White Saviors

BlueBoxDave grasps why the White suburban realignment to the Democrats is more of a huge opportunity to accelerate the working class realignment to the Republicans.

The Federalist:

“There is supposedly a schism in the Republican Party. You see it on TV, you read about it in the legacy conservative journals, and you see it discussed at length on social media. It isn’t real, but that doesn’t much matter; it appears to be real, and so it must be dealt with. We are to believe that a power struggle has been engaged between the establishment wing of the GOP led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Liz Cheney against the Trump wing of the party, which is nearly everyone else including, importantly, the voters.

It is entirely clear that the establishment wants Trump excised from the party even though the voters do not, but this misses a larger point. What McConnell and all of the right-leaning anti-Trumpers don’t understand, what they have never understood, is that the Trump phenomenon is not first and foremost a cult of personality, it is a set of policies and a worldview. Getting rid of Trump, even if that were possible, would not change that. The GOP of the last 30 years is over. To see what has replaced it, we must go back those 30 years. …

Those who tilt at the vain windmill of going back to the old GOP would have the party resurrect its support among suburban whites. But why? The lesson of 2020 was that Trump’s populism, rooted in the Reform Party, opens opportunities to working-class and non-white voters that are far more promising. Republican voters want more than the defensive Republican politics of the past 30 years, they want a new aggressive form of politics that advances their interests rather than slows down the erosion of their America.

There is no going back, and if that means losing some elections, it means losing some elections. Perot lost, and Buchanan lost — but did they? In fact, over time their ideas gained ascendency in the GOP and now define it. This is about much more than Trump. It always has been. The future of the Republican Party belongs to whoever can marshal the new GOP and expand its reach. That means putting the American people first. Republican voters will accept nothing less.”

Lock them out.

What shall we call the new and improved Democratic Party after the neoliberal anschluss of Bushies and Clintonites joining forces? The party of middle class virtue signaling? The Rockefeller Republicans 2.0? The party of all the elites in this country who have a stake in the status quo?

CNN:

“(CNN) – The acquittal of Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial speaks volumes about the moral fiber of the Republican senators who refused to abandon him. Even more, it shows how the former President, despite his political toxicity, still has a stranglehold on the Republican Party.

This should be an electoral bonanza for Democrats in the months and years to come.

And make no mistake, Trump is toxic.

You don’t need to be a professional pollster to understand that Republicans are in trouble among the suburban swing voters who simply loathe Trump. Poll after poll shows this: While the GOP may continue to run up the score in crimson-red states, Democrats will be increasingly competitive in other states with educated, purplish areas, like Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and now Georgia. …”

Here is why it is actually a great thing that they are gone:

1.) Trump barely lost anyway without them. If it had not been for COVID and his own inept governance, he would have likely won. He lost the 2020 election because he lost two groups of White voters. There were the college-educated, upper middle class White suburbanites who live in places like Sandy Springs or Bloomfield Hills and who get all the attention due to the “education polarization” phenomena, but there were also White Independents who just didn’t think he was populist enough. It was this latter group and Trump’s losses with voters who make under $100,000 a year that was decisive.

2.) A working class coalition for Republicans has far more potential than a Democrat coalition based on highly educated, cosmopolitan, metropolitan White professionals. In the House and Senate, it is a superior coalition because it is more flexible. Democrats also did poorly in the state legislatures. Democrats want to get rid of the Electoral College, the Senate and add Puerto Rico and DC as states because of their lack of appeal to rural voters. They are shrinking into a coastal elite party.

3.) The interests of conservative voters and Democratic Leaning Working Class (DLWC) voters are more aligned. The real problem is that the interests and values of both are not aligned with libertarian oligarchs. These people are a massive albatross for the GOP who keep the policy agenda out of alignment with Republican voters and working class voters in the middle of the electorate. It is a great thing that they are being alienated and shifting over to the Democrats with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

4.) The Democrats are two different parties. They are the party of the educated metropolitan professional class which has one agenda. These people are the libtards who are the CNN and MSNBC audience. They are the party of a multiracial working class which has an entirely different agenda. These people are the moderates. Health care is the issue that bridges the two wings of the party. It was the suburbanites in the GOP who have held the party back from moderating on that issue.

5.) These new Democrats who are the pride of the mainstream media are the Paul Ryan or David French Republicans. They are Republican establishment voters. They are neoliberal voters. They are already poisoning the Democrats from within by opposing tax increases. Joe’s coalition of PMC neoliberals is a conundrum because these people are going to block the progressive agenda on everything from raising the minimum wage to student loan debt relief to universal health care. Neoliberal Joe already said he couldn’t do student loan debt forgiveness because it would alienate them.

6.) Republican establishment voters have become Democrats. The George W. Bush Republicans are now on MSNBC virtue signaling about “white supremacy” and “racism” while blocking the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democrats on the issues that matter to them. What is the point of winning elections though if nothing can get done because such a coalition is incapable of commanding a congressional majority and with all of these Republicans now inside the tent opposing the Sanders agenda at every turn?

7.) For the last 30 years, we have had two parties which agreed on neoliberalism and which were both ultimately controlled by suburbanites and professionals, but now that is starting to change. Increasingly, all the neoliberals and all the wealthy suburbanites and the professional class are just Democrats now. There has been a dramatic thinning out of that wing of the Republican Party which is an opportunity, not a loss.

8.) Why is the Republican Party so awful? Why does it conserve nothing? Why did it turn a blind eye to open borders? Why does it enforce political correctness? Why does it favor these wildly unpopular policies? Ultimately, it always came down to “we can’t alienate the suburbanites.” We can’t do anything that would drive them away. So we have to go along with political correctness and unpopular tax cuts.

9.) At the end of the day, these people are motivated by the smug sense that they are better than everyone else in this country. This is the essence of their political activism. If you turn on the mainstream media, it is a chorus of middle class professionals scolding others and virtue signaling. Their politics are centered around their self actualization and esteem needs. They are grandiose displays of their own social status which is meant to impress others in their class. You have one group which looks down on other White people and wants save the planet from climate change. You have another group that looks down on other White people who are scumbags who want tax cuts. They are both modernists.

10.) Now that they are thankfully gone, there is no reason to continue catering to them. Lock them out. Hatred of political correctness unites Trump voters and extends far beyond them into the DLWC vote. Hispanic voters, for example, equally detest political correctness and don’t understand wokeness. They are also turned off by most of the same things as White working class voters who are Democrats. It was the policy agenda of the libertarian oligarchs and suburbanites that was repulsing them.

11.) Dumping political correctness and moderating on economics fixes any problem caused by the loss of suburbanites and then some. If these two changes were to happen, the populist wing of the Republican Party would dramatically grow on the other side of the Republican coalition and the electorate would finish realigning because all the populist discontent in America on both sides is in the middle where there are clusters of voters which don’t feel represented by either party.

12.) Trump and the GOP lost in the 2018 and 2020 elections because they maintained the status quo and didn’t lean into the shift. The donor class wanted to go back to the way things were before Trump. Trump squandered his political capital on Paul Ryan’s unpopular agenda.

13.) Finally, college educated PMCs on both sides whether it is the True Cons or the Democrat Independent Liberal Elites (DILEs) vote at higher rates than working class voters and all other groups. They feel more represented by the system and the two reigning ideologies than other groups which includes everyone in the middle between these two poles. The thing that unites working class non-voters is their correct and sadly fatalistic assumption that the system is rigged against them. This is an effect of both parties being controlled by professionals and suburbanites and the managerial elite above them who have rigged the system so that they win every time and their cultural or economic preferences are catered to by the victor. Changing this dynamic and ceasing to always defer to the True Cons wing as the governing wing of the Republican Party would have an explosive impact among non-voters. People would come off the sidelines and vote as they did for Trump back in 2016 before he became the great disappointment.

In sum, dumping political correctness (the biggest cultural resentment in the country) and moderating on economics and going in a more redistributionist direction (the biggest economic resentment in the country) will depolarize our politics and unlock an enduring populist majority for Republicans. It goes without saying that they likely aren’t bold enough to shake off old habits and their old branding and strike out in this direction even though the wind is blowing this way at gale force in the polls. There is a bigger populist wave than 2016 emerging in the polls which reflects a shift across the board among Republican voters on both identity (more explicit) and economics (more redistributionist).

The fact that so many Republican voters are even flirting with violence shows why change has to come. There is a revolt coming against the cultural and economic order in this country. It would make much more sense to harness it and channel it in a productive direction for the benefit of the country as a whole which is fed up with the polarization. We’ve already seen what happens when you feed the proles a diet of conspiracy theories, race baiting, plan trusting and performance art to keep them content.