The Groups and Barista Proletariat of the Democratic Party
1st December 2024
The 2022-24 rejection of Biden-Harris policies may or may not lead to an enduring Republican majority. However, it is, as the headline on an Ezra Klein postelection New York Times’ interview proclaims, “the end of the Obama coalition.”
The most major components of his supposedly ascendant Democratic majority, including record turnout and percentages among black voters, continuing supermajorities from Hispanics and Asians, and enthusiastic support from young people, have receded, and support from white college graduates has even cracked a bit. The 44th president, in his Kalorama mansion, 2.5 miles from the White House, has seen the arc of history bend toward Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago.
Smart Democrats are focusing on one cause of their party’s limited but, at least for the moment, decisive decline. Ruy Teixeira, coauthor of “The Emerging Democratic Majority,”which foresaw the Democratic Party’s triumph in 2008 but not its subsequent demise, writes that Democrats have moved sharply left on cultural matters, on racial quotas and preferences, on increasing rather than reducing immigration, toward stands that have repelled “the white working class” in the 2010s and now repel the nonwhite working class in the 2020s.