James Traub, the author of What Was Liberalism?, is pushing back against the conventional wisdom in Washington. Traub argues that the doomed push for the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and Build Back Better was exactly the medicine that was needed to stop the virus of resurgent Trumpism.
“In recent weeks, a new conventional wisdom has coalesced: Joe Biden is fumbling away his presidency by ignoring the first lesson of politics — give your voters what they want. …
The argument that a politician deserves our contempt — and his own failure — if he insists on giving voters what he believes the nation needs rather than what polls say they want is a formula for pandering …
It’s not hard to understand where the anguish comes from, at least in the case of disappointed and deeply worried Biden supporters. The working-class base of the Democratic Party has been leaking away for more than half a century. The fact that virtually every labor or social democratic party in the West has the same problem doesn’t offer much consolation, since there aren’t nearly enough well-educated exiles from conservative parties to replace them. Efforts to court an alleged bloc of non-voting progressives with identity politics (something which Biden has largely avoided) is an act of delusion. You have to reach people where they are.
The giant investment of Build Back Better was the centerpiece of Biden’s effort to change the life prospects of ordinary Americans, and thus to weaken the virus of polarization and the threat of Trumpism. The voting bills were meant to counter the worst effects of that polarization. For all their defects, they were the right medicine for what ails us. …”
If you think this is a blinkered take in light of the mountain of polling data on Build Back Better and voting rights, you ought to see where it is coming from. Back in 2016, James Traub wrote an article in Foreign Policy in which he called for coastal elites and PMCs to rise up against the ignorant masses.
“I was born in 1954, and until now I would have said that the late 1960s was the greatest period of political convulsion I have lived through. Yet for all that the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggle changed American culture and reshaped political parties, in retrospect those wild storms look like the normal oscillations of a relatively stable political system. The present moment is different. Today’s citizen revolt — in the United States, Britain, and Europe — may upend politics as nothing else has in my lifetime.
In the late 1960s, elites were in disarray, as they are now — but back then they were fleeing from kids rebelling against their parents’ world; now the elites are fleeing from the parents. Extremism has gone mainstream …
Mainstream parties of the left and right may increasingly combine forces to keep out the nationalists. This has already happened in Sweden, where a right-of-center party serves as the minority partner to the left-of-center government. If the Socialists in France do in fact lose the first round, they will almost certainly support the conservative Republicans against the far-right National Front.
Perhaps these informal coalitions can survive until the fever breaks. But the imperative of cohabitation could also lead to genuine realignment. That is, chunks of parties from the left and right of center could break away to form a different kind of center, defending pragmatism, meliorism, technical knowledge, and effective governance against the ideological forces gathering on both sides. It’s not hard to imagine the Republican Party in the United States — and perhaps the British Conservatives should Brexit go terribly wrong — losing control of the angry, nationalist rank and file and reconstituting themselves as the kind of Main Street, pro-business parties they were a generation ago, before their ideological zeal led them into a blind alley. That may be their only alternative to irrelevance. …
The reformed center would include the beneficiaries of globalization and the poor and non-white and marginal citizens who recognize that the celebration of national identity excludes them. …
Did I say “ignorant”? Yes, I did. It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them. Is that “elitist”? Maybe it is; maybe we have become so inclined to celebrate the authenticity of all personal conviction that it is now elitist to believe in reason, expertise, and the lessons of history. If so, the party of accepting reality must be prepared to take on the party of denying reality, and its enablers among those who know better. If that is the coming realignment, we should embrace it.”
In a sense, you could say that James Traub got what he wished for and that elites have been in revolt against the ignorant masses ever since Trump won the 2016 election and our politics has been steadily realigning along the lines that Traub prescribed in that Foreign Policy article.
Note: Traub seems to have vastly overestimated the magnetic appeal of this “reformed center” to working class voters of all races.
Labor won in Norway on the slogan “It’s normal folk’s turn”, as it has become common knowledge that all the parties had fucked up badly with the green and woke policies, where the rich were the winners, and the working class the losers. All the political parties are now also asking for the effect for normal people, not only the net effect for society, and that is an improvement, as saying yes to immigration then becomes so much harder, as the working class lose from it.
The Danish Social Democrats will probably copy the slogan, and focus on the losers from Covid, the energy crisis and globalization, even if the ruling Social Democrats were more than partly responsible for the policies originally. The Danish SD won last time by being strict on immigration, but immigration will probably not be super important this election, since all the parties are more or less restrictive on paper.
Biden has avoided identity politics? This guy’s on drugs.
Biden was never qualified to be president. Than again, most today are not qualified to be members of the senate or congress. You can add governors also. Most get in because of the stupidity of the voters.
Isn’t it authoritarianism when the elites force things upon us instead of following voter mandates?
Is this how democracy gets saved?
No, it is “authoritarianism” when you oppose this
Do you remember that research study that was published about 6 years ago? I think around the time Trump announced his candidacy.
It surmised through some form of polling and statistics that conservatives leaned heavier on the authoritarian scale while “liberals” tilted the opposite way.
As it turned out, the researchers got some data points backwards and they issued a correction that it was actually the “liberals” who had authoritarian impulses. The media had already ran with the study and broadly publicized the erroneous findings, but they never retracted when the corrections were made.
What a fascinating foreshadowing of the coming 6 years.
It was longer ago than I had remembered
(2012) but the correction came around 2016, so my timeframe was partially correct:
https://thenewamerican.com/correction-2012-study-showed-conservatives-are-more-authoritarian-actually-not-really/
In Orwellian “News speak.”
I wonder how many flights on the “Lolita Express” ashkenazi James Traub took to Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean island for pedophile elites?
“Did I say “ignorant”? Yes, I did. It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them. Is that “elitist”? Maybe it is; maybe we have become so inclined to celebrate the authenticity of all personal conviction that it is now elitist to believe in reason, expertise, and the lessons of history. If so, the party of accepting reality must be prepared to take on the party of denying reality, and its enablers among those who know better. If that is the coming realignment, we should embrace it
Of course kikes like Traub have always been for the centralization of all power into the hands of The Experts – especially since they constitute a wildly disproportionate percentage of them. They’ve also always been against nationalism, because they loathe & fear the White working/lower middle classes, so they will do anything to deny us the power & influence our numbers rightly demand.
But their plan to form a coalition of the rich & technocrat beneficiaries of globohomo with the nigs & wetback hordes they let in has hit a serious snag, since they’re unpleasantly surprised to discover that our replacements don’t like their trannyfag shit any more than we do.
Oy – vhat to do, vhat to do…
The noose is tightening around the scrawny necks of the (((Traubs))), and all their sneers & desperate authoritarian schemes will only make it tighter as they awaken & enrage ever more of their longsuffering goy victims.
Your inevitable day of doom is approaching fast now, kikes. We’re ready & waiting.
That’s it Democrats, pander to the hard Left and ignore or shit all over your working class base.
The self serving jew, Traub, gives analysis while never mentioning the elephant in the room. That the jews pull all the strings and all of the dysfunction in the government and confusion of now dumbed down, indoctrinated, Whites, is all caused by the jews.
(((Michael Shermer))) interviews (((James Traub))) about “liberalism”. As always, whenever there are two Jews present there will be at least five opinions – a vigorous debate of sorts. The part which is missed by the average goy is that the entire argument invariably boils down to what is best for the (((tribe)))?.