White liberalism is dying, by Daniel McCarthy. First a perspective on the Kavanaugh confirmation:
Ford was reluctant to go public because she knew her account would be challenged. To get around her inconsistencies and the fact that none of the witnesses she named as being present corroborated her story, liberals resorted to emotional extortion: ‘believe women’; and if you don’t, then you’re a rape apologist….
The extortion attempt failed thanks in part to ‘creepy porn lawyer’ Michael Avenatti, who turned up with an utterly unbelievable client who claimed that as a prep-school student Kavanaugh had participated in gang rapes. If ‘believe women’ meant believe an accuser even without evidence beyond her word, then Avenatti’s client had to be believed, too — but that stretched credulity beyond the breaking point. And if you didn’t have to believe her without evidence, then maybe you didn’t have to believe Ford on her word alone, either. …
What the protests say about leftism now:
The protests liberals whipped up against Kavanaugh this weekend, on the other hand, revealed too much about their own weakness. Washington, D.C. is a majority Democratic city with a black majority. But the Democratic voters out there yelling about Kavanaugh were as white as any country club gathering of Republicans. They looked like a line of Starbucks patrons — Caucasian, professional, largely millennial, with earth tones and earnest expressions aplenty. Men and women wore the same fashionable glasses and more or less the same clothes. It was a Pumpkin Spice Riot.
Where were the black Democrats? Where were the non-yuppies? Hillary Clinton could have asked the same questions on November 9, 2016, after she failed to get them to show up for her the way they’d showed up for Barack Obama. That election, like the Kavanaugh protest, showed that white liberalism has a problem: it’s too liberal for a majority of whites, yet too distant from the concerns of most non-whites.
Liberals and conservatives in the near future:
[White liberals] see themselves as the natural moral arbiters of society. But nobody else sees them that way.
Nothing says that a multiracial or multicultural society has to be politically centre-left, after all. India has a right-wing nationalist and religious fundamentalist government. Brazil looks set to elect a right-wing president in a runoff later this month. Yet white American liberals cling to the belief that demographic magic will rescue them from the insufficiency of their ideology appeal.
White liberalism is in fact in more trouble in this country than conservatism is. The only places where white liberals values matter are in elite cultural institutions. …
Conservatism under Trump, on the other hand, is flourishing, winning big victories first on taxes and now with Kavanaugh. NeverTrumpers have never been more embarrassed. Trump and those who come after him still have to find a way to win over non-whites, but the same ingenuity that led Trump to go after working-class voters can be applied to building other unexpected coalitions. Conservatism may remain overwhelmingly white for now, but at least conservatives are aware of that limitation. White liberals, on the other hand, continue to think they speak for more than just themselves.
