Sanders-style economic populism might make the Democrats more attractive to Trump voters

But cluelessness about cultural issues will be the final nail in the coffin

Amid all the sackcloth-and-ashes wailing and self-shriving among the mainstream press since Trump’s election, a lengthy article – actually an interview – in the New York Times caught my eye.

Entitled “Would Bernie Have Won?” and authored by the distinguished progressive commentator Ezra Klein, the piece asks the not at all inconsequential question whether Sanders scathing critique of the Democratic Party shortly after its Nov. 5 disaster was valid, and whether Harris would have emerged victorious, had the minions of Biden and Harris heeded his advice.

Klein is one of the most thoughtful progressives out there. He has the courage to ask both himself and his followers not only tough questions but to reject all sort of evasions, word salads, and excuses.

Klein touts the question whether full-tilt Bernie-style left-wing populism should be the future of the party. Bernie’s main critique has been that the Democrats have abandoned the working class and will most likely not win again until they are ready and motivated to do so.

He has doubts whether Sanders’ nostrums as stated will really do the trick. He writes:

Biden has been the most economically populist president of the modern era. He’s been the most pro-labor president of the modern era. And what did it get him — or Harris? And if democratic socialism, if Bernie-ism, is the answer to winning back these voters, why don’t you see democratic socialists winning in red districts?

To test out the hypothesis that for the party to return as winners rather than losers they need to take Sanders’ advice, Klein entered into a spirited conversation on his talk show with Democratic progressive influencer Faiz Shakier about the role Bernie should play in reshaping political policy and messaging going forward.

The conversation, which was long and rambling, focused on what might be considered Shakier’s major thesis, namely, that the problem is not that the Democratic party has failed to offer “populist” prescriptions.

The problem is that working class voters have overwhelmingly drawn the conclusion that Democrats don’t at all mean what they say about taking seriously the interests of the former, especially when they have morphed into the party of the wealthy, educated elites and institutional power brokers who commandeer an American economy that the vast majority of their blue-collar constituency is convinced is “rigged”.

Shakier makes a compelling case, but there is something missing. That is the question of “culture”.

A careful, empirical study of voter attitudes on cultural issues by the highly respected Pew Foundation in April showed an oversized cleavage between Republican and Democratic voters. It is obvious now that the disadvantage fell to the Democrats.

If one examines the statistics carefully, it appears that the disagreement on matters of culture far outstrip the otherwise strong divergence between the two portions of the electorate on the economy.

The biggest discrepancies, according to Pew, between voter stances centered on immigration, gender identity, crime, and the importance of the legacy of slavery.

It was these cultural issues as much as disdain and distrust surrounding “Bidenomics” that moved the needle significantly on November 5.

The fact that Democrats en masse can’t bring themselves to respect in any significant manner what is clearly now the electoral majority’s views on cultural issues, even if they respectfully disagree, is quite troubling.

The Washington Post forecast early last fall that cultural issues would turn out to be the game changer. “Harris, Trump and their supporters are battling over the future of American culture and values,” the Post opined.

There are huge divides between the Republican and Democratic parties over issues such as abortion, immigration and race. These are fights about policy, but they are also part of a broader debate about what kinds of people and actions should be considered normal and acceptable.

The highly respected Pew Research Center in a careful study published back in April proclaimed that cultural issues would be the prevailing factor in the campaign.

The most obvious illustration concerning the “normal and acceptable” was the fight over transgender athletes in women’s sports. The Trump campaign bore down in the closing weeks on transgender issues and, according to the Wall Street Journal, it struck a chord among a broad spectrum of voters.

Trump’s attack not only resonated with blue-collar laborers. It landed with affluent longtime Democrats on Wall Street and in corporate suites who have watched warily as the party increasingly aligned itself with an issue that affects a small portion of the population but commands huge amounts of attention in the political discussion at every level.

The Post article made this ominous prediction about the impact of the election on the cultural divide, which seems to overshadow all previous demographic disparities and the supposed “identity trap” that author Yascha Mounk in a best-selling book has warned about . “One vision of American culture will prevail, and another will be defeated.”

We now known who won, and we can easily speculate who will be the losers, other than the obvious. It won’t be pretty.

On the front lines will be four-year colleges and universities. The cannon fodder will be humanities departments who have always been keenly vulnerable on account of the long-standing disconnect between subject matter and career trajectories.

Inexplicably humanities faculty have made themselves doubly defenseless in recent years by stampeding like lemmings to shed their role as arbiters of the culture’s most durable and discriminating spiritual and moral values and gladly enlisting as hucksters for the crudest and most academically inane forms of “woke” ideology.

As Tyler Harper rails in The Atlantic, “humanities scholars and departments have not only failed to save their disciplines—a tall task that was perhaps always impossible—they have provided ammunition to conservatives who want to gut government funding for higher education”.

They same humanities scholars will bear the brunt of the brutal assaults on higher education that are only months away.

Harper blames this suicidal dash of the humanities on “administrative incentives” and “financial pressures”. He writes that “if the humanities have become more political over the past decade, it is largely in response to coercion from administrators and market forces that prompt disciplines to prove that they are ‘useful.’”

Well, no, not exactly.

Splashing your hardcore progressive ideological credentials across your first-time professional job resume, even at the height of the “anti-racism” craze in 2020 and 2021, would not have given you even the tiniest edge up in landing an entry-level job in, say, data analytics.

What Harper terms the “politicization” of the humanities has been the self-immolating preference of humanities faculty themselves over many decades.

It was not until the previous decade that a critical mass of previous esoteric social “theory” going all the way back to the 1930s had not merely permeated the entirety of the humanities disciplines, but had been “ultra-processed” into sufficiently banal and rote talking points utilizing such overdetermined words as “marginalized”, “colonized”, “racialized”, etc. to make them feel for the first time that someone was finally taking them seriously.

But it was a false dawn.

In joyously learning to speak the peculiar dialect of “wokeness” American humanities scholars demonstrated both their out-and-out ineptitude in mastering the nuanced complexity of European cultural theory they pretended to emulate and their misjudgment of the underlying dynamics of modern social history.

The “populist” sensibility that Sanders has been commending all along is indeed economically radical, but it is also culturally conservative – or should we say “traditionalist”.

That is the hard truth that even Sanders will have a hard time swallowing.