The flip

I was corresponding with a law professor friend about The Catastrophe, and she sent me this graph:

I haven’t been able to find the source data for this, although it certainly tracks with what I’ve seen from exit polls about high income — 100K+ and 200K+ — voters flipping for Harris. We already know that higher education is correlating ever-more strongly with voting for Democrats, so I suspect that the breakdown in the graph, or something like it, is probably happening. (We’ll know more in a few weeks, when Pew and similar organizations release more rigorously researched post-election numbers)..

It just so happens that Thomas What’s the Matter With Kansas Frank has an op-ed in the NYT this morning, that features the following claim:

Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump’s appeal — and they failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out.

I have been writing about these things for 20 years, and I have begun to doubt that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever turn on the lightbulb for the liberals. I fear that ’90s-style centrism will march on, by a sociological force of its own, until the parties have entirely switched their social positions and the world is given over to Trumpism.

Can anything reverse it? Only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old: a Great Society of broad, inclusive prosperity. This means universal health care and a higher minimum wage. It means robust financial regulation and antitrust enforcement. It means unions and a welfare state and higher taxes on billionaires, even the cool ones. It means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming-together of ordinary people — not a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals.

That seems a long way away today. But the alternative is — what? To blame the voters? To scold the world for failing to see how noble we are? No. It will take the opposite sentiment — solidarity — to turn the world right-side up again.

I would laugh if anybody remembered laughter. Frank’s argument, essentially, is that the Democratic party is still the centrist neo-liberal creature it was in the 1990s, which formed the basis of the book that made him at least Internet famous back in the day.

Now take a look at the bolded sentence in the quote above. To the extent — and it is now a very considerable extent — that there is political support in America for universal health care, a higher minimum wage, robust financial regulation, antitrust enforcement, unions, social safety net programs, and higher taxes on billionaires, every single one of these things is 100% located in the Democratic party and 0% located in the Republican party! Frank himself admits this in the piece, where he engages in some modest throat clearing about how yeah the Biden-Harris administration was pro-union and antitrust enforcement friendly, but not quite enough or in quite the right way, or something.

So yeah, I do blame the voters, or more accurately I blame the decadent infotainment culture that has made the voters collectively stupid enough to the point that it generates graphs like the one above. And this has nothing to do with “nobility” — it has to do with supporting liberal democracy and common decency over neo-fascist decadence, which, to be perfectly clear as Richard Nixon used to say, is what the American People ™ voted for on Tuesday.

At some point I’m going to do a post comparing Trumpism to the Peron regime in Argentina, but for now I’ll just note that Juan and Evita, as deplorable as they were, actually did deliver some shirts to the shirtless. In America, right wing “populism” just means no transgender surgeries for federal prisoners, along with more tax breaks for Elon Musk.

What a world.