Left-wing Democrats are facing a backlash

IN POLITICS, very much like in one's personal life, there comes a point when reality bites, when you conclude that Prince Charming would not be knocking on the door anytime soon; that you may be a good tennis player but would not end up competing in Wimbledon; that your startup firm was not going anywhere.

Economists refer to the "recognition gap" - the time delay between when an economic shock, such as a sudden boom or bust, occurs and when economists, central bankers, and the government realise that it has happened.

Along those lines, US President Joe Biden and the leaders of his Democratic Party are now reaching a point when the lag between their post-2020 election hopes and dreams, and the political reality that they face, is gradually closing down.

Future historians would probably try to figure out why President Biden entered the White House operating under the assumption that he received a political mandate from the American people to spend trillions of US dollars on restructuring the American social-economic system like President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal programmes.

The fact is that Biden did not win the election by a landslide and his party maintained a narrow majority in the House of Representatives and had to deal with a divided Senate - clearly not the kind of political balance of power conducive to launching revolutions.

One explanation for why wishful thinking has taken hold of the Democrats is the growing power of the party's so-called progressive wing.

Progressive agenda

In the aftermath of the defeat of their archenemy President Donald Trump and against the backdrop of the demonstrations triggered by the killing of a black man by a white policeman, these left-leaning Democrats promoted a narrative that proposed that the political zeitgeist was transformed.

Americans were supposedly now ready to embrace their progressive agenda that, in addition to calling for huge federal government spending, promoted identity politics and the fight against "White privilege" and called, among other things, for the "defunding" of the police and for protecting the interests of "people of colour".

In that context, progressive Democratic politicians like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (also known by her initials AOC) and members of her so-called "squad" who were bashing anyone who opposed their politics as "racists" would become social media stars, covered by The New York Times and The Washington Post as though they represented the political future of the Democratic Party, if not the nation.

But it was gradually becoming clear that being on Twitter 24/7 did not necessarily translate into real political influence; that AOC and her allies certainly did not carry more electoral support beyond their own districts and the noisy activists who were bombarding Americans with their woke slogans about "systemic oppression" and demands that Americans use "neutral" gender pronouns.

That President Biden has failed to win Congressional approval for most of his huge spending bills and was sinking in the public opinion polls seemed to be the least of the Democrats' problems.

The defeat of the Democrats in the race for governor in Virginia last November, and the fact that the Democrats came close to losing the election for governor in New Jersey, a leading "blue" (Democratic) state, were clear signs the large segments of the American public were rejecting the attempts by the progressives to move the country to the left, among other things, by pressing on matters around public school curriculum dominated by the issue of race.

The results of a recent Gallup opinion poll analysing Americans' political party preferences made it clear that the political zeitgeist was indeed changing but not in the direction predicted by the progressives.

Hence over the course of 2021 from a 9 percentage-point advantage that the Democrats enjoyed in the first quarter, Republicans gained a five-point edge in the fourth quarter - a dramatic change in the public's attitude towards the two major political parties.

No less significant have been the results of opinion polls that made it clear that a majority of Americans opposed the idea of reducing the resources available for the police. In fact, the most powerful opposition to "defunding the police" has been among residents of black and Hispanic neighbourhoods that have been forced to confront crime and gang violence on a daily basis.

That explains why Eric Adams, African-American and former police officer running for the job of the Mayor Of New York, ended up beating by a wide margin his progressive rivals in the Democratic primaries and later won the race for mayor, reflecting what many saw as the reassertion of the influence of politically centrist Democrats.

But the political event demonstrating the political dead-end facing progressive Democrats and the woke troops that support them that has caught the most public attention was the recent San Francisco school board recall election.

First, let us put things in perspective: San Francisco is considered the most left-leaning city in the United States, whose politics has been dominated for years by the most radical progressive Democrats.

So it was surprising, if not shocking, that in the city's recent school board election, three members of the board lost their jobs by a landslide: 79 per cent voted to oust Alison Collins, 75 per cent to fire board president Gabriela Lopez, and 72 per cent to remove the vice-president Faauuga Moliga.

The vote was seen as a reflection of the anger shared by many of the city's parents over the board's failure to reopen the public schools for two years and its members' focus on woke issues instead of on teaching their kids.

Sense of panic

The board had decided to spend time during the pandemic on renaming some to the schools in the city, removing the names of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, which they considered to be "inappropriate" because their lives and actions could be connected with charges of "racism, sexism and colonialism".

The board also concluded that too many Asian-American and white students were accepted to public schools for gifted students and that instead of test results, admission to these schools would be based on lottery.

Board member Collins, in a tweet she posted, accused Asian-Americans of using "white supremacist thinking to assimilate and 'get ahead'", angering members of the large Asian-American community in the city.

Hence the sense of panic engulfing Democrats these days as they prepare for the 2022 primaries when an unpopular Democrat is occupying the White House and their party's shift to the political left is antagonising many centrist Americans who voted for Candidate Biden in 2020.

Many of the Democratic candidates running for office in November are trying to distance themselves from the calls to defund the police and the entire identity politics agenda. But that might be too late to change voters' attitudes in November.