Why Democrats Are In Disarray

A socialist insurgency by elite leftists alienates actual working people who vote

CNN is reporting on a “midterm war” in the Democratic Party over the rise of Democratic Socialism.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York reportedly confronted Sen. Bernie Sanders over his “meddling” in a primary challenge against Rep. Valerie Foushee in North Carolina during a recent phone call.

“He seemed to not care,” said Rep. Greg Meeks of New York, “a Jeffries ally” on that call. I believe Rep. Meeks because Sanders really does not care about black representation in Congress. Sanders wants Democratic Socialism represented in Congress. It can come in any color, for him.

Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam, the first Muslim woman elected to office in North Carolina, was endorsed by Sanders, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement, and the Working Families Party.

Foushee won the March primary by a single percentage point. It was just one of several races in which the progressive wing of the Democratic Party challenged the ‘old guard’, which just happens to include the old Democratic Party coalition.

The youth vanguard of Democratic Socialism is led mainly by immigrant populations, these days. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Hindu, comes to mind. So does Allam, or Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Senate candidate, both Muslims.

Demographic displacement is not only painful, but unpopular. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigned for El-Sayed in Detroit last week. About three-quarters of the city’s population is black. Fox News reporter David Marcus found only around 100 people at the venue.

Among them were “fewer Black people than you could find at Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s restricted beach club in Rhode Island.” The Congressional Black Caucus has endorsed Haley Stevens in the race.

Marcus talked to “the spokesperson for Don Offord, the progressive running for the Democratic nomination in Michigan’s 11th Congressional District.”

One of the animating elements of this socialist insurgency became crystal clear, as he couldn’t stop talking about AIPAC.

“Don doesn’t take any money from AIPAC (the pro-Israel lobbying group),” Mark said proudly. I asked him if this could be a problem, not just with Jewish voters, but with moderate Democrats who support the Jewish state. A kind of shock fell over him, as if he’d never considered this, and he just refused to answer.

El-Sayed has found the limits of DSA pandering as well in Michigan, for he has distanced himself from ideological socialism while keeping the progressive economic agenda. He “believes” in a capitalism that is “regulated”. It is the DSA agenda — Medicare For All, wealth taxes, and businesses breakups — wearing a suit and tie.

This intersectional car-crash is coming into focus now because of the disaster in Maine, where Democrats are scrambling to replace Graham Platner as their challenger to incumbent Senator Susan Collins, a Republican.

Maine is the only state in the union that is whiter than Vermont, home of Sen. Sanders. Before he withdrew from the race last Monday under a cloud of allegations about sexual misconduct, Platner was underwater with working class Mainers, defined as not having a four-year degree, by 21 points.

Platner performed even worse with white noncollege voters. His projected image as a hardworking oyster farmer, military veteran, and anti-corporate crusader did not persuade the working class, which is mainly men.

Platner was supposed to herald the new Democratic “manly man”, a phrase that can only be uttered by someone who is not manly. The two men most responsible for his candidacy, and his national elevation by Sen. Sanders and others, are typical of the problem that Democrats have in attracting the vote of the working man.

Morris Katz, the strategist who pushed Platner as a “working-class hero” and “savior” of the Democratic Party, is a from an elite Jewish family in Manhattan. He dropped our of Skidmore College to pursue an entertainment career before politics. Katz has never had a working man’s job.

Daniel Moraff, the “mad scientist” who is credited with discovering Platner, is the grandson of Toys’R’ Us founder Seymour Ginsberg and a graduate of Yale law school. His company, Dark Forest LLC, is supposedly focused on recruiting “working-class” populist outsiders for Democratic races. He has never had a working man’s job.

Moraff comes from DSA. Katz was the media guru for the Zohran Mamdani campaign. These are elite leftist men, a species that is both overproduced and not common enough to win elections outside of its deeply blue urban habitat zones.

In an interview with The New York Times published this weekend, Mamdani revealed that he has no idea what the working man even is. What a surprise: the people who don’t know what a woman is, don’t know what a worker is, either.

Work instills dignity along with wages. Because Mamdani has never worked a real job for a single day in his life, he never learned the dignity of earning wages. Work has no inherent value to Mamdani. He does not price an hour of labor according to the value it produces because he has never had to produce value.

This in turn explains why the new socialist Democrats place so much value on opposition to Israel and AIPAC, an issue that barely registers with the vast majority of American voters. Elite overproduction has produced a class of over-educated, self-appointed Elect who overvalue this issue.

The issue is splitting the party, with Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania threatening to leave the Democrats if they take a decisive anti-Israel turn. Rep. Jeffries was one of the 109 House Democrats who did not support the latest effort to block aid to Israel. 103 Democrats voted ‘yes’.

“Nothing will be the same on this issue ever again, I think, after this vote,” said Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Greg Casar, who voted to block the aid. Jeffries dodged questions over party unity, saying “our approach will be one that is broadly inclusive.”

Because the white working class just so loves inclusivity, and also diversity, and also economic equity. Right?

In reality, workers of every color — defined here as noncollege men — hate socialism. They see right through the pandering pretensions of leftist dirtbags speaking for minorities and muttering about Jewish money.

Practically every man who has worked a real job has known a guy like Graham Platner. Part of learning to be an adult male in the laboring world is the discernment of which guys are real and which guys are bullshit.

Feminized professions — academia foremost — become very bad at spotting bullshit guys. Daniel Moraff’s annoying vocal fry and uptalk is a feminized, over-educated kind of speech that repels the demographic he claims to target.

They mark him as bullshit, the kind of guy who cannot spot a bullshit guy, or worse, promotes him to be bullshit. Not a man to trust, in other words.

Voters have clearly grown distrustful of Democrats. Their approval rating remains underwater. As with the Israel issue, they are running against Donald Trump, but this is not enough to motivate voters.

Depending on the poll, Democrats currently hold a 3 to 5 point advantage in generic ballot polls, which is lower than the 8.6-point advantage of 2018. That is not enough to count on a blue midterm wave giving them a large House majority.

Maine has likely become safe for Susan Collins, which makes their path to a Senate majority unclear. If Democrats do win a narrow House majority, it will be split by the emerging intra-party dynamics of old guard versus vanguard.

To see how this will play out as elections, look at Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee. “There certainly were not people who were so anti-Israel when I started, and there are within the progressive caucus now,” Cohen tells CNN.

Cohen, 77, is choosing to retire from Congress because his party has lurched to the left. “I foresaw it getting really nasty and antisemitism getting into it” if Cohen, who has always been a J-Street supporter of Israel, ran for re-election.

His district has also been altered by the United States Supreme Court and an ensuing reapportionment by the Tennessee legislature. The 9th is likely to turn red this year. The favored candidate to replace Cohen is repeat challenger Charlotte Bergman.

Charlotte Bergman

Democrats are in disarray because their governing elite is completely out of touch, and increasingly out to lunch, as in free lunch.

Democrats stand on free lunches, except for Israel. They make it their entire personality and then wonder why Jewish donors keep their wallets shut.

They imitate their own impression of the working class, of men, and of masculinity like a cargo cult, then wonder why they lose working men.

Increasingly, the vanguard wants to push the old minority representation out of their party and into Republican ranks. Polling reflects an erosion of Democratic support among Black and Latino voters, two demographics with higher rates of noncollege workers than whites.

The problem Democrats have is that in attempting to move on from identity politics, they pretend to have a working class identity. It is a pretense, and absurdly transparent to people who actually work for a living, especially men.