Matt Karp is my favorite college-educated Brooklyn-based socialist and historian.
We have similar views on the PMC Question. In my view, PMCs have gradually taken over the Democratic Party and have steadily pushed their bourgeois social liberalism and polarizing culture war issues which have repulsed the Heartland working class. The Republicans have capitalized on the collapse of the New Deal coalition and have steadily lured populist voters over to the GOP by focusing on the culture war in their messaging. The Republican Party has become much more working class while the Democratic Party has become much more professional class. And yet, both parties have remained stuck inside their old ideological frameworks and haven’t adjusted to the fact they have exchanged their bases.
Joe Biden’s Democratic Party is what we used to call the Whig Party or the old Republican Party. It is an Eastern-based party of arrogant coastal elites who feel entitled to rule this country, utopian social reformers, upper middle class professionals, Wall Street and Big Business. Whereas the New Deal coalition was a populist-progressive coalition, Joe Biden’s Democratic Party is based on woke progressivism, which has irreconcilable differences with populism. As a result of this, the Republican Party is now based on a populist-conservative coalition like in the Jackson era or the Bryan era.
Both parties increasingly sound like their historical predecessors even though in terms of ideology and policy and in terms of the gerontocracy in Congress they are still trapped in “liberalism” vs. “conservatism” even though that is not the debate that is even going on anymore. The Republican base is now largely composed of rural voters, workers and small businessmen like the Jackson and Bryan era while the Democratic Party has become the choice of affluent voters with cosmopolitan values.
I read this same article 25 year ago in the days of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council. All the “progressives” complained about Clinton’s “Third Way Centrism,” meaning Neo-Liberalism.
But those “progressives” weren’t particularly interested in opposing neo-liberalism more than rhetorically because their real agenda was to promote mass immigration and to attack American citizens they racialized as “white but not Jewish or Hispanic” as “racists” and “sexists” and “anti-semitic” and “homophobic” for opposing being replaced by foreigners.
If a progressive dares to oppose mass immigration they immediately become a “Nazi” – see, Aimee Terese and Angela Nagle.
“”…If a progressive dares to oppose…””
And this is very good. Non of the hive can`t say that we are wrong and should change the course. So entire hive goes over the cliff and nobody can`t stop that.
I’m pretty sure everyone who rejects wokeness is now by definition a reactionary who believes the past was better than the present. There is no such thing as the “far right”