https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/opinion/2020-progressive-candidates.html
Democratic Party voters are split. Its most progressive wing, which is supportive of contentious policies on immigration, health care and other issues, is, in the context of the party’s electorate, disproportionately white. So is the party’s middle group of “somewhat liberal” voters. Its more moderate wing, which is pressing bread-and-butter concerns like jobs, taxes and a less totalizing vision of health care reform, is majority nonwhite, with almost half of its support coming from African-American and Hispanic voters.
The centrist factions which is mostly non-white is not so interested in issues of race and ethnicity.
The three ideological groups favor different sets of policies. On the left, the very liberal voters stress “the environment, protecting immigrants, abortion, and race/gender,” Khanna emailed me, while the moderate to conservative Democrats are “more concerned with job creation and lowering taxes.”
While 72 percent of very liberal Democrats want candidates to protect immigrants, 42 percent of moderate-to-conservative Democrats share that priority. Sixty-six percent of the very liberal groups want candidates to address “race and gender issues,” compared with 42 percent of the moderates.
Even more interesting is the way these three categories of Democrats split on some of the most contentious issues raised over the first two nights of the Democratic debates: providing health insurance to undocumented immigrants and a Medicare-for-all proposal that would eliminate private health plans.
“The very liberal are more or less evenly split (51-49) on replacing all private health insurance, while the remaining two-thirds of Democrats clearly favor a program that competes with private insurance,” Khanna wrote. Somewhat liberal Democrats were firmly opposed (68-32) to the elimination of private insurance; the moderate and conservative Democrats were slightly more so (70-30).
In addition, Khanna continued, there is a “real differentiation by reported ideology on the question about federal health care for undocumented immigrants.”
In this case, the very liberal group was in favor, 75-25, the somewhat liberal Democrats split, 52-48, and the moderate-conservative group distinctly opposed, 61-39.White liberals are the only ethnic group that prefers other ethnic groups to themselves.
White liberals recently became the only demographic group in America to display a pro-outgroup bias — meaning that among all the different groups surveyed white liberals were the only one that expressed a preference for other racial and ethnic communities above their own.In a short two-year period of time, resentment by white Democrats of other races has declined dramatically.
Andrew Engelhardt has documented the increasingly progressive views of white liberals on racial issues between early 2016 and late 2018.
During this period, Engelhardt wrote, “white Democrats’ average levels of racial resentment declined nearly 16 percentage points.” This is by far the biggest attitudinal shift to the left — or the right, for that matter — in the last 30 years, a reaction driven in large part by Trump’s race baiting.What the article does not mention is that Donald Trump's classic base is not in the traditional Republican Party -- rural Christians and urban capitalists -- but rather in former Democrats who are rural, uneducated, non-religious, working-class and male. Those resentful stalwarts of the Democratic Party now vote Republican, and they have taken their racial resentment with them. So there might not have been such a dramatic transformation of attitudes within the Democratic Party.
One source of the polarization within the Democratic Party is social media, which is dominated by young, over-educated people attracted to radical stances.
Democratic Twitter is dominated by overeducated, over-caffeinated, over-opinionated pain-in-the-ass white liberals. Every candidate, and every staffer, checks Twitter and other social media scores of times a day.Another source of radicalization is a switch to small donors, who trend extremist.
[W]hen the D.N.C. made accumulating small donors a centerpiece to debate eligibility among two dozen potential candidates, that’s when the unintended consequence kicked in. Small donors are often more motivated, more activist, more engaged, more ideological. In short, more leftist. They’re less likely to send in five bucks to a candidate who says, “I’m going to preserve Obamacare, maintain private insurance, and add a public option so anyone who wants to can join Medicare” — even though that’s where most Americans and most Democrats are.There may be an element of reverse psychology at work. Trump stereotypes the Democratic Party as radicals who want to give everything away. This agitates core Democrats, who take the bait and internalize Trump's parody of the Democratic Party. Embracing a radicalism that is out of step not only with Americans generally but with most people in their party, core Democrats have set themselves up to lose.
Some of the leading 2020 Democratic presidential candidates didn’t help their cause in the June debates by taking a series of unpopular positions, such as banning private health insurance, providing insurance to the undocumented, and decriminalizing border entry. They’re giving Trump and the Republicans plenty to work with.Another issue is that the idealistic base of the Democratic Party so often will not vote for moderate candidates, whereas the conservative base of the Republican Party will turn out to vote for a Republican who they completely disagree with and find repulsive. This is what happened in 2016. In 2016, many liberals stayed at home and did not vote for Hillary Clinton, but if they had shown up at the polls, Clinton probably would have won. In contrast, although Trump may not stand for either Christian values or free trade, Republicans bit the bullet and voted for him anyway. (The article points out how in the general election Trump was perceived as more moderate than Mitt Romney. However, to some degree Trump was sold as an reasonable candidate by the Republican establishment such as the Christian evangelical leadership who actually knew better.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/us/politics/a-born-again-donald-trump-believe-it-evangelical-leader-says.html
David Brooks tries to make sense of the ideological polarization within the Democratic Party. He hones in on education level.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/opinion/white-liberal-democrats.html
People are always changing their minds, day to day. But over the past 20-odd years one group has shifted to an astounding degree: highly educated white Democrats. I’m not sure I understand why this group has undergone such a transformation, but it has, and the effects are reshaping our politics.
The easiest way to describe the shift is to say that educated Democrats have moved steadily to the left. In 1994, only about a sixth of Democrats who had gone to graduate school said they were consistently liberal. In 2015, more than 50 percent did. In 1994, only 12 percent of Democrats with college degrees said they were consistently liberal. Twenty-one years later, 47 percent did, according to the Pew Research Center.Brooks address theories of why super-educated whites have become so much more radicalized than others in the Democratic Party. In their own understanding of themselves, their education has rendered them the most enlightened and tolerant people in history. Another view is that as children of privilege, they must constantly prove themselves to be politically correct even while carefully avoiding the dismantlement of the system of privilege that elevated them.
The nice, safe lives of rich white liberals
To understand the relationship between education level and political radicalization, it is important to remember Sayre's law. When humans are confronted by a life-or-death situation, they tend to become pragmatic and are willing to compromise (e.g., the alliance between the USA and USSR during WW2). It is when issues are purely abstract and inconsequential to oneself that one becomes intransigent and hysterical. Academic politics are so vicious because nothing is actually at stake.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
Sayre's law states, in a formulation quoted by Charles Philip Issawi: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter." Sayre's law is named after Wallace Stanley Sayre (1905–1972), U.S. political scientist and professor at Columbia University.Another side effects of too much education is fantasy, as Alexis de Tocqueville explained about 200 years ago. Tocqueville noted that British intellectuals were so often accomplished community leaders and politicians (e.g., Edmund Burke), and so they tended to be realistic. French intellectuals, in contrast, were typically not in decision-making positions, so they tended to live in an abstract world of idealism and they promoted irresponsible grandiose schemes. They were the original self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-righteous "tenured radicals". It could be that the Democratic Party is a magnet for over-educated young white men who confuse messy reality with elegant ideas.
It could also be that this privileged fantasyland breeds a sense of danger. That is, as our lives become safer thanks to progress, we actually feel more vulnerable. Parents used to let their kids walk to school, but now not only do they drive them to school, they drop the kids off right in front of the school entrance rather than in the parking lot. Parents have become terrified of the jungle gyms that they themselves played on as children. Some Americans are paranoid and so they buy guns, and other Americans are paranoid about the Americans who buy guns. Some Americans are paranoid about foreigners crawling over their borders, while other Americans are paranoid about the Americans who are xenophobic. The deep background of all this paranoia is that as life gets safer, people lose their tolerance of danger. (Americans have become less geographically mobile, and this might be one of the reasons.)
["Safe", 1995, trailer]
Rich white liberals and cultural misappropriation
Another issue is cultural misappropriation. Rich white tenured radicals are addicted to cultural misappropriation. They cannot help themselves when it comes to identifying completely with the exotic, subordinated Other who they know so little about. (In contrast, conservatives tend to misappropriate their own historical traditions, e.g., the Tea Party movement.)Every movie is actually two movies, and they comment on each other. The 2008 movie "Rachel Getting Married" is an addiction movie about the reconciliation of two sisters, but it is also about the multicultural consumerism of upper-middle class liberals (the wedding is themed for world cultures). Consumerism demands novelty, and there is a synergy between novelty and the liberal ethos of diversity and tolerance. (When rich white liberals talk about diversity, they immediately begin to talk about foreign cuisine.)
["Rachel Getting Married", 2008, trailer]
["Get Out", 2017, trailer]
