By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, September 04, 2019
‘No Democrat is going to win the nomination for president
of the United States without African-American support. Nor should they,” Kate
Bedingfield, Joe Biden’s deputy campaign manager, told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell
last week.
Bedingfield was pushing back on a single bad poll for
Biden (from Monmouth University) that had the media and the other Democratic
campaigns smelling blood in the water. The poll now seems to be the outlier
that the Biden people say it is. But Bedingfield’s argument has a longer shelf
life both for the Democratic primary and the country.
Let’s start with the big picture. For decades, African
Americans have been an outsize segment of the Democratic base, all but defining
the leftmost ideology of the party. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the
Congressional Black Caucus et al. may have been to the left of the average
black voter (depending on the state), but at the national level they were the
anchor of what constituted the most liberal major constituency of the
Democratic coalition.
Now, that has changed. The most liberal flank of the
Democratic party is far whiter than it used to be, and decidedly to the left of
many of the party’s blacks and other racial minorities on a wide range of
issues. Zach Goldberg (no relation), a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia State
University, wrote a comprehensive survey of this phenomenon for Tablet
magazine in June in a piece titled “America’s White Saviors.” He notes that
black and Asian liberals are more sympathetic to restrictive immigration
policies than their white counterparts. And both black and Latino liberals tend
to be more supportive of Israel and less supportive of the identity-politics agenda
around sexuality and gender.
Some of the more moderate views of many blacks and
Latinos may stem from the fact that they tend to be more religious than
increasingly secular white liberals, polling has found. Another factor is the
age divide: Older voters in all parties and ethnicities tend to be more
conservative. And some of it has to do with a sea change in attitudes on race
in general. White liberals are the only demographic that says they have more
positive views of other ethnicities than their own. As Matt Yglesias of Vox
notes: “In the past five years, white liberals have moved so far to the left on
questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of
even the typical black voter. This change amounts to a ‘Great Awokening.’”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), let’s
remember, defeated her primary opponent in 2018 thanks largely to strong
support in the most affluent parts of her district, where woke white liberals
are a bigger part of the mix.
More broadly, white liberals have become deeply
ideological, shedding the coalitional and transactional orientation that long
defined Democratic-party politics. One can see it as a left-wing version of the
right-wing emphasis on ideological purity that consumed and ultimately
bedeviled the Republican party before Donald Trump smashed all that.
Meanwhile, many black and Latino Democrats — and voters —
have held onto the political pragmatism that has defined a lot of the party’s
politics for the last half-century.
While white liberals were quick to demand the resignation
of Virginia governor Gary Northam in the wake of revelations that he wore
blackface during his time as a medical student in the 1980s, a majority of
blacks in Virginia said he should finish his term.
This is the context that is vexing many of the Democratic
contenders for the presidential nomination. To many conservative ears, all of
the talk about race on the debate stage sounds like pandering to the black
vote. But they’re actually pandering just as much to the white liberal vote and
its echo chamber on Twitter.
Meanwhile, as the L.A. Times reported earlier this
summer, black voters, particularly black women — the king- or queen-makers of
the Democratic primaries — are pragmatically focused on defeating Trump rather
than on making the perfect the enemy of the good. And that’s a big reason that
Biden commands such a large share of the black vote, particularly among older
voters.
This is the great irony of the Democratic primaries. All
of the major candidates, save for Biden, are desperate to prove they care the
most about minorities. But they’re operating on an ideological theory that
assumes they understand the interests of those minorities better than minority
voters themselves.
This is what’s so devastating about the Biden campaign’s
defense against Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and even
non-white candidates such as Kamala Harris and Corey Booker, all of whom are
struggling to win support from non-white primary voters. In a party defined by
what used to be called white guilt, the last thing you can say is that black
voters are wrong.
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