On Politics

The Democrat core (“base”) is not the working class, and has not been for some time; rather, it’s the professional-managerial class (PMC; citations too numerous to list, but see unrepentant Democratic strategist Ruy Tiexiera 2025). This has presented difficulties for them, since the PMC (the 10%) is too weak to be elected, govern, or rule all on its own. Further, the Democrats can’t appeal to the working class in a way that would consciously unite them, because who wants that? Hence the Democrat bundling, through identity politics, of various identity-based verticals around the core, the beauties of this strategy being that: (a) demographics would — as Democrats believed — do their work for them (Tiexiera 2002), (b) they didn’t actually have to deliver anything (except possibly recogntion, and checks, to those identity-based “voices” hired by their network of affiliated NGOs), and (c) they could indulge in moral preening, as gratifying to them as it is annoying to others (especially conservatives, for whom “owning the libs” has been consecrated as a national pastime).

Campaign tactics and candidate foibles aside, one way to read election 2024 is as a comprehensive rejection of PMC governance (their function being to govern on behalf of the ruling class, primarily by making sure the working class never unifies on the basis of material interests; see NGOs, supra). And the PMC wholly earned that rejection. Counter-examples are welcome, but so far as I can tell, there is not one single institution where the public meets the PMC for the provisioning of services that could be said to be healthy or even functional, despite the presence of some exceptional individuals. Not the health care system, not the educational system, not the legal system, not the financial system. Nor any of the increasingly enshittified online services.

Meanwhile, I came up as a Democrat, so I’m still not comfortable discussing the Republican base. That said, it does seem that Republicans — unlike Democrats — brought a gun to gun-fight (or a war, if you take Russell Vought’s heated rhetoric seriously, as I do[1]). Indeed, destroying the Democrat PMC base seems to be the Republican version of strategic bombing: Attacking what John Mearsheimer calls liberal hegemony at USAID, assaulting the civil service, gumming up the grant-making works, bringing the universities to heel both on policy and on foreign students, completing the destruction of public health: In every case the common factor is to decrease the class power of the PMC[2], and hence the political power of Democrats, much as Stalin did with the kulaks. This also applies to the Republican assault on the (putative) moral hegemony of the PMC, the preening fodder called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (with its accompanying apparatus of training, human resources, media personalities, etc.).

NOTE

[1] If you were a Republican who believed that the Democrats decided that Tiexiera’s “coalition of the ascendant” wasn’t delivering a permanent majority to them through organic demographic change, and that Biden decided to build that coalition inorganically, by opening the border to undocumented immigrants and distributing them around the country through a network of Democrat-controlled NGOs, then you might — even leaving aside lizard backbrain issues — be quite happy that your party was on a war footing against an “invasion.”

[2] This iteration of the PMC. No doubt Silicon Valley will have something to say about who will take over the governing function for the ruling class in future.