The Democrats are rapidly changing how much they talk about each of the Left’s three obsessions: race, class, and gender.
Somewhere along the road from their Nov. 5 election defeat to the Jan. 20 inauguration of President Donald Trump, they decided to tamp down discussion of race and gender and to revive old-fashioned leftist class warfare against the rich.
Thus, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), minority leader in the House of Representatives, excoriated Republicans for what he said was their determination “to stand up a shadow government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.”
He was talking about Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who is digging up wasteful and abusive spending of taxpayer dollars that the Left thinks belong to it by right.
There are two parts to the Democrats’ complaint. The first is to say Musk heads an unelected government. Democrats hope to hobble Trump’s second administration by making the case in public and in federal court that it is exercising unconstitutional authority. The argument, though of dubious quality, will delay reform, which is part of the point.
The second element of the Democrats’ complaint is that the shadow is being cast by a phalanx of self-interested rich people. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), minority leader in the Senate, sneered at Trump’s “billionaire buddies.” His tedious, hypocritical rhetoric was amplified without irony on social media by Alex Soros, son of billionaire George Soros, who for decades has been toppling elected governments and replacing them with ones that will adopt his extreme left-wing agenda.
The fact that the party of the Left has turned against the wealthy should not fool you into thinking it objects to rich people on principle. They’re fine if they think like Soros. The wealthy were totally acceptable to the Left when, in the 2020 election, Wall Street gave the majority of its campaign donations to Democrats. The blue party isn’t choosy. It’s like the pragmatic robber who focuses on banks because that is where money is.
Democrats have cooled toward billionaires now partly because Wall Street hedged its election bets in 2024 and gave to both parties, slightly more to the GOP. But their switch to class warfare, to the politics of envy, is about more than that. It has come about primarily because Democrats lost millions of working-class and lower middle-class voters to Trump and they are desperate to win them back.
When Democrats were emphasizing race, they were focusing on an issue that neither black people nor white people regarded as a top priority. Democrats also, in their obsession, made racial divisions worse. Mostly, however, the Democrats’ problem was that they were ignoring pocketbook concerns uppermost in the minds of ordinary Americans of all races.
Their fixation on gender was even worse. It puts them on the side of what ordinary people, those unblinded by ideology, can see as a borderline psychotic cultural disorder. Gender politics is certainly not a high priority for most people. Focusing on it meant ignoring voters.
The Democrats became a party of fringe, sometimes imaginary, problems that disdained the concerns that most of the country cared about. Trump, by contrast, told the majority he was on their side and put their hopes and worries at the front of his agenda.
The significance of the Democrats’ switch against the rich has nothing to do with virtuous principle but involves a cold calculation that the party’s survival and future exercise of power require it to pay minister to voters’ concerns. That is what prompts their demagogic hostility toward billionaires. It will do nothing to help anyone, but it will seem to be siding with the majority.
Leftist class warfare is obviously not new, but it has been dormant for a long time. Even socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) inveighed less in the past decade against his bogeymen, “millionaires and billionaires.” And when the Left decided opposition to illegal immigration was racist, the Bern doused his fiery rhetoric about the mass foreign influx depressing blue-collar wages.
Now, because left-wing electoral hopes depend on winning on the economy, we are going to get much more class hostility and more tub-thumping about the rich. The Democrats will scorch plutocrats and talk up the merits of socialist policies. Most will not explicitly advocate socialism, unlike Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), but that is where Democratic policies are headed.
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Race and gender will continue to motivate some of them, particularly the most ideologically committed, but it will be more in the background. Democratic politicians, whose principal concern is to be reelected and to exercise power, will put most of their energy into widening dangerous and disingenuous class divisions between haves and have-nots.
This will militate against enterprise, against wealth creation, against the American dream, and against freedom. If you think Democrats had bad ideas in 2024, be assured that they have many others just as bad that they will be raising from now until 2028.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
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