The left’s autopsy of its very predictable electoral defeat has become a comedy show.
Joe Scarborough is on bended knee, licking the boots of an incoming president he has likened to Hitler. Nancy Pelosi, who first defended Biden’s mental capacity before coldly whacking him, is now blaming him for Kamala Harris’s loss. Activist “journalists” claim that Harris ran a “perfect” campaign and blame voters “who gave up on democracy.”
The self-preening typifies much of what’s wrong with the contemporary American left. It’s a culture driven by its own self-exaltation and social credit scores rather than self-examination. Moral condescension and virtue signaling are its chief currency.
Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s new book on the hypocrisy of elites, “We Have Never Been Woke,” captures this bonfire of the vanities. Using immigration as an example, he points to the self-dealing of elites who “have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you” but mask their avarice in sanctimonious virtue.
Meanwhile, the migrant waves over-saturate labor markets, steal working-class jobs and lower pay scales. For working Americans, this wealth transfer is yet another assault by the same liberal elites who drove the neoliberal consensus on free trade that enriched themselves — all while hollowing out working-class communities and transferring jobs abroad through unfair trade laws. Most workers lost real wages under the Biden administration.
The de rigueur of the left is to cry bigotry when the working class and others object to this self-dealing. The college educateds get fat while expressing moral condescension towards anyone that questions their “multiculturalism over nation” pathos or their victimhood obsessions. Pretty clever gig if you can get it.
But al-Gharbi drills down on exactly why the virtue signaling is so important to elites. In a world where universities “overproduce” the sheer number of elites, it’s become the method by which elites try to differentiate themselves and distinguish their higher social credit vis-à-vis their peers.
“‘[W]okeness’ has become key a source of cultural capital among contemporary elites,” the author argues. This is perhaps why the post-modern, deconstructionist left has adopted so many policy and cultural positions — on crime, critical race, critical gender, climate absolutism, the mimicry of “river to sea” terrorist rhetoric — that play to these insular needs of donors and activists, but alienate Democrats from most voters.
Rather than reading the election results, Democrats seem to be doubling down.
The Post this week reported that the White House is encouraging more migrant surges with, among other things, a glitchy ICE app that allows the 230,000 illegal migrants in New York (and potentially millions elsewhere) to merely “check in” with immigration officials online rather than in person. This is music to the ears of the criminal cartels who thrive on the promise of minimal in-country monitoring and ease of evasion.
The Post also reports the White House continues to battle Texas’s efforts to fortify border barriers to deter the most imminent, pre-inauguration migrant wave — yet another encouragement for the cartels.
Democrats pontificated for the last four years on the virtues of democracy yet seem to be defying the
clearly expressed will of the voters in favor the “virtuous” elites. One possible explanation is that they cynically believe an aggravated migrant crisis will complicate the incoming administration’s cleanup of efforts.
But the irony here is that their sanctimony closes their ears; rather than superior, it leaves them intellectually impoverished. To wit, a worsened mess likely makes the new administration cleanup crew look more competent and heroic.
This dynamic is at play today across multiple policy fronts. In 2021, for example, a new Biden administration had the proverbial wind at its back on climate policy.
But like most of West Europe, it fleeced the opportunity with condescending preachiness and NetZero austerity policies like EV mandates that imposed high costs on American workers and consumers while doing nothing to restrain the rapidly growing carbon emissions elsewhere on the planet.
As a result, the public throughout the West has become skeptical, and the major international initiatives — COP29 and the Paris Agreements — look closer to their death beds. Again, this sets the stage for the incoming administration to capitalize on newly emerging, more cooperative financing models to develop economically promising renewables and carbon capture technologies.
How ironic would it be for the Trump administration to find the needed common ground on climate internationally to advance the issue.
Elsewhere, the administration’s slow-walking the needed offensive armaments to Ukraine and
its schizophrenic approach on Israel — pledging support one day and then, with yet more virtue
signaling, undermining Israel’s efforts to root out the genocidal terrorists in places like Rafah — has also left the world more unstable and set a more favorable stage for Trump’s potential triumphalism on the world stage.
And this is the point. Priggishness and moral condescension, absent any meaningful factual backing, is
not just vacuous pseudo-intellectualism but, because it imperiously tries to shut down debate rather than
discovering knowledge, it leaves its practitioners all the dumber. It may be the most important
autopsy lesson the left could learn from the election.
