The Impending Internal Democrat Party Civil War
Democrats, Factionalism, Joel Kotkin, Predictions
Joel Kotkin argues that, even if the democrats manage to win the presidency this year, the tripartite Democrat Party coalition is inherently unstable and its factions are bound to fall apart.
The [Democratic] Party now enjoys predominant influence over mainstream media, rising influence among wealthy elites, a stranglehold over education and entertainment industries, and the domination of the burgeoning non-profit world. Remarkably the self-styled “party of the people†now accommodates the big Wall Street firms and tech oligarchies alongside the progressive, neo-socialist, activist base and an ever-diminishing remnant of traditional working-class voters.
This powerful coalition is also a fundamentally unstable one—a three-headed hydra whose heads, particularly after Trump leaves, will soon be biting each other furiously. One faction, the corporatist elite, genuflects and even profits from the progressive mantra on climate, gender, and race. Some, like former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, are so committed to gentry progressivism that he recently suggested those who don’t get with the program could “face a firing squad.†Others, like the Marxists and rioters of BLM, seek a total social revolution and increasingly speak of ending “racial capitalism.â€
Many on the Right, having learned nothing since Reagan, simple-mindedly identify each of these two dominant groups as “liberal.†A more accurate assessment would be “corporatist†and “socialist.†…
[I]ncreasingly, the policies of the party’s two dominant factions—the corporatists and the socialist Left—are out of sync with working- and middle-class interest. On issues like climate change, patriotism, and housing, notes Berkeley law professor Alli Joseph, both the progressives and corporatists evidence “class cluelessness or class condescension†that undermines the party’s populist appeal. The Left’s agenda, as epitomized by the New York Times’s 1619 project, and widely adopted by the corporate elite, is no winner on Main Street. Even the World Socialists see it as “a gift to Donald Trump†and “a falsification of history†which denies “the great Democratic legacy of America’s revolutions†and alienates most working class Americans.