all aboard the infinity train

En L'air

Detail and draft under the cut

Bernie-style populism didn’t land because billionaires figured out long ago they could undermine it by being socially right-wing, and the working class would forgive their wealth and privilege. That’s why this same demographic is willing to make it rain for grifters like Joel Osteen and Pat Robertson. That’s why they worship the wealthiest man on the planet like a God and consider him some real-life Tony Stark. People dismissed Donald Trump as a shameless attention-hungry New York oligarch until he called Mexicans rapists. Then he shot up to the top of the GOP primary polls. The working class didn’t think much of Elon Musk until he said “pronouns suck.” Then he became their hero. A scion of working-class Pennsylvania lost his US Senate seat last week to a hedge fund manager from Connecticut. West Virginia elected their richest man to the Senate after electing him governor – as a Democrat and later a Republican. Ohio tossed out their longtime Democratic senator, known for his strong support of labor rights, for – literally, no joke – a used-car salesman.

You can’t tell me the working class in America thinks being a billionaire alone is what makes one a “wealthy elite.” There are significant factors at play here Bernie is either oblivious to or purposely ignorant of.

In college, a professor once told me that Communism never succeeded in the United States because we are too religious and proud as a country. Religion, traditions, and culture were never widely discredited the way they were in Europe and Asia, where the clergy and nobility kept the bourgeoisie in figurative chains for centuries. The relative ease of social mobility made America unique compared to its Western counterparts. Historically, American progressivism has been focused on expanding social mobility – initially limited to only white men – to identity groups who had been denied it at the start: blacks, women, and immigrants. We have done it, with various amounts of success. While it may seem counterintuitive, Americans pride themselves in being the nation that pioneered the idea that wealth and status can be achieved through ingenuity and hard work and not just based on a lucky roll of the genetic dice, as it was in the Old World. It doesn’t mean we don’t have generational wealth in our country; we do, but since it isn’t the sole way to achieve wealth and power, we don’t care nearly as much about destroying all of it. Further, we will happily endorse it if the oligarchs and the aristocrats vow to promote and protect the social values we care about and the social hierarchy that benefits us.

It’s one of the reasons I believe Bernie could never beat Trump. If you ask working-class people what they want: an anti-immigrant, anti-intellectual billionaire or a Vermont socialist backed by kids from Harvard and UC Berkeley who hate our traditions and customs, the working class will always back the billionaire.

The one thing Bernie has not gotten and never gotten, even with all his Champion of the Working Class cosplay crusading (as a wealthy Vermont millionaire who has accomplished very little during his long tenure in office aside from repeatedly fracturing the Democratic party), is that a lot of the American working class see billionaires (as pointed out above) as aspirational role models, not evil parasites. Scholars can and indeed have written many long sociological, political, and analytical papers about the "What's the Matter with Kansas?" problem, wherein working class and poor people vote against their own economic interests in order to elevate grifting xenophobic populists whose policies only benefit the already-rich. For one thing, this presupposes the "rational individual" economic-maximization model of human behavior, which was popularized in the free-market 1970s and 80s, and has never been true in any meaningful sense, but as pointed out above: America is addicted to the "hard work makes you rich and billionaires have clearly worked to earn their wealth" mindset. They are equally addicted to the "temporarily dispossessed millionaire" fallacy, wherein if they too just Pull Themselves Up By The Bootstraps, that is the only thing stopping them from being equally wealthy. It's not, but we're still absolutely throttled by the "Republicans Are Better For The Economy" myth that just played a huge part in Trump's second election win. What's empirically "real" or not matters less and less.

Bernie's brand of faux-leftist populism is so toxic in America precisely because it pairs this apparent destruction of the American Dream (hey why do you want to destroy my chance of becoming a billionaire?!) with virulent anti-American tankie-lite rhetoric spouted by the online left, who see America as the source of all evil in the world despite benefiting enormously from their upbringing in America and access to American privilege. We can (and again, have!) written many, many papers about the founding and continuing social ills embedded in America: its establishment on the back of slavery, racism, genocide, and so on. But when it comes to day-to-day electoral politics, the average mid-to-low-information American voter does not give a shit about complicated historical debates and generational injustices. They just don't. They care about how much things cost at the grocery store and what the vibes "feel" like to them. After a brief upsurge of social acceptance in 2020 with BLM/George Floyd, they've also lost interest in dealing with systemic racism, and are inclined to accept Trump's easy-scapegoating rhetoric. This is not limited to white people either; witness the major gains he made with Hispanics in particular. The ones who are able to vote in presidential elections are US citizens and see themselves as safely insulated from Trump's mass-deportation policies because they're not undocumented (even if they have friends and relatives who are and who are very much NOT safe). They want to preserve their own piece of the pie and are not acting in grand pan-Latino racial solidarity. Nobody says they have to -- they can focus on their own personal interests just as much as white voters -- but they're definitely one of the communities who are in the soonest for a rude wakeup call.

Looking at the election results shows that America is, as ever, an extremely divided country. This election was not a landslide for Trump. The Republicans benefited from an extremely favorable map to pick up WV, OH, MT, PA in the Senate, but added no House seats and still have a tiny majority of about 3 (which may shrink further with special elections and/or unexpected departure). Trump got 49.9% of the vote; Harris got around 48.5%. The American electorate is not left-wing; it is also not immutably right-wing. It is primarily transactional, "what have you done for me lately," and cursed with low information literacy, sophisticated disinformation campaigns, and short-term memory that is worse than a goldfish. Abortion passed everywhere except in FL (where it needed 60% and got 57%). As ever, the public liked Democratic policies, but voted for Republicans to punish Democrats for not implementing them fast enough. That is one of the most maddening paradoxes in all of American politics and it fucked us good this time, but that's the twist of the screw. The Republicans also benefited from the post-COVID anti-incumbency that kicked Trump out in 2020. A lot of the scary things that happened in the last four years -- rising prices, ongoing threats to democracy, Dobbs, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, etc -- were not necessarily Biden's fault, but they happened on his watch and contributed to the sense of visceral fear and threat that is always a better predictor of electoral behavior than the flawed idea of Rational Economic Maximization.

As such, despite the avalanche of "What Democrats Must Do Now" postmortems, we should definitely point out that Bernie instantly threw them under the bus for not being "pro-worker," when the Biden administration was the most pro-worker, pro-labor, and anti-corporate in recent history (and due to the electoral backlash it received as a result, quite possibly for a very long time). Bernie primarily conceives of the American working class as white people, often white men, engaged in customary trade-union pursuits, which is outdated and inadequate and reeks of the rancid "the left wasn't nice enough to fragile insecure white men" takes that are latently or openly misogynist. Biden did a hell of a lot to address their economic interests, and they punished him for it, because what is at stake, in their minds, isn't actually their economic interest (even if that's what is often used to describe it) but their position of unquestioned power as white men. They will happily give up the chance of better economic policies if it means continuing to assert their authority over other marginalized people; their lot might not be great, but at least they're still white. And indeed, still men. Bernie complaining that the Democrats didn't cater enough to White Men is, objectively, bullshit.

As such, I can tell you that one way that the Democrats can get back to electoral relevancy, which is definitely likely in 2026 and 2028 if we can get that far, is not by listening to Bernie. "Destroy the billionaires" paired with toxic tankie rhetoric driven by the online left competing with each other to be more extreme and unpleasant is electoral poison and that's why Bernie's chronic campaigning got him nowhere and fatally splintered the Democratic party in 2016, allowing Trump to win in the first place. It's a dud. The end. There is nothing positive or constructive in that vision, and while riding aggrieved populism can get you decently far, it also has to be a populism that's rooted in some idea of America, however shallow and lip-service. "Make America Great Again," despite how much Trump does to destroy America in every conceivable sense, works because MAGAts wave American flags and feel like a righteous and integral part of their country. The fact that in this election cycle, Democrats actually embraced love-of-country rhetoric, American flags, and appeals to fundamental "American" values, no matter how cringy and schmaltizily-nationalistic it feels to educated liberals, is an important part of getting that ground back. It promotes the idea that you can love America (however defined) and vote Democratic, and we can't give that up. Because then yeah, everyone waving the flag will be a jingoistic MAGA fascist, and people who like and respond to that imagery (which is a decent majority of ordinary Americans) will want to associate with them by default.

The increase in DEI after George Floyd in 2020, LGBT products and ads, efforts to train and hire women and minorities - which I believe are all good things! - came to be associated with major corporations from Bank of America to Target to John Deere. Your average low information voter began to see Big Corporations as associated with the left.

So when Democrats railed against the billionaires and the elites it rang hollow. Because voters now see Democratic constituencies as elitist billionaires.

This has only been magnified by the Democratic party's base becoming college educated, coastal, and urban.

I'm not saying this is right or wrong. But that's the perception. And as we now understand, elections are just based on perception and vibes.

Harris's campaign was going in the right direction. She tried to reclaim freedom and patriotism for the Democrats. She couched her policies in terms of economic opportunity. Democrats shouldn't overcorrect and abandon the things she did right.

I'm already seeing people debate left versus center. Some are saying that Harris's turn to the center alienated the base and that Dems need to move left to excite people. Some say that Harris was hurt by her 2019 lefty policies and never recovered. I don't think this argument is helpful at all.

Dems need an answer to the right wing media ecosystem. They need to figure out how to reach low information voters. They need to figure out how to talk to people where they're at.

"They'll sell your soul just so you'll make believe"