The Three (Failing) Faces of the Declining Democratic Party

Joel Kotkin has liberal leanings, but he has routinely condemned the failed, corrupt, immoral leadership of the California Democratic Party.

He outlines three major factions within the Democratic Party, and they are all fighting among each other. They are having a harder time raising money, the DNC cannot pay its own bills, and most liberals are leaving the corrupt Democratic Party because they robbed Bernie Sanders and supported one of the most abysmal general election candidates ever.

Kotkin shares his take on what's at stake for the Democratic Party:

In the wake of President Trump’s first official State of the Union speech, and the positive momentum in the economy, the putative “party of the people” now faces a much under addressed internal crisis. United against Trump, the factions which dominate the party increasingly operate at cross purposes.

The Democratic Party wants to unite against Trump, but even the leadership recognizes that burning bridges and attempting to impeach the President will not only fail, but will further harm whatever leverage they have left in Washington DC.

They are in a real pickle. Their aggrieved, self-righteous base wants warlords overrunning Washington DC and killing every Republican. They want to shut down government entirely and undo representative government.

Ultimately all parties are coalitions of disparate groups and interests. Much attention has been on the divisions within the ruling GOP — libertarians, social conservatives and populist/nationalists. But with the Democrats poised to make a comeback this year, and perhaps gain control of all three branches by 2020, perhaps it’s time to analyze divisions that may determine the extent of their ascendancy.

Kotkin is wrong here. The Democratic Party is filled with disparate groups, a "coalition of ideologies" according to Jonah Goldberg. The Republican Party is an ideological coalition, unified along the principles of individual liberty, limited government, and constitutional rule.

The Democratic Party's different groups of self-serving aggrandizement are in full conflict with one another now. They are all fighting for a smaller piece of the Big Government pie, and they are willing to throw their one-time political allies overboard to get what they want.

The labor unions are especially worried, since they are going the way of the dinosaur in a free economy where workers enjoy so much movement.

Three different, and often somewhat hostile, tendencies now define the Democratic Party. These include the corporate oligarchs, causists obsessed with particular hot button issues and arguably the most critical to long-term ascendency, populists, who bear much of the party’s social democratic message and legacy.

The oligarchs

Republicans still retain the allegiance of certain, older industries — pharmaceuticals, energy, home-building, agriculture and manufacturing — but the post-industrial information age moguls are almost entirely Democrats. This trend has been building since the time of Bill Clinton, and remains even more evident in the Trump era.

I would make one crucial correction here. Republicans did NOT have the allegiance of manufacturing companies, since Rust Belt voters still saw the GOP caving to Big Business with corporate welfare, tax cuts, and cheap labor through amnesty and mass legalization programs.

Now that Trump is in office, manufacturing groups and businesses trust the GOP. All this talk about "post-industrial" indicates that Joel Kotkin still doesn't get it. Industry is alive and well in the United States, and Americans are working again!

Much of this has to do with geography and culture. Tech, media and entertainment firms are almost entirely concentrated on either the west or east coast, where being a Republican identifies you as “uncool,” or if you dissent too openly, potentially unemployed. Heavily dependent on imported labor, these firms particularly seek to expand their already large numbers of H1B indentured servants, something Trump, and for his part Bernie Sanders, have opposed.

How accurate to refer to H-1B holders as "indentured servants." They live in the United States at the will of their employers. If they complain or raise a fit, they can be fired, and then deported since H-1B depends on the fancy of the firm which offered it to them.

These blue state hell-holes do not care about American cities or citizens. They only care about making themselves wealthy

Under attack for their pervasive abuse of women and ignoring non-Asian minorities, these industries seek redemption by financing the anti-Trump “resistance” even as they cash in on GOP economic policies. Their increasing control of media makes their pretense seem plausible; everything from football and awards shows now come with a blatantly political agenda. 

Rich, white guilt motivates the rapid hire of cheap, foreign labor. When does this abusive insanity stop?!

Unprecedented wealth — the top five tech giants are worth together more than $3 trillion — allows these “hip” plutocrats to transcend most regulatory excess, as long as it keeps them safe from anti-trust enforcement and Bernie Sanders-style redistribution.

The causists

Causists — gay rights, feminists, extreme greens, retro-urbanists and race-based political movements — now constitute the ascendant wing of the Democratic Party today. Their passion, communication and organizational skill increasingly drives the party agenda, turning traditional liberals increasingly into radicals with often extreme views “mainstreamed” into basic party dogma.

Here are the victim groups. They are preying on each other now. They are so radical, that working-class Democrats have become Republicans, they can't stand the extremists, strident tone of the modern day Democratic Party.

To be sure, the issues of the causists started, and remain, critical concerns that need to be addressed. But the current political physics tends to push each of these movements towards ever greater stridency and extremism, threatening the party’s long-term ability to win over middle of the road, suburban voters.

It's going from bad to worse for the Democrats. They are so divided on how to stop Trump, and now they are divided on which pet project or agenda should get the most attention.

Greens, for example, not satisfied with improving air or water, or even reducing greenhouse gases, increasingly threaten the very bases of middle-class aspiration, such as home ownership, and have turned increasingly against capitalism itself. Similarly gender advocates often err between a rightful advocacy of rights and protections for women and gays to insisting that whites and males, in particular, repent their biological essence.

It's called "insanity."

Similarly social justice warriors can no longer be satisfied with incremental change or the idea of using economic growth to address issues of inequality and class mobility. In their brave new world non-citizens are treated no differently than those who went through the process, and may even get the vote, at least in California. They also increasingly demand single-payer healthcare and free college which will require much higher taxes. At some point in their drive for something akin to Scandinavian socialism, they may run directly into the interests of the oligarchs, who despised by the left, still fund the party and many causists.

The populists

In deep blue “fortress cities” with large populations of educated global citizens, the causists views are widely accepted without question. But in much of the country — most importantly the Midwest — neither the oligarchs nor the zealots have much hold outside big city cores and college towns.

These populists no longer exist. They are not Republicans, recognizing that President Trump has done more for working men than the Democrats ever cared to do.

True Middle American populists — Bernie Sanders after all represents post-industrial retirement colony of Vermont — are increasingly marginalized in a party dominated by identity issue activists and the big money of the post-industrial hierarchy. The other factions’ agenda — free trade globalism, uncontrolled immigration, strident social liberalism and identity politics — are the very things that could help re-elect Trump.

Bernie Sanders is a crony socialist. He talks about making "the rich" pay their fair share, but now he's rich himself. How does he factor in whether he's paying his fair share or not?!

To win and consolidate their gains, particularly amidst a now strong economy, Democrats need to find a way to recover their basic economic message — as they did under President Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. They should focus on how to build sustained economic growth that would provide better opportunities for upward mobility for middle and working class voters, and in particular millennials. If they choose however to listen primarily to causists and oligarchs, they may win in the short run, given the ineptitude of their opponents, but may prove unable to sustain their ascendancy over the longer term.

The Democratic Party has to run against economic growth to win Election 2018. The President's economic agenda is going full steam, and nothing is going to stop working and middle-income voters from succeeding in an economy which is fee to work for everyone, not just for the politically-connected 1%

Final Reflection

The Democratic Party wants to create voters. They allow illegals to vote. They want dead people to vote. They have no problem fundamentally changing the contour and culture of the country to fit their limited political agenda of winning more elections. They have no problem striving to stifle freedom of speech while upending freedom of association for workers.

The green movement is overgrown with conflict, too, as the wind and solar energy people are killing of endangered species, which has riled the animal rights activists. The labor unions want big boondoggle public projects, but the environmental eco-terrorists want everyone living in caves, and they want to knock down as many buildings as possible to give Mother Nature full power once again.

The LGBT and Abortion lobbies are so extreme, that middle-income and middle-of-the-road Democrats have become increasingly disaffected with their debauchery. Add to this mess the rampant corruption of the DNC and Crooked Hillary's epic swindle of Bernie Sanders' viable chance at the nomination, and the Democratic Party, the liberal placeholder in American politics, is falling apart with no chance of victory.