Progressives Overreact?

[ModlrMike]

• It is not the working class that sees the police as an unnecessary evil and opposes rigorous enforcement of the law for public safety and public order.
• It is not the working class that believes public consumption of hard drugs should be tolerated, with intervention limited to reviving addicts when they overdose.
• It is not the working class that believes many crimes like shoplifting should be decriminalized because punishing the perpetrators would have “disparate impact”.
• It is not the working class that believes you should never refer to illegal immigrants as “illegal” and that border security is somehow a racist idea.
• It is not the working class that believes an overwhelming surge of migrants at the southern border should be accommodated with asylum claims, parole arrangements, and release into urban areas around the country.
• It is not the working class that believes competitive admissions and job placements should be allocated on the basis of race (“equity”) not merit.
• It is not the working class that views objective tests as fundamentally flawed if they show racial disparities in achievement.
• It is not the working class that believes America is a structurally racist, white supremacist society.
• It is not the working class that sees patriotism as a dirty word and the history of the United States as a bleak landscape of racism and oppression.
• It is not the working class that thinks sex is “assigned at birth” and can be changed by self-conception, rather than being an objective, biological reality.
• It is not the working class that thinks it’s a great idea to police the language people use for hidden “microaggressions” and bias against the “marginalized”.
• And it is definitely not the working class that believes in “decolonize everything” and manages to see murderous thugs like Hamas as righteous liberators of a subaltern people

All of this applies equally north of the border, but mostly outside the Toronto-Ottawa corridor.

 

[Kirkhill]

The party's over....

More from Ruy Texeira who wrote the bible for the Democrats a couple of decades ago, predicting that a browner country meant a more Democrat country.

He has changed his mind. Apparently some of the Progressives have as well.

The Progressive Moment Is Over

Four reasons their era has come to an end.

www.liberalpatriot.com

1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
Some really interesting commentary and polling results.
....
Perhaps more interesting is the commentary of the Progressive commentators. Noah Smith is one whose name is known to me.

I spent pretty much all of the 2010s—my first decade as a writer and pundit—advocating for various progressive causes…I called for expanded immigration, national health insurance, and a bigger welfare state, extolled the benefits of diversity, cheered for a revival of labor unions and stronger antitrust, criticized mass incarceration, dreamed of a phase-out of fracking, and even endorsed reparations for slavery. In the late 2010s, it felt like a long wave of progressive sentiment…had finally reached a critical level of intensity…

A few years later, I’m not so sure. My values haven’t become more conservative—my desire for a more economically egalitarian and socially tolerant society has not diminished an iota…But I have to say that I now doubt the practical effectiveness of some of the policies I embraced in previous years. Others still seem like good ideas, but I’ve been dismayed at their botched implementation where they were tried. And many progressive ideas simply don’t seem like they’ll be able to win majority political support in the near future.

Here is his current take on defunding the police ....

"The simple fact—and the thing I failed to properly realize before 2020 and 2021—is that policing works. A bunch of evidence shows that police deter crime—through the threat of incarceration they represent, their presence on the street, and through their simple removal of the most criminal fraction from wider society. That doesn’t mean police are the only thing that reduces crime…ut police are an essential, indispensable part of American public safety, and without public safety nothing else in society can function."

Whodda thunk it? Progressives own this one and it is another big reason the progressive moment is over.

Whodda thunk it indeed.

The most remarkable thing I find is that this individual was on the leading edge of the pundits and advisers for Progressives around the world, including our very own PM, Keir Starmer, Jacinda and Mark Carney. In 2010, at the dawn of era of hope he had been out of Stanford with a BSc in physics for 7 years. He was roughly 30 years old.

And he no appreciation or understanding of the role of the police in society.

Kumbaya.

...

The entire article deserves to be read.

 

[Kirkhill]

Further to, from the same article, and worth noting in isolation (IMO)

The hard fact is that progressives’ intransigent hostility to fossil fuels is not widely shared by ordinary voters, who are fundamentally oriented toward cheap, reliable and abundant energy. In a recent result from the New York Times/Siena poll, two-thirds of likely voters said they supported a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.” Two-thirds!

Support for increasing fossil fuel production is particularly strong among working-class (noncollege) voters: 72 percent of these voters back such a policy. Support is even higher among white working-class voters (77 percent). But remarkably, support is also strong among many demographics where one would think, based on conventional wisdom, one would likely see opposition. For example, 63 percent of voters under 30 said they wanted more oil and gas production, as did 58 percent of white college-graduate voters and college voters overall. Indeed, across all demographics reported by the NYT survey—all racial groups, all education groups, all regions (Midwest, Northeast, South, West) and all neighborhood types (city, suburb, rural/small town)—net support (total support minus total oppose) was at least 15 points and usually much higher. Now that’s popularity.

Or how about this remarkable result from a new NBC poll. Testing a wide range of policy proposals to see whether voters would be more or less likely to support a candidate who espoused them, the most positive response among voters was to a proposal to expand domestic oil and natural gas production. By a very wide 67 percent to 15 percent margin, voters said they would be more likely, rather than less likely, to support a candidate who wanted to expand fossil fuel production!