How wokeness could cost the Democrats the election

This time around, Hillary Clinton is not lamenting Republican ‘deplorables’. She has chosen instead, along with Kamala Harris, to label Donald Trump and his supporters as out-and-out fascists. Different words but the same meaning: anyone who backs the GOP candidate in next week’s US presidential election is an enabler for modern-day blackshirts or stormtroopers.

But for many Americans, the real ‘deplorables’ are to be found among Harris’s backers, such as the tech oligarchs who dominate the economy, the financiers of Wall Street or the moguls of mainstream media. Think of the likes of Bill Gates, who just forked in $50million to the Harris campaign.

Even more detested by most of the public are the ‘progressive’ activist class that has embraced Harris and shaped her past record. This group, as the author Musa al-Gharbi writes in his new book, We Have Never Been Woke, constitutes ‘a new elite’. Trained as ‘symbolic analysts’, these often flailing graduates and professionals now represent a revolutionary class pushing the Democrats towards the ideological loony bin. As long as Harris and the Democrats remain in thrall to the activists’ progressive ideology, they will be tarred with their widely unpopular views on everything from climate change to transgenderism, race quotas and immigration.

Their numbers are not too impressive. Overall, the woke make up roughly eight per cent of the electorate. But they tend to be politically motivated and dominant within the party apparatus, newsrooms and schools. They have long dominated local politics in cities like Los Angeles, Oakland, Houston and Boston.

Progressive influence has been far more evident in the Biden administration than in preceding Democratic regimes, especially those of Bill Clinton and even of Barack Obama. The current administration has welcomed ideologues with strident progressive views on the environment, gender, race and the Middle East. Biden and Harris have focussed on these woke constituencies over more traditional Democratic policies that embrace broad-based economic growth and opportunity.

Harris, more than Biden, epitomises the current version of the ‘left’ that is rooted in an increasingly gentrified base, rather than working-class or middle-class people. This has been financially rewarding for the Democrats. The ultra-rich and their progressive foundations have consistently outraised and outspent the political ‘right’ by a margin of nearly two-to-one. For Harris, long supported by these same people, this has helped build up an unprecedented billion-dollar campaign war chest, as much as three times the size of Trump’s.

Leftists like Bernie Sanders admit that Harris’s apparent shift to the centre during the election is a mere pragmatic feint. But as her campaign has lost momentum, his political action group, Our Revolution, now warns even the hint of moderation could limit turnout among progressive voters.

Yet there’s a problem here. Outside of the biggest cities and college towns, progressives are thin on the ground. Their views are far from popular with the general public (abortion rights is the main exception). The progressive, mainstream media – such as the New York Times and USA Today – insist that wokeness poses no big problem. But, as former New York Times opinion editor James Bennet put it, the traditional media now serve as the place where ‘America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist’.

Thankfully, politicians still have to deal with the real America, leading some swing-state Democrats to run away from the progressives’ ideological handcuffs. In tough races in Pennsylvania and Ohio, incumbent Democratic senators are even stressing their close ties to President Trump to win re-election. In contrast, California’s woke governor, Gavin Newsom, is now so unpopular that some of his own legislators avoid being seen with him. Clearly smelling the coffee, he has kept his state’s nuclear and natural-gas power plants operating, despite fierce opposition from greens. He has even suggested amending the state’s landmark environmental law, which has proved devastating for the cost of living.

In California, as elsewhere, rising street crime and drug overdoses is leading to remarkable shifts even in the bluest of cities. Progressive district attorneys have already lost in San Francisco, as well as in Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York. In next week’s election, Los Angeles DA, George Gascon, is behind his Republican opponent by an astounding 30 points. Proposition 36, which seeks to overturn lenient sentencing policies once embraced by Harris, is also likely to pass easily in California. This year two members of the leftist ‘squad’ – Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman – were decisively beaten in primaries by more traditional Democrats.

The defeat of wokedom can also be seen in the private sector, where many companies are now abandoning the once omni-present Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) machinery. Similarly, large companies – most notably, major investment firm BlackRock – are also shying away from the Environment, Sustainability and Governance (ESG) agenda. This reflects the unprofitable nature of most green ventures, many of which entering what one executive described as ‘the valley of death’. No surprise many investors are beating a rapid retreat. These firms may not survive under a Trump administration or even a Republican Congress, without government subsidies.

Harris’s handlers know opposing the woke ideology would win votes, but her past record makes this a difficult proposition. Take immigration, an issue on which Trump often expends his worst demagoguery. Even as she seeks to pretend she was never Biden’s ‘border czar’, Harris could pay a heavy price for an administration that allowed the border to become so porous. Opposition to the open border goes well beyond MAGA racists. The vast majority of Americans, according to a CBS News survey, favour deporting undocumented immigrants. Most also favour proof of citizenship status being a requirement to vote, a position widely rejected by progressives.

Rather than embrace unrestricted immigration because most are similarly brown-skinned, American Latinos also worry that the current influx of largely poor, barely educated immigrants could take their jobs or lower their wages, forcing them to compete with a ‘serf class’ with limited rights and lower expectations. This is no simple nativist talking point: the Congressional Budget Office warns that the recent massive ‘surge in immigration’, much of it undocumented, could impact the salaries of low-income workers, many of whom are Latino. In addition, roughly half of all Latinos, notes Pew, associate the current migration wave with increased crime in their communities.

Yet it’s a long way from the barrio to the ivory towers and swanky urban precincts inhabited by the progressive elite. A recent Rasmussen study of high-earning, grad-degree urban professionals found their views on a host of issues, such as climate policies limiting meat and gas consumption, and controls over free speech, differ widely from most Americans. These highly educated deplorables lament that Americans have too much freedom, not too little. So who are the real fascists then?

These divergent views reflect a clear class bias. The ‘1%’ surveyed by Rasmussen said they were prospering under Biden. Tech workers and investors, according to a recent Information survey, favour Harris by roughly three to one. A rollicking stock market and high property prices are manna from heaven for those who already own a lot or soon will. CEOs, on Wall Street and elsewhere, are enjoying record pay. Rather than invest in automation or skills training, many business leaders look instead to cut wage costs by employing illegal immigrants.

As they have looked to please the progressive deplorables, the Democrats have proved ill-positioned to address deteriorating conditions among the working and middle classes who once made up the Democratic base. Inflation under Biden has hit the less affluent particularly hard, keeping their inflation-adjusted incomes below when Biden was elected. It may be many years before they can catch back up. A majority say they are worse off than four years ago. In 2020, before the impact of Covid, only a third did.

Overall, one in four Americans fears losing his or her job in the next year, while roughly half of all US adults surveyed now think the vaunted American Dream, as epitomised by home ownership, has become unreachable. The lines for food banks, particularly in the electorally crucial Midwest, have been lengthening in recent years. Most voters expect Harris to raise taxes, making things worse.

Harris has tried to placate the masses with a spew of handouts and incentives, notably for housing and small business, with some tied to race. But her record in California demonstrates that climate concerns meant more to her than allowing for affordable housing. As California’s DA she wielded the state’s environmental laws to block new housing developments, helping to make California the most unaffordable place to live in the country. In the Golden State, one in five pays half their income in rent, more than anywhere else in the US.

It is hard to underestimate how much the spectre of global warming dominates much of the thinking of the progressive activist class. Yet barely three per cent of Americans, according to Gallup, peg this as their main concern. Backing draconian and expensive measures to ‘save the planet’ may be de rigeur among elite zealots but it threatens the livelihoods of many Americans, particularly those involved in the carbon economy – like truck drivers, factory workers, oil riggers and farmers. Relatively few working-class voters, according to a survey conducted by YouGov last year, are keen on the current green drive to wipe out fossil fuels in the near future.

The cultural causes of the left-wing deplorables are, if anything, even more unpopular than their economic policies. Progressive Democratic positions on slavery reparations and racial quotas are backed by no more than 30 per cent of the population. The drive for transgender rights, such as allowing children to transition without parental approval or having biological males participate in women’s sport, are opposed by roughly two-thirds of voters. The Democrats’ cluelessness on gender was demonstrated by their unintentionally comic attempts to promote their own version of masculinity by using pro-Harris actors who claim to eat ‘carburetors for breakfast’.

The cultural disconnect is so vast that the woke seem genuinely unaware that many immigrants are often more culturally conservative than native-born whites. No wonder black, Latino, and young men tell pollsters they will vote in larger numbers for Trump this year than they did in 2020. Several Arab and Muslim leaders have also endorsed Trump, who is doing surprisingly well for a candidate so often accused of Islamophobia. Similarly, the progressive embrace of critical race theory, also overwhelmingly opposed by most Americans, has driven Democrats to denounce merit, alienating generally middle-class groups like Asians and Jews.

Even if Harris manages to win, thanks largely to the awfulness of Trump, Democrats will need somehow to break the lock hold of progressive wokedom. A Harris administration that doubles down on woke would make it all too easy for Republicans to pose as the party that defends the middle and working classes, including aspirational minorities.

Of course, the Democrats do not have a monopoly on deplorables. After all, Trump has been willing to share a platform with clearly obnoxious, conspiratorial figures like Tucker Carlson. Yet unlike the Harris camp, Trump has shown himself to have essentially no ideology and is unlikely to be burdened embracing unpopular right-wing stances, as we can see in his careful treatment of the abortion issue.

In contrast, Harris will be hard-pressed to dismiss the deplorables on her side, since she has little personal appeal, and her strongest and most committed supporters hail from that detested corner of American political life. If she wins, Harris will be beset, as was the doddering Joe Biden, with people whose sympathies on virtually every issue spell electoral disaster. She also may find compromising with those supposedly ‘fascist’ Republicans in Congress very unpopular with her core supporters. Educated, progressive women, her strongest political base, tend to be the least interested in ‘com[ing] together and mak[ing] the sacrifices’ needed to unite the country, according to a recent American Compass survey.

For Democrats, it may be far better in the long run if Harris loses, allowing future candidates to reject the activist set and bring the party back to more saleable positions on crime, economic growth and upward mobility. Until then, woke Democrats are working to the advantage not of liberal ideas, but to Trump and his likely successor, JD Vance.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.