Each spring, Japan celebrates Hamamatsu Kite Flying Festival, part of the Golden Week celebration that includes Children’s Day. Hundreds of kites in a dazzling array of patterns and colors fill the sky over the seaside. It’s a multiday display of unity and peace — culminating in the final day’s kite fighting, where the various kite teams playfully vie to entangle each other’s kites to crash them.
Kite fighting reflects the natural human tendency to turn any pastime into a competition and any competition into a form of combat. In modern kite fighting in places like India and Brazil, players coat their kite strings with ground glass to make them capable of slicing through rivals’ strings. The objective is to cut the rival kites free of their strings and send them tumbling to the ground. The combat is fierce enough that it has led to serious injuries and even deaths as the strings strike people on the ground.
The Democratic Party thinks of its coalition as a tranquil squadron of beautiful kites, with each constituency bound to the coalition by a heavy string. The party’s elites assume that these strings are high-test lines that cannot be broken once they are in place — meaning that once a constituency joins the coalition, the elites can take for granted that it will never fly away. Unfortunately for the party, the coalition is weakening from the mutual abrasion of the strings holding it together.
The party bound African Americans to the coalition with civil rights and affirmative action. It bound Latino Americans with unrestricted immigration. It bound women with abortion rights. It bound working-class Americans with union endorsements. It bound gay and lesbian Americans with gay marriage. It bound Jewish Americans with a commitment to social justice and support for Israel. It bound the eco-conscious with green policies under the banner of fighting climate change. And most recently, it bound transgender persons and their allies with transgender ideology and bound Muslim-Americans with support for Palestinian rights.
The Party insists that all members of its coalition pledge fealty to all these strings but fails to recognize that many of these lines cut across and against one another. Transgender ideology conflicts with women’s rights and traditional gay and lesbian priorities. Green policies conflict with the interests of workers. Unfettered immigration impacts municipal funding, public accommodations, and public safety, disproportionately affecting minorities, including Hispanics, who have long been U.S. citizens. Civil rights and affirmative action intended to promote equal opportunity have morphed into DEI and equality of outcomes, which erodes equal opportunity.
surveyed late-deciding voters and found that, although they generally did not view Harris’s economic policies unfavorably, Trump won them by 52 percent to 36. Among these late-breaking Trump voters, more than 70 percent disagreed with Harris’s perceived policies on border security, illegal immigration, and taxpayer-funded gender transitions.
The New York Times interviewed young voters after the election to delve into their choices and motivations. One 25-year-old woman told them, “I think I became radicalized on the men and women’s sports issue. The ad that said, ‘Kamala represents they/them. Trump represents you,’ that was so compelling. While Trump is deranged, he represented normalcy somehow to me.”
This quotation sums up the obsession of the Democratic Party with pulling the strings on the disparate constituencies of its coalition rather than building an appeal to the electorate as a whole. Consider the last-ditch effort by the Harris campaign to craft an appeal to African American men. Besides its economic incentives for entrepreneurship and home ownership that were (initially) unconstitutionally specified for African Americans, their “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” included a proposal to legalize marijuana. The idea that this last point was top-of-mind for black men in their voting decisions seems like a bad racist joke akin to the one that drove Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz out of office in 1976.
The post-election debate within the Democratic Party pits progressives against moderate reformers. The progressives believe that a lack of redistributionist and state-forward economic policies, not identity politics, doomed the Harris campaign. The moderates believe that Harris’s economic policies never got a fair hearing because of voters’ resistance to the party’s “woke” identity politics. In the wake of the election, reformist thought leaders like Ruy Teixiera and Matt Yglesias proposed multi-point agendas to guide the party back to mainstream cultural values, These prescriptions include embracing patriotism, looking beyond race as a determining factor of a citizen’s fate, adopting border enforcement with legal immigration, and deprioritizing transgender ideology in public policy.
The trouble for the Democratic party is twofold. The progressives’ strategy is blind to the cultural backlash against wokeness, but the moderates’ prescriptions are too little, too late. The attitudes, values, and policy prescriptions reflected in lists like Yglesias’s and Teixiera’s read almost verbatim to those that define the Trump neo-Republican coalition. Even if it adopts the reformers’ list in its entirety, the Democratic Party will be hard pressed to convince the electorate that they can do a better job of implementing it than Trump can himself. Why settle for a pale imitation from reluctant converts when the true believer in all those issues has been campaigning on them for years?
Unlike the Democratic coalition, the coalition that re-elected Trump doesn’t bind its constituencies with single issues. Rather, it cements them together with common values and interests that cut across its different demographic constituencies: economic prosperity, American civic pride, national security, and civil security. As the strings tying various constituencies to the Democrats fray and snap, those who break away can find a soft landing in the emerging Republican coalition.
Image: AT via Magic Studio
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