Democratic Party workers watching the presidential election returns in shock on the night of November 8, 2016.
Photo Credit: AP / Matt Rourke

For a very long time,  progressives have believed that eventual long-term control of the federal government by the Democratic Party was their manifest destiny. People of their ideological persuasion were gaining control of most of the major media, including almost all of the TV network news departments and many major city newspapers, as well as of academia. Yet, events over the past year create doubt about just how “manifest” the supposed manifest destiny of the Democratic Party is.

Manifest Destiny of the Democratic Party?

Why  should the progressives of the Democratic Party believe the future belongs to them? There are at least three reasons. One is the multigenerational indoctrination of students in high school  and university. This has convinced many young people that progressive ideology is the way of both moral virtue and reason. The second is the use of multiculturalism to justify the absorption of illegal aliens into the body politic to support the Democratic Party. The third is a historical bondage of minorities, particularly blacks, to the Democratic Party. This is mostly due to historical reasons, and partially to the welfare programs Democrats support.

Ever since John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote their book The Emerging Democratic Majority in 2002, Democrats have been entranced with the idea a growing base of young and minority voters would give them perpetual control of American governments. The basic idea was the Democratic Party could meld a coalition between working class whites and minorities. They would then obtain a majority of the electorate as their base. As the progressives gained increasing control over the education system, both in high schools and universities, Democrats aspired to gain the support of the Millennial and iGen generations. The Millennials are generally considered to have birth dates between 1980 and 2000. The iGen generation (also called Generation Z) followed the Millennials.

The progressive indoctrination of our youth can easily be documented. The American Interest website recently published an essay, entitled Mind the Professors by Samuel J. Abrams, that is concerned with precisely this subject. In that post the graph below was presented as 45 years of data of the ratio of leftist individuals to rightists (progressives to neoliberals in my parlance) for three separate populations: University and college faculty, the entire American electorate, and first year university and college students.

From this data we can see from the red curve the American people themselves have remained consistently and fairly evenly divided between the left and the right with a slight bias toward the left. However, starting in 1984 we see a fairly consistent growth in leftist faculty compared to those on the right. Currently, there are on average around 4.5 leftist professors to every professor on the right. Moreover, The American Interest article shows that these leftist professors are concentrated in the social science and liberal arts departments where they can have the greatest influence. This is demonstrated by the bar chart below.

A short perusal of the chart will show you approximately 75% of the social science faculty was progressive in 2014, and almost 70% of the history and political science faculty. The percentage of progressive faculty appears to fall monotonically the harder the science is. The percentage of progressive faculty does not fall to below 50% until you get to the really technical subjects. Outside of the hard sciences, American institutions of higher learning have indeed become primarily schools to indoctrinate young people into the mysteries of the political Left. Over the decades since the 1960s, progressives have dominated the teaching of students in high school and university.

The results of this leftist domination can now be found with the millennials being the only living American generation to be favorable toward socialism. In 2014 a Reason-Rupe poll asked of various age groups, “Would you say your opinion of Socialism is very favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable, or very unfavorable?“. Graphing the number of net favorable and net unfavorable responses versus age group gave the plot below.

With millennials being a large voting bloc, they are a wild card whose effect can not be easily predicted. If they vote in large numbers they could return control of Congress back to the Democrats.

All of these facts and ideas are potent reasons for progressives to believe they are on the threshold of gaining long-term control of American governments.

Cracks in the Democratic Party?

Yet,  the election of Donald Trump itself shows all is not well with the Democratic Party. Trump himself is just a symptom of what ails the American progressive movement embodied by the Democratic Party. What truly ails them — at least politically —is the same populist revolt that is bedeviling dirigiste elites in Europe. In the United States, the first component of the Democratic coalition largely to abandon the Democrats in the 2016 elections was the white working class. The white working class in such blue states as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan was substantially what gave the election to Trump rather than to Hillary Clinton. What motivated those Democratic defectors to switch to the Republican Trump? The same reasons moved them as have turned many in European electorates to move away from their dirigiste elites. First, there is the Western economic decay of the past several decades that has worsened their economic conditions. Then, there is the effect of policies tied to multiculturalism. By bringing in a great many immigrants without a requirement for cultural assimilation, dirigiste governments have:

1. Worsened the economic conditions of their peoples. Ill-educated immigrants from third world countries increase welfare, police, and education burdens on the state, and take low-level jobs away from the least-educated indigenous citizens,
   
   
2. Decreased their physical security. Unassimilated immigrants who are frustrated in any way by their host country are a ready source for increased crime. Just witness the rise of Islamic immigrant crime in Europe, and the rise of immigrant crime gangs like MS-13 in the U.S. In addition, the flood of new immigrants can hide the infiltration of islamic jihadist agents.
   
   
3. Set the stage for cultural suicide. With domestic populations reproducing close to or below replacement levels, an uncontrolled flood of immigrants from other cultures can cause the replacement of the indigenous culture by the cultures of the immigrants over a few decades. If one believes all cultures are of equivalent value, this would be an issue of little importance. However, if citizens believe their own culture has much of great worth, they might well want to require cultural assimilation of all immigrants.

These seem to be the main issues causing the white working class to defect from the Democrats.

Yet there are other fractures showing in the Democratic Party. In particular, there is a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll that shows a growing disaffection of Millennials with the Democratic Party. This online survey of more than 16,000 registered voters between the ages of 18 and 34 shows their support for Democrats slipped approximately 9 percent over two years to 46 percent. In addition, Reuters says “And they increasingly say the Republican Party is a better steward of the economy.”

How can this result be reconciled with the Reason-Rupe poll of August 2014 showing Millennials favoring socialism over capitalism by 58 percent to 37 percent? Investors Business Daily suggests this change is a natural result of Millennials beginning to grow up. They write,

They are getting married, buying homes and starting families in increasing numbers. And as a result, they’re starting to realize that the liberalism they espoused as youths comes at too high a price in adulthood.

[NB: The IBD writer refers to “liberalism,” but what he should actually have written is “progressivism.” Today’s progressives are in no sense “liberals”!]

While they are undergoing this maturation, Millennials can also see the undeniable economic progress made in the last year with the neoliberal Republican economic policies. One of the most striking statistics illustrating this progress is the rate of increase of real personal income less current transfer receipts.

Current transfer payments include things like income from social welfare. The growth of income plotted above includes only income for producing something in the economy.

Another striking statistic is the headline U3 civilian unemployment rate.

The U3 unemployment rate was 3.9 percent in April. The last time it was this low was more than 17 years ago in December of 2000. There are other encouraging statistics, but these two are among those that would be most apparent to Millennials. Those who are paying attention might well feel disenchanted with Democrats who propose to reverse the policies creating this progress.

Experience can be a life-altering force.

There is yet one more factor that might be alienating Millennials from the Democratic Party. The Millennials might be very altruistic and drawn to the noble rhetoric of progressives. They might be somewhat brainwashed by their education. Nevertheless, more than anything else they appear to be libertarians. Eventually, it was inevitable they would notice that the progressive Democratic Party is the more authoritarian of the two major parties. Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, wrote in Time that

Today’s young Americans, who include both Millennials (born 1980–‘94) and iGen (1995–2012), represent the future of the political landscape: 18- to 29-year-olds are now an equal or a larger percentage of voters than those over 65. . . . First, young voters — especially iGen — are more conservative than is often assumed. In my analyses of the nationally representative yearly survey Monitoring the Future, the percentage of high school seniors who identified as conservative rose from 23% in 2000 to 29% in 2015, creating a group more conservative than the Reagan-era GenX teens of the 1980s. Raised during the Great Recession and anxious about getting good jobs in a time of income inequality, iGen is laser-focused on their economic prospects. . . . How can iGen hold these seemingly contradictory beliefs? In short, because they’re libertarians (or at least more libertarian than their elders). iGen was raised in a highly individualistic culture favoring the self over the group; phrases such as “do what’s right for you” and “believe in yourself and anything is possible” echoed through their childhood. Libertarianism is as close to cultural individualism as can be found in the political arena, favoring individual rights and fighting against government regulation.

Any large erosion of Millennial support for progressivism would bode ill for the Democratic party at the polls this November.

Yet another part of the Democratic Party that might be starting to fall away are black Americans. Democrats have depended on the votes of blacks ever since the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet many blacks have questioned whether they are being taken for granted, and are now not getting anything in return for their votes. This is a theme explored by Asma Khalid in the NPR post Black Voters Need More Convincing From Democrats In 2018. Khalid notes that

Black voter turnout fell seven percentage points in the last election, plummeting from 66.6 percent in 2012 to 59.6 percent in 2016, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Many analysts say a natural drop-off was expected in the post-Barack Obama era. But the 2016 voter turnout for African-Americans was not just lower than the Obama years, it was even slightly lower than the 2004 election between George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Khalid highlights the experience of a black woman, Koya Graham, as typical of African-Americans. Ms. Graham registered to vote as soon as she turned 18, and voted in election after election for Democrats. In the 2016 election, however, she stayed home and did not vote. In the Spring of 2016, she told NPR, “I’m not interested anymore. I don’t see any immediate, significant changes happening.” Later after the election, she told NPR she thought the Trump presidency has turned out to be a blessing in disguise. She opined, “I think for our people, for my people, this is probably the best thing that could have happened. The veil has been lifted.”

Has the veil been lifted for other blacks as well? The recent praise of Donald Trump by Kanye West, and the reactions of other blacks to it hints of changing black attitudes toward Republicans. In a tweet about Trump on April 25th, West wrote,

You don’t have to agree with trump but the mob can’t make me not love him. We are both dragon energy. He is my brother. I love everyone. I don’t agree with everything anyone does. That’s what makes us individuals. And we have the right to independent thought.

Following that tweet, a Reuters poll on April 29 showed Trump’s approval among black men rose to 22 percent from 11 percent in the previous week. Trump reciprocated Kanye West’s love in a speech to the NRA, as shown in the PBS video below.

Tucker Carlson explored the implications with Jason Whitlock, an anchor at Fox Sports 1, in the Fox News video below.

Even if all that happens is that a larger fraction of blacks refrain from voting, that result could be a disaster for Democrats. If in addition some of them decide to join their white working class brothers and sisters in voting for Republicans, that disaster could be amplified.

It is far too soon to make any guesses about what will happen at the polls next November. Nevertheless, the trends are tantalizing, and do not seem to favor a “blue wave.”

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