The Moment Before Wile E. Coyote Falls to Earth

The recurring drama of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner is that the Coyote keeps coming up with a cunning plan to blow up the Roadrunner, but every time the cunning plan blows up in his face.

I am reminded of this as the unremarkable Joe Biden picks the unremarkable Kamala Harris as his running mate. They are both, I think, caricatures of who we do not want as president.

I wonder if that has been true about the Democratic Party for the last 50 years. Let us suppose the Democrats were genuinely shocked when Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968. But hey, accidents happen.

Then Nixon won a second term, going away. Well, the Democrats taught him a lesson and booted him out of office. But then came Reagan, the "amiable dunce," in swampy Clark Clifford's memorable phrase. And a Republican Senate.

OK, so things returned to normal in 1992 with Bill Clinton, the master politician of the ages. But the next thing was the first Republican Congress in 40 years!

OK, so we got the First Black President in 2008. But the next thing was a Republican House in 2010 and a Republican Senate in 2014.

What in the world is going on? 

What is going on is that the Democrats are becoming more and more desperate to hold onto the reins of political power that they had come to regard as theirs by divine right -- or at least the arc of history -- and the good old ways just aren't working any more.

Let us say that the problems began when working-class Americans first started breaking away from the New Deal coalition and voting Republican. It started with Nixon's Silent Majority, and reasserted itself with the Reagan Democrats.

I experienced the Reagan Democrats directly in 1980 at a Republican presidential caucus in Kent, Washington. There was I and another gentry guy as Bush supporters. But on the other side of the room were guys that looked like phone-repair technicians: they were Reagan supporters and they carried the day. On that day I knew that the world had changed.

Democrats have been pretty cunning about neutralizing this trend, by increasing immigration and turning a blind eye to illegal immigration. They understand that most immigrants start out as Democrats until they find their economic place. And they respond to a racist appeal until they experience themselves as Americans rather than hyphenated Americans.

The problem is that this approach to politics requires that you taint all ordinary un-hypenated Americans as white supremacists. Thus the progressive three-layer theory of politics, as suggested by Matt Taibbi:

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

So, in this lefty world there are the innocents, the good guys, and the bad guys. 

Contrast that with my reductive Three Peoples theory, which has People of the Creative Self, People of the Responsible Self, and People of the Subordinate Self. Or Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer theory, which has Gentry, Commoners, and Clients.

In the Chantrill/Yarvin world, there are special people, ordinary people, and subordinates. It is a world which naturally has different kinds of people, but they ought to be able to rub along, with a little give and take.

But in the lefty world, things are black and white. And the only thing to do is for the allies to defeat the white oppressor monsters with the votes of the oppressed peoples before they grind the noses of the oppressed people into the dust.

I don't think it is that tendentious to suggest that the left's three-layer theory is, as lefties like to say about other people's ideas: Overdetermined.

And the Democrats' politics seems to have got them to a weird place, where the leading candidates for the presidency were a couple of old guys, one a socialist and one an old wheel-horse of the New Deal era. The rest of the Democratic candidates were diverse caricatures from central casting. The gay guy Buttigig! The fake Latino O'Rourke, the black guy Deval Patrick. The fake Indian Elizabeth Warren.The hedge-fund guy Tom Steyer. The Jewish billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

Who among them could you say "cares about people like me?"

Let us notice the Big Lie at the heart of the three-layer "members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors."

It is that the ordinary white middle class, the Commoners, are in fact implacably powerful "white oppressors." Really liberals, are you sure? The conservative guys that I had lunch with last week are a cabal of white oppressors just back from their white-supremacist meeting?

And yet this is the lie that powers the whole Diversity and Inclusion politics of today's Democratic Party, and what prompts corporate America to immediately side with Black Lives Matter upon the death of George Floyd -- who, it turns out, was resisting arrest, was clearly under the influence of drugs, and was being restrained merely until the emergency medical folks got there.

When you play ducks and drakes with the truth, you get Trump. Because Trump is the candidate of the Commoners, of ordinary Americans without gorgeous qualifications, without access to power, without special privileges.

More and more I get the point of Curtis Yarvin's notion that the ruling class strokes the "ambition, honor, and vanity" of the Gentry layer. All the folderol about the First Black President, the First Woman President is all bubba bait for the Gentry. Oh yeah! We are so evolved! Isn't it wonderful that we elected the First Black President! Finally, gays get to marry! We are so evolved! So compassionate! So inclusive!

But, it seems to me, this politics gets you the present gargoyles on the Democratic ticket for president. Joe Biden, the underwhelming senator from a tiny state, Delaware, Chosen By Obama so as not to outshine the underwhelming guy at the top of the ticket. Kamala Harris, who made her way to headline politics as the creature of Willie Brown, the Mr. Big of California politics, and has clearly not developed an essential instinct for what to say and what not to say.

The question is: how do these gargoyles get to be presidential candidates? The answer, I think, is the poisonous race and gender politics of the Democratic Party that cannot let ordinary politicians make their way to prominence, but must be always putting the race/gender finger on the scales, must always be reducing everything to good-guys/bad-guys race war.

And the bottom line of their politics is that if the rulers can get the votes of the Gentry and the votes of the Clients then who cares about the Commoners?

Well, nobody cares until the Commoners rebel, because of the injustice of the "oppressed peoples, allies, white oppressors" theory of politics.

And then the Democratic Wile E. Coyotes are stunned when the latest cunning product from Acme Corporation blows up in their faces.