Every so often, particularly the closer we
get to election day, I'll read an article in the Times or Reuters or some other
publication where reporters actually talk to voters about who they're voting
for and why. I like these articles because it's one of the few times that our
media actually talks to people like people instead of talking around, over and
above us.
There's a common theme this year when these
papers talk to ACTUAL working class voters such as building managers,
fisherman, and small business owners. That theme is how much harder it is for
them to either do their jobs or make ends meet. Some of it has to do with the
trade war Trump started, some of it has to do without his immigration policies
have made it harder for them to find workers to do projects, some of it has to
do with just being able to pay their bills. The common thread is, to quote
James Carville, the economy, stupid.
The Democrats are expected to do well in
this election cycle because they are playing in to the idea of
affordability, something the President
basically considers a fake issue. Many of the people interviewed are former
Trump voters who are considering either voting Democrat, or if they have no
stomach for it, sitting the election out. In either case the circumstances for
a blue wave are growing more and more likely by the day.
I mention this because I've read a lot of
articles online at this site and others. And there are a lot of things that
inflame the readers here: DEI policies, the policies of ICE, laws against
transgenders, the administration of history, Gaza, how Trump is corrupting the
Justice system…well you know most of them better than I do. And yet somehow I
haven't read a single article here or indeed in most left-wing journals talking
about economic issues and how they hurt everybody.
They have a lot to say about capitalism and
how its destroying everything that is good and pure. But the closest they'll
ever get to talking about economic issues is how the one percent have too much
money. They'll argue about how broken capitalism, how much the rich have
corrupted every part of our American system and made it a wasteland. Yet I find
it telling that most of their article are more about the evils of the 'One
Percent' and how to help the other 99.
I've mentioned in previous articles that
the left really has no economic policy to speak of beyond money is the solution
to all the problems in society and the way to get that money is to tax the
rich. This is the attitude of the
activist, which as has been established is usually a college-educated and
relatively rich white person. How the
wealth of the one percent ends up getting to the rest of America has never been
established by the progressive.
Most of their arguments are based on taxing
the income of the wealthy, which is a false narrative. The argument for a
wealth tax has occasionally been floated by some states but as we've seen it
rarely gets out of the state legislature or is struck down, as Mamdani's second
home tax was by an appellate court last month. And because the wealthy have
more resources then you or I they can easily relocate to other states or
countries where the tax laws won't reach them and the money certainly won't get
to those who need them.
The larger problem is that the Sanders and
AOC's of the world have never explained how, having taxed the top one percent,
that money then gets to those who need it, particularly those I mentioned
below. Which brings us to the real issue: the left has never really cared about
helping the poor so much as they have hurting the rich.
Far left political issues have always
targeted the wealthy and the system itself and blamed them for what is wrong
with society while the far right has historically attacked minorities for
what's wrong with America. And whether it's the Dixiecrats or the Southern
Strategy of Nixon, the right's method has always been more successfully in
getting votes. This is the difference between the left-wing populism of Bernie
Sanders and the right wing populism of Trump: one couldn't win the Democratic
nomination; the other won the Presidency twice. What's hurt the Democrats the
most in the last decade is that they've spent far too much time trying to
follow the Sanders model rather then try to win back the working class which
the left, despite ostensibly wanting to help, considers beneath them in every
respect because they are working class.
The exit polls of the 2024 election made it
very clear that the plurality of all voters – over 40 percent of them – made
their choices because they were concerned about the economy. This is nothing
new: economic well being has always been a good talking point whether Reagan is
asking "Are you better off then you were four years ago?" or Clinton
campaigning on that very message. But
because the left is mainly made up of people who themselves are well off in the
American hierarchy – maybe not in the one percent, but definitely no lower than
ten – it's almost always the least important issue to them. Academics like Nikole Hannah-Jones and
celebrities like Mark Ruffalo can yell about the racism and unfairness of
America because they can afford to do so. It's highly unlikely someone
who trying to decide between whether to pay for their medical insurance or
water bill in Mississippi gives a crap about transgenders being allowed to use
bathrooms in his state. He's more concerned about his own life.
If the left wonders about the well-being of
these people, it's only in an abstract way: why do they vote against their
economic interests instead of Republicans who promote culture wars? But they're
not really interested in getting them to vote Democrats because most of them
are annoyed Democrats aren't left-wing enough for their states. That Democrats
have realized that they can only win with economic issues has earned them the
slur of 'neoliberal' and that there's no difference between the two parties. Which
is another way of saying: neither party is sufficiently progressive for me.
It might seem glib to look at so many of
the issues the far left raises as vital, whether they are campaign finance
reform, policing, immigration as simply 'rich
people problems'. But the fact it is easier to decide what issues are vital to
you the more money you have and conversely the richer you are, the easier you
can put a wall between yourself and the rest of the world. Not to sound like a
broken record but the reason the conservative movement is more successful then
the progressive one in terms of effective control of every level of politics is
because they've always realized they need to spend the time and energy to
manipulate the voter in order to achieve their goals. The progressive movement,
by contrast, sees the process beneath them and wants the voter to realize on
their own how badly their being abused and exploited and come to the left on
their own. Both sides no doubt hold the average voter in equal contempt but the
conservatives are much better at hiding it because they need them. The progressive actually holds the voter in
contempt for being dumb enough to fall for the manipulations of either side.
The other major problem with the left is
that they spend the overwhelming majority of their time focused on causes that,
however noble and important they are, nevertheless are abstractions to the
overwhelming majority of Americans. And because that nearly all of them are so
massive that the only power the average person in this country has to do
something real – voting – can do very little to fix them, the average person
chooses to focus on more concrete realities that affect their day-to-day lives.
There's nothing wrong with this in theory and practice, but almost to an
individual the average progressive tends to use this as a cudgel to argue the worst possible thing
about the masses, usually using it as code for them being bigots.
In the aftermath of the 2024 election the
majority of progressives chose to dismiss Trump's electoral victory as
confirmation of the foolishness of the average voter because they cared about
'the price of eggs'. To them that was code for them being idiotic at best and
racist at worst, which has been their blanket assumption of so many working
class voters at least for the last decade.
During that same cycle the cause that was
by far the most important to the progressive was Gaza. To them this election
was a mandate not on American democracy or the Democratic administration but
rather foreign policy in Gaza. (To be sure then as now many of them believe
that electoral politics can't solve the problem in Gaza, but let's let that go
for now.)
The problem is, even for the most devoted
people to the cause, what is happening in Gaza is an abstraction where
is the price of groceries is a reality that affects more people in their
daily lives. As I illustrated above
working class voters care far more about economic issues while college educated
and upwardly mobile ones care far more about things like Gaza. And while I grant you it is unlikely the
voters will be able to change what happens on either issue with their votes
next month they are all voting in America, not the Middle East. It's not racist
or wrong for Americans to care more about issues that affect their lives
more than ones that don't.
Gaza is just the most recent of which the
left cares about: the Justice Democrats platform as I've illustrated has more
to do with social justice then economic well being and by its nature has only
appealed to those who are inclined to agree with left-wing policies to begin
with. That has always been a much smaller percentage of Americans then the left
insists it actually is but the left doesn't see a problem with it. The
Democratic Party does – and to their credit have spent much of 2026 trying to
run candidates who will listen to the voters I've mentioned above rather then
trying to win over those who have only a minor allegiance to democracy in the
first place.
The power of the vote, to send a message to
those in power every two years, has essentially been taken for granted by the
masses for so long that even the most educated tend to forget both how
relatively recent it is to world history and how relatively few countries practice
it. The far left, more then the right, tends to treat it not just with disdain
but actually uses it to argue it’s a fraud and an illusion to hold the populace
in chains. That they have yet to come up with an alternative – not even a
better one, just a different one – in all the years I've been reading them is
another in the seemingly endless line of obstacles as to why they've failed to
succeed as a political force in America.
But what has become clear in the last
decade is that the average citizen does take it more seriously then it did.
The average voter turnout rate for both Presidential and midterms have been at
their highest levels in decades as Americans are realizing yes, elections do
have consequences and that they want their voices to be heard. That the extremes
on both sides have made it clear how little use they have for the message when
it goes against what they want is honestly irrelevant because elections aren't
about what they want but what the voters want.
If next month's elections go according to
the polls the Democrats will have succeeded because they've heard the complaints
of what the voters in the articles I've read as well as countless others and
are trying to find candidates who will hear them on economic issues which is
what they care about. If this annoys the progressives who care about every
issue but this one, well, we've spent a decade listening to them and the
voters have made it crystal clear that its not their first priority. The left
can afford to care about other things, but the vast majority of Americans
can't. Until they realize that, they'll basically keep doing what they've
always done because they can afford to.
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