progressive government. People seem to feel that they have been taxed, regulated, bossed around and intimidated by left-of-center politicians for decades -- but the results are bad and have been getting worse.
New York, where I live, and Florida, where I often visit, provide an interesting contrast.
They have comparable populations -- New York with about 20 million people, Florida with 23 million. But New York state's budget is more than double that of Florida ($239 billion vs. roughly $116 billion). New York City, which is a little more than three times the size of Miami-Dade County, has a budget of more than $100 billion, which is nearly 10 times that of Miami-Dade. New York City's spending grew from 2012 to 2019 by 40 percent, four times the rate of inflation. Does any New Yorker feel that they got 40 percent better services during that time?
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The ultimate test, of course, is how people are voting with their feet. For years, New York has been losing people to states such as Florida. This same story can be told with minor variations about California and Texas. Basically, big red states are growing at the expense of big blue states, which will translate politically into more Republican representation in Congress and more electoral votes....
On the other side, if Democrats do not learn some hard lessons from the poor governance in many blue cities and states, they will be seen as defending cultural elites, woke ideology and bloated, inefficient government. That might be a formula for permanent minority status.
The author of The Coming Democratic Majority back in the early 90s, Ruy Teixiera, is now writing not of a permanent Democrat majority but a permanent Democrat minority.
In the wake of the Democrats' drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the GOP, you'd assume the party would be all-in on a fundamental rethink, starting with some serious soul-searching on how the party came to be so out of sync with the majority of America on key cultural questions.
Questions like: Is America really a "white supremacist" society? What does "structural racism" even mean and does it explain all the socioeconomic problems of nonwhites? Is anyone who raises questions about immigration levels a racist? Are personal pronouns necessary and something that should be popularized if not demanded? Are transwomen exactly the same as biological women and are those who question such a claim simply "haters" who should be expunged from polite society?
For each of these questions, the answer for the overwhelming majority of Americans is an obvious no. But in elite Democratic circles, it's a different story. For a party pondering its unpopularity, you might think that this gap would be a good place to start.
Well, if the two months since the election is anything to go by, you'd be wrong. Instead, much of the party is maneuvering to change as little as possible on the cultural front.
Why? Because fundamentally today's Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues real issues. They are typically viewed as politically motivated distractions or as expressions of something else entirely (i.e., racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, etc.) They are not treated as issues that need to be dealt with on their own terms.
He cites Democrats diminishing the impact of the left's unbearable cultural imperialism in order to avoid any need for change. He discusses various copes to avoid reality, including the changing the subject, claiming that people are really just mad about corporate big-wigs or something.
Of course there are also those who claim "we just have to take control of the narrative." Haven't you already been controlling the narrative through jackbooted censorship and debanking for ten years?
And then there are the "dead enders," the Sonny Hostin types who insist that it's not Democrats who have to rethink their positions, but Republicans.
Finally, he notes that many Democrats avoid taking any kind of blame for the historic loss by claiming that it was all just baked into the cake due to inflation and covid fatigue (ignoring the fact that Democrats caused these problems), and this is affecting all the countries of the world, so there's nothing we could have done and therefore there is no reason at all to change.
See the article for that.
This is all pretty remarkable, given that in this election the top reason among swing voters not to vote for Harris was the perception that she was focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than on helping the middle class (Blueprint research group polling). This of course was the theme of the campaign's most effective ad (Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you).
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In light of these findings, how it even possible that so many Democrats stubbornly refuse to admit cultural issues are a good chunk of what is dragging down the Democratic brand with ordinary voters, especially working-class voters? How can they persist in their blinkered culture denialism? We're definitely getting into "who are you going to believe--me or your lying eyes?" territory.
Obviously, part of it is fear of "the Groups"--the advocacy groups who push the positions above--and their many allies across social and mainstream media, foundations, academia, think tanks and within the Democratic party infrastructure itself. Those who might wish to point out the obvious--that Democrats' association with cultural leftism is a huge problem for the party--are not unreasonably afraid that they will face an onslaught of criticism from the Groups and their allies....
So fear is clearly a factor in culture denialism. And voters have picked up on this--they have a sense that the inmates are running the asylum....
However I think the problem goes deeper than the fear, real as that may be. The idea has penetrated deeply into the Democrats' DNA that these issues are not real issues. They are artefacts of the Republican attack machine, preying on bigoted impulses, rather than real concerns of voters.
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These issues reflect deeply held beliefs and values and are vitally important to ordinary voters, especially working-class voters, not diversions from real issues foisted upon them by crafty Republicans. So far, even the screamingly obvious implications of this last election have not been enough to shock many, if not most, Democrats out of their culture denialist torpor. We shall see if this denialism survives the next few years of the Trump administration and the necessity Democrats clearly face to broaden their coalition among the very voters for whom cultural issues are intensely real and the Democratic brand intensely alienating.
Some political theorists are calling this "The Triumph of Conan Politics" or "Our Cimmerian Moment."