The Democrats’ green war on the working class. By Batya Ungar-Sargon.
Last week, a joint survey by the New York Times and Siena College found that the Democrats are in deep trouble with some crucial voting blocs that had once been their mainstays. For the first time, Democrats now have a larger share of support among white college graduates than among non-white voters.
As some of us have been pointing out ad nauseum, we don’t have a political, partisan divide in the US. We have a class divide that separates college-educated elites from the working class. And the left has become almost completely aligned with those college-educated elites.
How did this happen? Turn on CNN or MSNBC or open the New York Times and you’ll be told that the fault lies with the Democrats’ messaging. …
But the real problem isn’t the Democrats’ messaging — it’s their priorities. In fact, their messaging is actually impeccable. It signals very accurately what their values are and, by extension, who they view as their base.
As the New York Times put it: ‘The confluence of economic problems and resurgent cultural issues has helped turn the emerging class divide in the Democratic coalition into a chasm, as Republicans appear to be making new inroads among non-white and working-class voters — perhaps especially Hispanic voters — who remain more concerned about the economy and inflation than abortion rights and guns.’
The Democrats are no longer speaking to the multiracial working class, but to people with other concerns — such as climate change, gun control and abortion. The Dems’ new base is the work-from-home pyjama class, the people with the luxury of caring about climate change and ‘January 6’, while their neighbours wonder if they should put food on the table or gas in the car because there isn’t enough money for both.
Want to know why working-class voters of all races are abandoning the Democrats? It’s because the Democrats have abandoned working-class voters. …
Climate change or crime? It’s a class thing:
‘The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’, our political and media elites like to say when anyone pushes back.
You know who the world really has ended for? Someone who has been murdered. Someone who can’t afford to feed their kids. …
Different economic classes — money changes everything:
The bigger issue here is that the interests of the laptop class aren’t just different from the interests of the working class — they are often in fundamental tension. Demands to defund the police, open the borders and lock down for Covid make affluent progressives feel good about themselves, while they act as a literal tax on the working classes, who have to pay for this moral vanity. The Democrats’ new base tends to misread its economic privilege as a sign not of good fortune but of higher moral purpose. And they then demand others foot the bill for it — those with far fewer means than they have…
California manages to be both the greenest of the states in the union as well as the one with the greatest income inequality. The high energy costs of green zealotry have also disproportionately impacted non-white households, leading to what environmental lawyer Jennifer Hernandez has dubbed the ‘Green Jim Crow’. Millions of California households live in energy poverty – thanks largely to the green policy preferences of wealthier Californians.
In order to signal their own virtue, progressives are making their neighbours poorer. Anyone who objects is given a lecture or told to buy an electric car. Don’t have $70 in your bank account to fill up your car with gasoline? No problem – just buy a $60,000 electric vehicle! Joe Biden has put a $12,500 rebate for EVs in his Build Back Better Act! …
So is there hope for the Democrats? Can they turn things around? To me, these are the wrong questions. After all, it is not the job of working-class people to defend the professional aspirations of college-educated Democrats. It ought to be the Democrats’ job to defend the working class. Or at least it used to be.
