I just did a Google search to check the name of the Judis and Teixeira Emerging Democratic Majority, the book that told Democrats back in 2004 that they were going to own the future with minorities, women, the educated and young people.
But a funny thing happened with the auto-complete when I typed in "judis ". It auto-completed to "judis emerging republican majority." OK, now it doesn't. Not any more. Not after I forced it to "emerging democratic majority."
Because now any fool can see that there is a real good chance that Republicans will own the future, by appealing to a middle-middle constituency of the ordinary American middle class: people without fancy educations, but that have worked to rise above the subordinate working class and that have started to identify as Americans rather than hyphenated-Americans. The people I call the People of the Responsible Self.
And that is why all the human props that President Trump called out in his first State of the Union speech were demonstrably middle-middle kinds of people. And they noticed. The parents of the two murdered girls were noticeably affected. One mother observed how moving it was for the president to notice a nobody like her, and how he kissed her on the forehead. Well, yeah. There's one born every minute. The president was using all the folks in the gallery as human props, and they better understand that. But he was also sending a message to all the middle-middle people in America: I care about people like you.
Earth to Democrats. If you are a middle-middle American then for the last decade you have probably been starting to think that the Democrats don't care about people like you. In the olden days, Democrats used to win the "cares about people like me" question hands down. But now Democrats care about people that put out #WeBelieve yardsigns and the identity politics victims. Not the middle-middle people that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.
Notice that, if you are a liberal then you don't have to follow the rules, you either don't work or your work is special, and your clients don't have to obey the law, as in the homeless and illegal aliens in sanctuary cities and "peaceful protesters." People notice this. Middle-middle people notice this. They noticed it fifty years ago when The Kids were tearing it up in the Sixties. That's why President Richard Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew were able to mobilize the Silent Majority into a 60-40 blowout in the 1972 election. In those days, of course, the Democrats owned the Congress, so they were able to kick President Nixon out of office for shenanigans that would be regarded just as boys-will-be-boys when the Obama administration did it. But I don't think today's Republicans will be the pushovers that the 1970s Republicans were.
The astonishing thing about Donald Trump, for me, is that he has run as a populist nationalist, but governed as a conservative libertarian. Nobody could have expected, when Charles Murray published By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission in 2015, that the next president of the United States would spend his first year sending a wrecking crew to dismantle the regulations of the administrative state. That's why Murray's book proposed a kind of guerrilla war on the administrative state. He didn't expect to see a president in the near future that would execute on his anti-administrative state agenda; he thought it would take a bottom-up insurgency dedicated to making life difficult for the bureaucrats that just wanted to get through to their pensions.
But here is the thing. No Republican since Ronald Reagan has been able the play the populist card and also bring the ordinary middle class and the white working class with him. But in Trump the white working class trusts. Strictly speaking, the white working class is supposed to be suspicious of the big corporations. But here Trump has cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. OK, the middle-middle started out thinking that the tax cut wouldn't benefit them, as taught by the mainstream media. But now we seem to be seeing an economic breakout on the corporate front. Corporations seem to think that the future is so bright they gotta wear shades. And the middle-middle is noticing.
Who knew? Well, we green eye-shade guys kinda hoped. Because we muttered to ourselves about marginal tax rates and blah-blah-blah. But we didn't really expect the staggering response of the corporations to the tax rate cut. Yeah. Remember back in 2012 or 2013? Obama said that he would go for a corporate tax rate cut. So he coulda been a contender, and perked up the economy and got Hillary Clinton elected. Much better than siccing the FBI on the opposition.
OK, I know. All this talk of emerging permanent majorities is pure folly, partly because people start to believe it. Sean Trende is right. Party strength tends to fluctuate about the middle, and when parties lose badly they course-correct. And it is rare for a party to win more than two presidential elections in a row.
But I dare say that the Democrats are facing a reappraisal in the next few years, rather like the awful experience from 1972 to 1988 when they lost four out of five presidential elections. I wonder how long it will take them to get the message.
But a funny thing happened with the auto-complete when I typed in "judis ". It auto-completed to "judis emerging republican majority." OK, now it doesn't. Not any more. Not after I forced it to "emerging democratic majority."
Because now any fool can see that there is a real good chance that Republicans will own the future, by appealing to a middle-middle constituency of the ordinary American middle class: people without fancy educations, but that have worked to rise above the subordinate working class and that have started to identify as Americans rather than hyphenated-Americans. The people I call the People of the Responsible Self.
And that is why all the human props that President Trump called out in his first State of the Union speech were demonstrably middle-middle kinds of people. And they noticed. The parents of the two murdered girls were noticeably affected. One mother observed how moving it was for the president to notice a nobody like her, and how he kissed her on the forehead. Well, yeah. There's one born every minute. The president was using all the folks in the gallery as human props, and they better understand that. But he was also sending a message to all the middle-middle people in America: I care about people like you.
Earth to Democrats. If you are a middle-middle American then for the last decade you have probably been starting to think that the Democrats don't care about people like you. In the olden days, Democrats used to win the "cares about people like me" question hands down. But now Democrats care about people that put out #WeBelieve yardsigns and the identity politics victims. Not the middle-middle people that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.
Notice that, if you are a liberal then you don't have to follow the rules, you either don't work or your work is special, and your clients don't have to obey the law, as in the homeless and illegal aliens in sanctuary cities and "peaceful protesters." People notice this. Middle-middle people notice this. They noticed it fifty years ago when The Kids were tearing it up in the Sixties. That's why President Richard Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew were able to mobilize the Silent Majority into a 60-40 blowout in the 1972 election. In those days, of course, the Democrats owned the Congress, so they were able to kick President Nixon out of office for shenanigans that would be regarded just as boys-will-be-boys when the Obama administration did it. But I don't think today's Republicans will be the pushovers that the 1970s Republicans were.
The astonishing thing about Donald Trump, for me, is that he has run as a populist nationalist, but governed as a conservative libertarian. Nobody could have expected, when Charles Murray published By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission in 2015, that the next president of the United States would spend his first year sending a wrecking crew to dismantle the regulations of the administrative state. That's why Murray's book proposed a kind of guerrilla war on the administrative state. He didn't expect to see a president in the near future that would execute on his anti-administrative state agenda; he thought it would take a bottom-up insurgency dedicated to making life difficult for the bureaucrats that just wanted to get through to their pensions.
But here is the thing. No Republican since Ronald Reagan has been able the play the populist card and also bring the ordinary middle class and the white working class with him. But in Trump the white working class trusts. Strictly speaking, the white working class is supposed to be suspicious of the big corporations. But here Trump has cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. OK, the middle-middle started out thinking that the tax cut wouldn't benefit them, as taught by the mainstream media. But now we seem to be seeing an economic breakout on the corporate front. Corporations seem to think that the future is so bright they gotta wear shades. And the middle-middle is noticing.
Who knew? Well, we green eye-shade guys kinda hoped. Because we muttered to ourselves about marginal tax rates and blah-blah-blah. But we didn't really expect the staggering response of the corporations to the tax rate cut. Yeah. Remember back in 2012 or 2013? Obama said that he would go for a corporate tax rate cut. So he coulda been a contender, and perked up the economy and got Hillary Clinton elected. Much better than siccing the FBI on the opposition.
OK, I know. All this talk of emerging permanent majorities is pure folly, partly because people start to believe it. Sean Trende is right. Party strength tends to fluctuate about the middle, and when parties lose badly they course-correct. And it is rare for a party to win more than two presidential elections in a row.
But I dare say that the Democrats are facing a reappraisal in the next few years, rather like the awful experience from 1972 to 1988 when they lost four out of five presidential elections. I wonder how long it will take them to get the message.
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