Thomas Frank, the Dem ‘Kansas Whisperer’, phoned in with an op-ed about the election results for the New York Times whose only worthwhile part is the opener.
Everyone has a moment when they first realized that Donald Trump might well return, and here is mine. It was back in March, during a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, when I happened to read the explanatory text beside an old painting. This note described the westward advance of the United States in the 19th century as “settler colonialism.” I read it and I knew instantly where this nation was going.
My problem with this bit of academic jargon was not that it was wrong, per se, or that President Biden was somehow responsible for putting it there, but rather that it offered a glimpse of our poisoned class relations. Some curator at one of our most exalted institutions of public instruction had decided to use a currently fashionable, morally loaded academic keyword to address a visitor to the museum — say, a family from the Midwest, doing the round of national shrines — and teach them a lesson about American wickedness.
By the second paragraph, Frank is already backpedaling from this observation about the poisonous power of wokeness. The rest of the op-ed is a barely digestible mush in which he complains that the Democrats spent too much time talking about Liz Cheney and not enough about unions.
(They spent far more time talking about unions than they did Liz Cheney or ‘war making’.)
Frank isn’t wrong when he identified that painting caption as a fracture point. He’s just wrong about why it matters. He’d like the Democrats to be a ‘working class party’ again, but he either doesn’t understand what the problem is or can’t say it out loud.
An anti-American party can’t be a working-class party. Leftist movements, no matter how evil or destructive, could be patriotic in the sense of upholding the national greatness of a country they took over. The Bolsheviks were patriotic in that sense. They wanted a great Russia. The Chinese Communists wanted a great China. Do America’s leftists want a great America?
The “settler colonialism” tag gives us the answer. What they believe in is destroying America.
That was not always the case. A Communist takeover in the 1920s would have led to a horrifying tyranny but one dedicated to a strong Communist America. Maybe even in the 1950s.
By the 1970s, the idea of America was fundamentally anathema. Western civilization itself had to be destroyed. Third world dogma demanded the end of the United States. And of Europe.
An anti-American party has plenty to do for writers, activists, gender theorists and organizers. It can have jobs for techies and academics, but it doesn’t have anything to do for the working class.
Especially when you pile on environmentalism.
Beyond offering a lot of government freebies (on a race and trans tested basis) it has nothing to say to the working class. Even unionization has become an upper middle class hipster phenomenon at major newspapers, government agencies and nonprofits.
What working class people actually want are good steady well paying jobs with a ladder upward for themselves and their children. That’s why Trump’s tariffs are appealing. And it’s why Democrats are unconvincing when it comes to protectionism because they don’t believe that America is worth protecting. It’s why Democrats can no longer be a working class party. They’re not working class and they don’t believe in protecting America from anything. Nor do they value the working class as anything except segments of a potential base whose value is tiered based on race.
The Great Society, which Frank would like to get back to, was the product of Democrats who were at least outwardly patriotic or at least could speak the language. Kamala was the product of transnational elites who happened to live in America, but could just as easily have been raised and be running for office on the same program anywhere in Europe or Canada.
Her priority wasn’t the working class, it was using equity to cut America down to size.
How do the Dems get back to a working class party when they’re not working class and they hate the country that the working class lives in? They can’t wage a revolution for the working class because their revolution is on behalf of overthrowing America, not its government, but its society, culture, values and geographic existence?
You can’t fight for the people of a country you want to destroy.