How the Populist Right Can Win the New Class War.

By James Pinkerton

James Carville is a well-known Democratic operative, and yet he’s also capable of causing trouble for Democrats. That’s what happened in an April 27 interview, when he declared, “Wokeness is a problem, and we all know it.”A problem, that is, for the Democratic Party.

As Carville explained:

You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in . . .neighborhoods.

We might pay special attention to some of Carville’s word-choices: “people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges.” There’s a stereotype that leading Democrats hang out in the Ivy League and other posh colleges — and Carville agrees with it.

Indeed, he went on to attack “jargon-y language that’s unrecognizable to most people — including most Black people.” Picking up on his theme of a snobby dimension to leftist thinking, Carville added, “This ‘too cool for school’ [bleep] doesn’t work, and we have to stop it.”

Here we can pause to quote conservative Scott Alexander, who wrote earlier this year, “Wokeness is a made-up mystery religion that college-educated people invented so they could feel superior to you.”

Continuing, Alexander added, “The whole point is that the only way not to be racist is to master an inscrutable and constantly-changing collection of fashionable shibboleths and opinions which are secretly class norms.”

So we can see: Alexander is agreeing with Carville; the whole essence of wokeness is that it’s a status symbol. Just as some people choose to raise themselves — at least in their own estimation — by gaining an affected accent, others seek to gain status by becoming fluent in woke.

Wokeness is a status symbol above all. So the woke are always a minority — because, obviously, a status symbol doesn’t work if the majority have it. Hence, wokeness is doomed to fail electorally in the long run. Perhaps realizing that, the US Democrats now rig the demography, the media, voting, and even vote counting.

Then Carville [… says] “I think it’s because large parts of the country view us as an urban, coastal, arrogant party.”

We can also add: “rich.” Of the ten richest states (including the District of Columbia), as measured by per capita income, Joe Biden carried eight last year; of the ten poorest states, Donald Trump carried nine. Drilling down a bit, we can also see that Democrats represent 41 of the 50 most affluent districts in the U.S. House.

Yet it’s not just that Democrats are woke and wealthy. In addition, some of their best-known policy ideas are way-y-y out of touch with ordinary people. But don’t take my word for it — here’s Carville: “Maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isn’t the smartest thing to do because almost [bleeping] no one wants to do that.” …

Self-defeating virtue signaling:

For years now, political scientist Zach Goldberg has tracked the ideology of elite, opinion-leading Democrats, most of them White. … According to Goldberg’s data, White leftists and their “pro-outgroup bias” are, literally, self-loathing.  And we can readily see how that sort of mental malformation would make for unpopular politics. Continuing, Goldberg added:

As woke ideology has accelerated, a growing faction of white liberals have pulled away from the average opinions held by the rest of the coalition of Democratic voters — including minority groups in the party.The revolution in moral sentiment among this one segment of American voters has led to a cascade of consequences ranging from changes in the norms and attitudes expressed in media and popular culture, to the adoption of new political rhetoric and electoral strategies of the Democratic Party. …

The Democrats’ dilemma:

If wokeness was just a matter of words, it’s possible that Democrats could change those words; after all, when the word “liberal” became a negative, they simply took up a new phrase, “progressive,” and carried right along.

And yet unfortunately for Democrats, wokeness is more than just wordplay; it’s also policy. …

To illustrate, we might consider some of the favorite phrases of Democrats these days: “structural racism,” “Black Lives Matter,” “mass incarceration,” “transgender,” “trans women are women,” “trans men are men,” “reproductive rights” — and yes, in certain noisy circles, “defund the police.”

We can quickly see that each of these phrases has a policy program attached to it. And most often, those policies come straight from some faculty lounge or some other equally left-wing lair. …

Joe Biden was a Trojan Horse (not that this wasn’t widely suspected before the “election”):

Joe Biden was elected to the White House in 2020 precisely because he was not woke; he was different, or at least he said he was. And yet now that he’s in the Oval Office, the wokesters seem to be winning most of the internal policy debates — and that’s exactly what Carville was warning about….

The strongest statistical indicator of whether someone votes Democrat or Republican nowadays is whether their family income is over $100k. The great re-alignment applies here — Democrat voters are increasingly the ones with the larger incomes.

As Carville said, the country increasingly views the Democrats as the “urban, coastal, arrogant party.”

The coasts, of course, are where the money is, including New York City, Silicon Valley, and Powertown, Washington, D.C. And politically, these places are where Democrats predominate.

Thus we see that there’s been a political inversion from the old stereotype of the Republican Party as the party of the rich: Today, Democrats are the plutocrats.

More precisely, the plutocrats and the professional class that serves them are now mostly Democrats.

This inversion trend has been evident for some time …

The decisive hinge came in 2016, with the candidacy of Donald Trump. Although wealthy himself, Trump could make a simple calculation: There are a lot more non-rich people than rich people, so why not side with the non-rich?

Of course, Trump being Trump, he went further than that: His message included a serrated edge of anger and resentment at the coastal elites — and folks in Ohio and Oklahoma loved him for it. …

Through most of U.S. history, majorities of voters have been hostile to the rich. In the old days, that class hostility had benefited populist Democrats; in these new days, that class hostility is helping populist Republicans, who have been repositioning themselves as the home for workers, soldiers, first responders, and homemakers….

Democrats have captured both big money and big culture:

Democrats represent more than just Big Money. They also represent Big Culture, and as such, they must answer for its excesses.

Big Culture is larger than just the Main Stream Media, big as that is; Big Culture is also Hollywood, book publishing, and the newest recruit to wokeness, pro sports.

By this reckoning, if Big Money is an elitist One Percent, then Big Culture is a second elitist One Percent. Yes, the Democrats and the left control both.

Without a doubt, that’s a lot of power, both financial and cultural.

However, as Carville suggests, such power might not be enough. After all, Big Money and Big Culture — those two One Percents — don’t represent a lot of people, also known as voters.

In addition, the two One Percents bring with them baggage, even backlash; as Carville says, they are “arrogant” and self-consciously “too cool for school.” Regular people don’t like being talked down to, let alone being outright insulted.

So, time to do away with real democracy, obviously.

The New Republicans:

So what should Republicans do? The answer seems obvious enough: If they sense Democratic weakness on wokeness, they should keep pressing their anti-woke advantage. And that means standing against crime, standing with the police, and standing up new laws as needed.

For instance, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been working hard to make the Sunshine State an Antifa-free zone. … DeSantis played his cards well, framing the issue as a choice between wokesters plus rioters, on the one hand, and law and order, on the other. De Santis won that fight, of course, and on April 19 he signed into law the bluntly titled “Anti-Riot Bill.” Florida is now a safer place. …

Republicans must rally the non-woken, of all colors, into an avowedly anti-woke coalition. …

In response, of course, woke types will say that Republicans are playing the race card. But that’s nonsensical because nobody but a crazy likes disorder.

Instead, Republicans are playing a class card on behalf of the rainbow of people who uphold the homey virtues of family, tradition, and normalcy. That’s a good platform to attract normal people of all colors, and they are the majority.

An anti-woke coalition will form a large majority, and the wokesters know it. Which is why they are so busy rigging the “democracy”.

Reading this I could see similarities with Liarbour and their actions here.

By the time we get back to some form of democracy, it might be too late.