Seismic Cracks in the Icy Coalition of Democrats
Is that a bullet hole? Or a black hole?
It’s complicated. We don’t like complicated. If you can’t say it in a tweet or a 30 second sound bite on teevee, don’t waste our time. I remember some decades ago when it was a great joke one year that USA Today had just won a Pulitzer Prize for “Best Investigative Paragraph.’ These days any argument that requires research, in-depth analysis, and careful piecing together of the people and partisan positions involved is easily dismissible as conspiracy theory, most likely by right wing fascist liars.
Why don’t we like complicated? That’s simple enough. We don’t like complicated because we can’t do it anymore. By the time we get to school we’re already too dumb to acquire the kind of critical thinking skills needed to navigate ‘complicated,’ and the philosophy of education now in place has adapted by ceasing any attempt to teach critical thinking skills or provide the base of historical information and learning that used to make investigative reporting possible and even occasionally credible. How did we get so dumb? That’s the result of something called a feedback loop, which I just described earlier in this paragraph. Through multiple generations, dumb parents raise kids to be dumber than they were at that age, then not teaching critical thinking leads to parents who are even dumber next time around, and, well… wash, rinse, repeat. In this case the wash part is a washing away of what used to be called intelligence. A word we might also once have defined as a tolerance and even appreciation for the complicated things in life.
Elsewhere I have already dispensed with the fallacy that there is anything like a constant ‘average IQ’ through time. In fact, the entire IQ testing establishment has been gamed to conceal the sad truth that IQs are declining, and have been for a long time. We really are dumber than we used to be. Worse, IQ tests don’t measure intelligence at all. They just measure what they measure and less of that all the time.
So, why am I bothering to write about the probably fatal seismic shattering of the nearly century-old Democrat Party coalition which has already done so much to eviscerate all our institutions and minds? Another simple answer. Because I have faith. Faith that writing it down is worthwhile even if there’s no one to read it or understand it. And because I can.
Bridging the chasm of empty acceptance always begins with a single step.
You see, once you reject the idea that something, anything, is too complicated to understand you will start to perceive that the universe is sending out helpful clues about what’s going on. This is actually a feature of the universe, which is its own set of nested Chinese Dolls. If we can follow the doll sequence down far enough, there will eventually be a doll small enough to be studied in detail and thereby provide information about all the others as well.
We have just been given a doll of the perfect size. That is the role of the Claudine Gay story. She is a one-woman confluence of all the colliding parts of the Democrat shattering that is underway. What are the colliding parts? All the key components of the coalition: the Z Generation, the edifice of American education, women, blacks, Jews, LGBTQ’ers, muslim immigrants, and the overarching ideology of victimhood. Not to mention a native New Yorker, which is hardly a trivial credential. As a representative to one degree or another of all of these Dem constituencies, Claudine Gay was supposed to be clad in impenetrable armor, the kind that would make her an unstoppable weapon against all of the Democrat’s targeted enemies. That’s why and how she came to be Chosen by the most prestigious university in the land to be their President some several months ago.
But it has all blown up, almost like a Saturn rocket on liftoff. Why? Because the coalition is not really an alliance of the like-minded, not really a coalition but more like a cartel, which is defined as a truce between competitors who can agree on a handful of shared selfish objectives. Cartels always break apart when self interest finally forces differences into the open and what could once be blinked away becomes, finally, a deal killer. OPEC prospered as long as the member nations profited by gouging the United States on the price of oil. It crumbled when member states began to discover advantages, better deals, by dealing with customers under the table. Why shouldn’t they go for a better deal? It’s not like they were ever really all that fond of one another. There were always potentially disastrous differences hiding under OPEC’s magnificent conference room tabletop.
The same is true of the Democrat coalition, going all the way back to its establishment by FDR. He realized that if you combine the voting blocs of people who didn’t have enough in the depths of a Great Depression with the voting blocs of those who would benefit more directly by growing the size and reach of government, you could win every national election in perpetuity. The great Harvard preppie with the cigarette holder therefore became a hero to the masses by appealing to their fears with promises and giveaways. Trade unionists, poor people of all races and ethnicities (including recent immigrants), women with children and out-of-work husbands who couldn’t be certain of avoiding starvation, and all the people who already worked for government or wanted to.
After his first four years as President, FDR had barely made a dent in the depression, but he was spending money like mad and whenever any program failed, he always had a new one, a new, even bigger promise to offer. It’s all he needed. He got elected President four times, and what brought America out of the Great Depression was not the New Deal but World War II. His coalition survived his own death from dementia in 1944, a year into his fourth term, and his successor knew a good thing when he saw it, making the New Deal growth in government permanent by blessing all the formerly temporary employees as unfireable members of the civil service in good standing.
With few interruptions, the Democrat Party controlled both houses of Congress by significant majorities for the period from 1933 until the Newt Gingrich ‘Contract with America’ finally turned the House of Representatives back to the Republicans for a few years.
It’s a great strategy for winning elections. It has its own built-in feedback loop., especially after the masterful tweak added by LBJ in which he succeeded in pulling the black vote completely away from the Party of Lincoln by promising a Great New Society That actually succeeded in destroying black urban neighborhoods and replacing them with permanent crippling dependency on the monetary largesse of government. All of which government failed to correct any of the problems it was supposed to, because the real genius of big government is that it’s its own welfare program, employment for political allies in such numbers that their various agencies can never be efficient at anything they do but lobbying for a bigger budget next year. Best of all worlds. Government grows because it can’t be stopped from growing. People in need never rise out of need except through well publicized government interventions like Affirmative Action, and even the middle classes become more dependent on government as more of their lives or regulated and restricted by government.
Most brilliant unintended consequence? The party that pioneered so much money given ostentatiously away becomes the automatic home base for every emerging group that sees itself as the victim of an unfeeling capitalist system. Even the rebels who rise specifically in opposition to government policy are subsumed by that same government. Radical draft dodger opponents of the Vietnam War return home from Canada or the commune to regain reputability by becoming academics, bringing their left wing views with them. Along the way, they discover the same keys to power the party has known about since FDR. Control the narrative and you control the outcome. Keep the stupid people stupid and make them even stupider in every possible way but doing what the smarter people in charge tell them to.
Through variations of this story, the Democrat Coalition has continued to grow and evolve. They eventually took over all the greatest institutions of higher learning in the land. By that means they also gradually acquired control of all the professions, even the clergy. The conquest of hard science was achieved similarly. The perversion of the social sciences was always inevitable, given its lack of any quantitative basis whatsoever. This triumphantly empty branch of academia was therefore perfect for the pioneering of an entirely new kind of academic writing, in which the total absence of new idea content is covered by impenetrable neologisms in vocabulary and an incestuous reliance on the process of establishing credibility by mass-producing and mass-citing of the exact same fact-free hearsay.
I’ll explain later. For now consider it a tease.
Enter Claudine Gay. And enter the arrow of Paris, poised to shatter the coalition like the piece of glass it is.
Gay first. She is a shining symbol of the New Democrat Coalition that has systematically replaced the FDR Coalition. In many ways a perfect and invulnerable champion of the progressive left because she embodies so many of its constituencies in a single persona. Female/feminist, gay, black, CHYOS (Harvard and Stanford), LGBTQ+ and DEI activist, and President of the most powerful academic institution in the world. A veritable Achilles of the left, as portended in Ancient Greek mythology. Yes, Ulysses effectively drafted the peerless demigod warrior to fight in the Trojan War, which unfortunately did not end happily for Achilles despite some good innings early on.
HARVARD POWER
This is where the New Deal Coalition began. The influence and intellectual force of Harvard’s historical cultural horsepower cannot be underestimated. This little rotogravure could go on for pages, and it’s a big part of the armor Claudine Gay donned when she was named President.
Political Archetypes
tip of a very large liberal iceberg that has steamrolled politics, arts and literature, and the law.
Political Soldiers
Bill Gates, Mike Wallace, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Cornel West, Michael Bloomberg,
Bill Kristol, Natalie Portman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chris Wallace, Mark Zuckerberg.
NEW YORK POWER
Why is this credential so high up on the ladder of power attributes? The Harvard-New York connection is so potent that it threatens to undercut the Crimson’s claim of being the educational lord of the universe. About half of the representative Harvard people shown above have New York roots of one kind or another. It’s not a coincidence that both places consider themselves the capital of the world, albeit in slightly different but overlapping realms. There’s an ocean of confidence fueling both. It’s also no coincidence that both places are intimately involved in the sustained effort to bring down Donald Trump.
No shortage of power in the New York lineup, which includes the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate and the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, as well as key players in the J6 Committee’s televised trial of the former President and in the efforts to jail and bankrupt him in the New York court system. Harvard’s choice of Claudine Gay fits smoothly into the Empire State progressive narrative of Social Justice on behalf of ‘Democracy’ and ‘Equity.’
From Left to Right: Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senator
Kirsten Gillibrand, Governor Kathy Hochul, Attorney-General Letitia James, District Attorney
Alvin Bragg, Mayor Eric Adams, Reps. Dan Goldman and Jerry Nadler, the Revs Al Sharpton
and Louis Farrakhan, and Civil Court Judge Arthur Engoron.
BLACK POWER
Political Headliners
The 118th Congress includes 62 black members, 11.5 percent of the 535 total. This percentage is just under the 12.4 percent of U.S. population made up of black people. Not quite there but close. And considerable progress since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s that finally ended the Jim Crow rule of southern Dixiecrats and made it possible for African-Americans to run for office throughout the nation. Since the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, black people have ironically quit the Party of Lincoln (and MLK) for the Democrat Party. The Congresspeople shown below are representative of the emergent diversity of the Black Caucus, which now includes more women and more Muslims than ever before.
There has been similar progress in the Presidential Cabinet, where black officeholders actually constitute more than 12.4 percent of the total, with 6 of 26, with black executives accounting for 23 percent of appointments confirmed by the Senate.
And for the first time in U.S. history, there are now two black members of the Supreme Court, of whom the female is an outspoken Progressive.
Collectively, these results highlight the overdue nature of Harvard’s selection of its first ever black President. Easy to infer that there has been a firm Progressive hand behind such an advancement.
From Left to Right: Senator Cori Ford, Rep. Elijah Cummings, Rep. Bennie Thompson, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, Rep. Maxine Waters, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, SecDef Lloyd Austin, EPA Admin. Michael S.
Regan, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and Associate Justice Katanji Brown Jackson.
Cultural Breakthroughs
It would be difficult to overstate the contribution to contemporary black power provided by the Black Lives Matter movement, which has even succeeded in attracting Harvard’s attention. The $2 billion impact BLM has had on urban businesses and neighborhoods, well worth the hundred or so lives lost in the process. We wouldn’t be where we are as a nation now, and Claudine Gay wouldn’t have made it to the head office of University Hall without them.
Washington, DC. Enough said.
From Left to Right: Black Entertainment Television, Higher Ground Productions, Netflix “Black
Leads” offering, the Urban Movie Channel (precursor to) the Allblk Channel, and the new and
blacker Black Entertainment Channel Plus.
FEMALE POWER
As we’ve been seeing, the original FDR coalition has changed over the course of the 20th and now 21st Centuries. These new infusions of power represent additions to the carapace protecting Claudine Gay as Harvard’s President. Most importantly to a huge percentage of the American population, of course, is her status as the only the second female president (succeeding the first ever) in the university’s 387 year history. We have grown used to women in power, though it has remained stubbornly elusive in key respects until very recently. Gay’s ascendancy addressed one of those heretofore elusive respects.
Political Power at the Highest Levels
You know the powerhouses, including the ones who shake the earth behind the scenes as well as in
official elected positions. We’ve had a Speaker of the House and a Vice President. Also Hill and Jill.
There are 26 federal office positions considered cabinet-level. Since Kamala Harris is included
on the list in her capacity as VP, this means half (lucky 13!) are occupied by females. The good
news is that - depending on how you count - only eight of the rest are white males. Also, of the
secretaries above, only three have experienced headlines that could be construed as scandalous.
Four of these appointments occurred within the last two years, during
the Biden administration. That’s progress and power by any standard.
These are all very major changes, easily lost in the hustle and bustle of more seemingly spectacular news, for example what we’re beholding in another of Claudine Gay’s principal causes…
LGBTQ+ POWER
Something exciting happening in this realm almost every day now. Who would have thought that Harvard would choose an openly gay President of the University? Well, they could see the writing on the wall. All the walls everywhere, even the ones in the bathroom…
Congress
Cabinet Officials
Trans, Sec’y Pete Buttigieg and Deputy and Ass’t Sec’y HHS Rachel Levine
Open Secrets
Mum’s the word on these, but we all know why the elite political world is loosening up at last.
News/Talk Media
Ellen DeGeneres, Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow, and RuPaul. Role models all.
Entertainment Celebrities
Top Row: Gay, Bi, and Trans stars in some order
Bottom Row: Trans, Established (Ellen/Eliot) & Up-and-Comers
LGTPQ+Ped Pioneers
Epstein and Weinstein. Politics & Hollywood getting their heads together.
Stuffed shirts are finally learning to be playful, even childlike.
It’s a time of great normalizing of relationships that used to be so stilted and distant. Leadership matters.
MUSLIM POWER
This is a subject not spoken of enough. One might have thought, until her congressional testimony, that Claudine Gay was not truly supportive of advancing Muslim power in the United States. Why all the categories of conviction covered above are so necessary to understand. President Gay’s ties to the Muslim Community are implicit in her identity as a New Yorker and a black woman. It’s complicated.
What matters for the moment is that Muslim Power exists, is important, and is growing steadily. Why Gay was so brave not to cave to the superficial clamoring for the Israel-above-all position of her congressional cross-examiners. Such a pandering would amount to several kinds of betrayal. For example, who else among her natural allies and constituents would not be so appeasement-oriented when it comes to the question of a Palestinian Rights? Perhaps these exhibits will help you understand…
How So Many People in This Country Really Feel
So-Called “Mostly Peaceful Protest” at the White House, Jan 13, 2024. Click the pic.
JEWISH POWER
The Jews are not like any of the other groups being championed by the Progressive Movement. Why? The discrimination they’ve experienced is markedly different from that of all the others, who have been for decades, even centuries, locked out of every opportunity for equity in this nation. The Ivy League (and, yes, Harvard) is a perfect example of the difference. So is the Congress of the United States.
Unlike black people, Jewish people are not underrepresented in Congress relative to their percent of population. They account for 2.4 percent of the U.S. population, but they make up 6.9 percent of Congress, nearly three times higher than demographic equity.
What does this mean? It’s the real cause of the deeply ingrained antisemitism that afflicts most of the rest of the world. Jewish immigrants to this country arrived as penniless and hungry as any other. Like the others — Polish, Italian, Irish, Chinese, you name it — they were not accepted anywhere. But they’ve had thousands of years of practice arriving in foreign lands this way, and they did what they always do. Work at anything and everything, endure every humiliation, and put every bit of time and money saved into the education of the children. Who climb out of poverty within a single generation and start making waves — and oodles of money — everywhere. Which guarantees they will be hated in perpetuity. Harvard can’t not let them in, because 1) Harvard wants to be the best (used to anyway), and 2) Harvard does not want to be like the Progressive asshole at Princeton who banned them completely from the university to avoid dealing with them. So Harvard and all the others not presided over by Woodrow Wilson accepted a lot of Jews and just tried to keep the numbers within acceptable limits, which made their degrees worth more than others and created generations of intellectual and cultural rebels who were brilliant at spotting prejudice wherever it was and going to war against it in every way possible. They regarded themselves as oppressed even if everyone else thought they were overrepresented in all the money-making professions and businesses, and so they became — TA DA — Democrats, in almost the same percentages as post-LBJ black people.
The profound irony in all this is that Jews wound up inventing much of 20th Century Liberalism and almost all of modern day Progressivism, forgetting somewhere along the way that there’s more to justice than winning the argument.
Where they are now. But all of the ones who ostentatiously hate them, including most of Claudine Gay’s constituents, have done some big-time forgetting of their own over the years. Like who was always in the vanguard on Civil Rights, Feminism, and progressive political revolutionary theory and practice.
Civil Rights Movement
Click on the pic.
No, maybe they didn’t start it, but they were among the first white martyrs to the cause. Two of the three murdered Civil Rights workers in 1964 Mississippi were Jewish. What say you to that Farrakhan, Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright?
Feminist Movement
Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin. The Big Mamas
all women should remember, including this eccentric sister from Down Under…
Collectively they wrote the gospel (and the political playbook) of feminism, rape law, pro-choice activism, and innumerable other reforms of marriage, employment, and economic opportunity.
Historical Democrat Liberalism
Jacob Javits, Abraham Ribicoff, Howard Metzenbaum, Carl Levin, Arlen Specter, Joe Lieberman,
Paul Wellstone, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Ruth Bader-Ginsberg. Liberal Democrats all.
They fought for liberal causes like freedom of speech (even for Nazis), organized labor, civil rights, graduated tax rates, and government assistance for the poor and underprivileged, and held the course even as the world began sliding into the Vietnam era morass of Weathermen, Black Panthers, and an insurrectionist drug-fueled counterculture…
Which their own descendants were also ringleaders of…
Modern Progressive Action Strategies
Mark Rudd, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, William Kunstler: SDS, Chicago 7, and their lawyer.
They may look like hippie freaks, but they came from schools like Columbia, Berkeley, and Brandeis. The stuff they did was no accident. Every member of Antifa owes a debt to all these guys.
Saul Alinsky, the Godfather of modern-day weaponized ‘progressive’ politics
He wrote the manual that gave Hillary and Obama step by step instructions for destroying their political enemies. In the words of Wikipedia, “Responding to the impatience of a New Left generation of activists in the 1960s, Alinsky – in his widely cited Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer (1971) – defended the arts both of confrontation and of compromise involved in community organizing as keys to the struggle for social justice.
“Beginning in the 1990s, Alinsky's reputation was revived by commentators on the political Right as a source of tactical inspiration for the Republican Tea Party Movement and, subsequently, by virtue of indirect associations with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as the alleged source of a radical Democratic political agenda. While criticised on the political Left for an aversion to broad ideological goals, Alinsky has also been identified as an inspiration for the Occupy movement and campaigns for climate action.”
American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.
Wiki summarizes their work thus: “It is the strategy of forcing political change leading to societal collapse through orchestrated crises. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, amassing massive unpayable national debt, and other methods such as unfettered immigration thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse by overwhelming the system.”
Sound familiar? Their ripple effect continues…
Trump Hunters
You should know who these ruthless haters are by now. And, yes, they’re all Jewish.
They learned the lessons of Frances Fox Piven and Saul Alinsky all too well. They are a big part of the reason why Biden is President and the demons of the Middle East are out of the bottle. They should have known better, but when you’ve trained yourself to be a political butcher and you both enjoy it and profit from it, it’s hard to know what to do when some of the knives you’ve been handing out are poised at your own throat. Why we’re seeing some…
Divided Loyalties
Sadly, the souls of most of these shrewd and skillful people are already lost. Everything they do actually adds to the power and fury of the antisemitism that is gathering momentum like a boulder rolling downhill. Their own directionless will keep exacerbating the cracks in the glued together but otherwise irrational coalition of which Claudine Gay is a paper-thin symbol. Her personal ruin has been accomplished. The complete ruin of anything like a comprehensible Democrat agenda is in process, crazing the ice they’re skating on with hundreds, even thousands, of…
MORE CRACKS
The Plagiarism Virus
What’s even more fascinating is the specific cause of Gay’s, and the Democrat Party’s, quandary. A really inconvenient, no-win showdown between Judaism and Islam. Especially hard for politicians who are devout atheists and nihilists to begin with. Here’s the funny part. It’s really easy to decide between Judaism and Islam. The second one is nothing but a half-assed plagiarism of the first by a power-mad pedophile megalomaniac. But nobody has ever read the Quran against the Old Testament of the Bible, anymore than they’ve ever read a single PhD dissertation in the social sciences.
Perfect. Really. Where does that leave us? We could make the next steps into a movie, I suppose. Except somebody already did that and there’s no need to plagiarize the original. Here it is, complete with cracking sheets of ice, white Klan-like robes, and lots of butchery in an endless wasteland…
Okay. Not really her words. Might as well be though. Claudine is no one’s child but her mother’s. Pretty fragile Joan of Arc figure for a war fought on crackled ice. She’s Batwoman, a costume wearing a confused biological female. An ill-conceived rip-off of a tired icon. Because she presumed for no good reason to symbolize everything, she wound up as the definition of nothing but a sad story for everyone. Canceled after a brief run. Mazel tov.
THE BATTLE ON THE ICE
Imagine who you want in the uniforms, but this is only of many battles on the ice that will unfold as elements of the left tear each other apart at everyone’s cost. Harvard cannot replace Claudine Gay without offending someone in the coalition. If they don’t choose a black LGBT female committed to DEI they will be seen as pandering to right wing critics. If they do choose a clone of Gay, they will be seen as pandering rather sickeningly to the extreme left. If they choose a Jew, the Muslims will get violent. If they choose a Muslim, the Jews will savage Harvard and the Democrat Party financially. If they choose any other woman, they will simply be proving once and for all that Affirmative Action is the university’s only mission. If they choose a man rather than a woman, they will be seen as cowed sexist sellouts to the patriarchy. (Who knows? They might try an end run with a race/gender-irrelevant Satanist… but that would not end well either.) They have no good choices now. Very much like the Democrat Party. Why battle will be joined in destructive perpetuity in what used to be the crystalline intellectual sphere of the left. There will be lots of casualties, both institutional and personal. Because even the most complacent average Americans out there will ultimately come to see that the only ones with no champions on the left are people like them. And the New Coalition will come apart in chunks. And the first and most symbolic victim will have been Claudine, the wannabe female Achilles with a heel of clay.
And afterwards…
The Crackling Breakup of the Old FDR Coalition
A place to start over someday…
CLAUDINE GAY IN RETROSPECT
Or, in her own words, in a brand new assignment and mission…
SEE ALSO THESE RECENT POSTS:
ALSO RELEVANT:
THERAPY:
Comments