Demography is destiny. Take a look at the Progressives’ crazy agenda. Not one part of it says “family values.” Instead, it puts them at the head of your family dinner table. Their mission, led by the elites in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Corporate America, is to control you. The elites are awash in guilt. Are you? Hardly.
You’re bustin’ your butt to make a living and to raise good kids. You’re the forgotten men and women who the Progressives feel they can steamroll. Not so fast. Their mission is not sustainable as long as we recognize the problem and put on the brakes.
Joel Kotkin writes in Quillette:
In the United States, the Democrats have become almost indistinguishable from the big Wall Street firms and tech oligarchies, mainstream media, and other wealthy elites. Democrats once ruled mining and manufacturing towns; today, they represent 41 of the 50 wealthiest Congressional districts. The Republican Party, meanwhile, has evolved from the country club Wall Street party into one reliant on white working-class voters, and increasingly minorities, like Latinos, who appreciate that Trump delivered the first real income gains in a generation.
Similar patterns have emerged in Europe, which has also experienced “job polarization” resulting from shrinkage of the middle-wage sector, notably in Germany, France, and Sweden—countries long associated with social democracy.6 In Britain, Labour has suffered enormous erosion of its once-solid working-class base; concern about uncontrolled immigration and the erosion of national sovereignty drove support for Brexit among blue collar workers. In 2019, the Tories won roughly half the once-reliable working-class vote, compared to a third for Labour.7
Similarly, the Australian Labour Party has seen its share of suburban, working-class voters decline as it adopted a progressive and green agenda more popular with the urban intelligentsia. In France, the working class has largely deserted the Socialist Party, with many turning instead to the Front National (now renamed the Rassemblement National). In 2015, the FN won more working-class votes than all the leftwing parties combined.8 In Germany, the working-class base of the great Social Democratic Party has also shifted rightward, including towards the nativist AfD, while the professional class moves decisively towards the Greens.
The green conundrum
The green agenda, notes Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira, has driven much of this shift. The doctrines of environmental puritanism impact most directly those who work with their hands, in factories, the logistics industry, and energy. The disparate impact of draconian climate legislation on working- and lower-middle-class families is plainly evident in my home state of California, where climate policy has crippled the production of higher paid blue-collar jobs in fields like construction, manufacturing, and energy. The impact of “decarbonization,” particularly attempts to “ban” fracking, according to a US Chamber of Commerce report, would cost 14 million jobs, far more than the eight million lost in the great recession.
Progressives, and President Biden, suggest these job losses can be made up with “green jobs.” Unfortunately, this is something of a fairy tale; analysis by the Building Trades Unions shows that green jobs pay far less and last far less long than the positions they hope to replace. Rather than find a way to boost blue-collar jobs, there’s a growing appetite to employ the powers assumed by the executive during the pandemic lockdowns (for which the working class has borne the brunt) as a “test run” for a policy of dampening economic growth (“de growth”).
Life in the new green regimes will be ever-more restrictive and socially regressive; the Biden administration, for example, is discussing such things as taxing gas mileage to pay for infrastructure, something that would be wildly unpopular outside of a handful of dense, transit-dependent cities. Similar dangers lurk for Europe’s working class. In Britain, high energy prices have been linked to the continuing decline of the local steel industry. Higher energy prices in heavily industrialized Germany have hurt the working class far more than the affluent rich.
Low-income energy consumers, meanwhile, are particularly harmed by the enforced shift to renewables. The Jacques Delors Institute estimates that already some 30 million Europeans could not adequately heat their homes this winter. Deutsche Bank’s senior economist Eric Heymann predicts that green policies will create “a European mega-crisis” and a “noticeable loss of welfare and jobs.” This kind of naturally unpopular program, he points out, will necessitate “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship.”
Action Line: Progressive can’t have your cake and eat it too. Not anymore. They’ve awakened a giant—those who rise and stand for what they believe in. The American middle-class will not go down without a fight. Progressives don’t have monopoly power over you.
