The Democrats’ civil war has begun

Let the great democratic civil war begin. The impending demise of Joe Biden and the patchwork coalition he represents threatens to exacerbate precisely the intra-party conflicts that his presidency was supposed to appease.

In 2020, Biden managed to cobble together the remnants of the old Rooseveltian New Deal coalition, securing enormous support from both the oligarchic elite and the progressive left. This was possible largely because the repellent Donald Trump had alienated not only the left, including the emerging Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), but also the dominant elites and numerically powerful moderate liberals.

Today, as Republicans rally around Trump, the Democratic coalition has become fragile. As has been the case for decades, much of the traditional New Deal coalition has continued to leave the party. Biden’s inflationary policies and commitment to progressive cultural and environmental priorities are not playing well with the traditional, predominantly working-class voting base. This is particularly alienating since the majority of Democrats consider themselves moderate or even conservative.

Biden’s performance has not only unsettled his core electorate even before last week’s disastrous presidential debate. It has also unsettled the oligarchic elite that funded his 2020 campaign, as well as the party apparatus and its media hangers-on. They may still comfortably submit to cultural progressivism and climate hysteria, but massive redistribution of wealth and other limits on their power are less likely. There are tentative signs, at least on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, that some are now considering supporting Trump instead. These defectors may not be many, but they stink of money.

The only reliable – and vocal – bloc of Democrats is increasingly found on the far left. This faction backed Biden against Trump in 2020, despite his relatively moderate political record. The idea was to influence his administration afterward. It would be an “evolution,” as Squad congresswoman Pramila Jayapal described it. Biden largely conformed to that agenda, at least rhetorically, championing issues ranging from net-zero goals to promoting transgender ideology.

This new left is organized in groups such as Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution, the Working Families Party in New York, and increasingly radicalized unions representing college professors and teachers. The DSA is arguably the most important of these left movements. Described by Jacobin As the “most important center for left-wing activism in the country,” the DSA seeks power primarily through infiltration of the Democratic Party. It also tends to pursue “illiberal” policies, which New York Times Columnist has rightly called it “the most disturbing feature of contemporary progressivism.”

This rejection of liberal values ​​would have appalled the group’s founder in 1982 and one of my teachers, Michael Harrington. DSA activists in New York actually celebrated Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel as a victory against colonialism and apartheid, despite the rapes, murders, and hostage-taking. Rather than reflecting the pragmatic, mixed-market politics traditionally found on the American left, these groups more closely reflect the strident positions espoused by European Greens, France’s radical socialists, and the United States. The Insular France and the now largely silenced Corbyn supporters of the British Labour Party.

Read the rest of this article at Spiked.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle ClassHe is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, where he directs the Center for Demographics and Policy. For more information, visit joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter. @joelkotkin.

Photo: Werner Slocum/NREL via Flickr under CC 2.0 license.