Comment by kalkin

I don't want to ascribe any particular political beliefs to the commenter, the quip about re-education was somewhat of a joke given the irony of somebody arguing against dictatorship by invoking mass "deprograming". But many a true word is spoken in jest.

There are no real Maoists or true communists in the US anymore, at least not enough to constitute meaningful political forces. To the extent they exist they are irrelevant, and one can argue further that no true left remains in the US at all.

As for my analysis of the Trump phenomenon, I only have intuitions and biases to offer, so caveat lector.

I don't think it's particularly mysterious. The general perception is that the American left has made identity politics and social justice its main political and social programs, to the detriment of basic governance, most importantly the economy and security, thereby breaking the social contract.

You cannot be a party that aggressively defends and promotes the interests of minority classes at the expense of the majority without loosing the support of the majority. In some cases, these minorities are so small as to border on the absurd.

Something like 0.6% of people identify as transgender in the United States(1). They are vastly over-represented in the media, in left wing political programs, and in the general zeitgeist at large relative to their population size. The same goes for the LGBT population, which represents maybe 10% of the US population (and that's a liberal estimate).

Try as you might, you cannot escape the cold, hard fact that 60% the US population is white, with something closer to 70% identifying as white or partly white. 90% percent of that group is going to be straight.

The US middle and working classes still really haven't recovered from the financial crisis of 2008, the aftermath of which precipitated a huge transfer of wealth from these classes to the upper class, a trend that accelerated during the pandemic.

So you have a majority of the population who are reeling from a devastating loss of wealth, station, and status, unable to keep pace with inflation, watching one of the two main political parties aggressively promote the interests of a tiny minority at their expense, or at least that is the perception.

Putting aside the nature of the minorities in question, the subservience of the political class to a minority of the population has another name: elitism. The natural response to elitism is populism, which is what we are seeing.

The protection of minority rights is a noble cause, but it's primarily a civil rights issue, and the focus should be on making sure those classes are treated equally under the law. The goal should not be the elevation of their social and cultural station above the majority.

Biden, and then Harris/Waltz, are the kind of the ultimate expression of this left-wing, elitist decadence. Biden appointed a man who wears stilettos and dresses to work in charge of nuclear waste as the Department of Energy. People can rage at me all they want for that description, but that is what the majority of Americans perceive. Again, putting aside any questions of morality, it is political suicide.

Tolerance of mass border crossings was probably a more directly fatal error, representing a final decoupling of the democratic party from their ideological roots in the labor movement which was always militantly against illegal immigration. Again, the perception is that interest of minorities (in this case migrants) are primary to the interests of the majority. In this case the minority are not even American citizens.

There's a lot more to say on this topic, and I'm sure you can find more persuasive analyses from better sources, but these are some of my intuitions.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

1. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad...