Michael Barone has been writing smart things about politics longer than most people have been alive, and he’s not done yet. Today he looks at the Democrats’ rumination in response to their sweeping loss on Nov. 5. Barone blames “the groups” and the “barista proletariat” for the loss, which he explains.
Ruy Teixeira ... writes that Democrats have moved sharply left on cultural matters, on racial quotas and preferences, on increasing rather than reducing immigration, toward stands that have repelled “the white working class” in the 2010s and now repel the nonwhite working class in the 2020s.
Once upon a time, Democrats relied on policy advice from state and city party bosses who were in touch with ordinary people. These days, argues economist Noah Smith, they are overly reliant on “a variety of activists and special interests — collectively known as The Groups,” who, in the contemporary equivalent of smoke-filled rooms, “persuade Democratic staffers and politicians of their ideas ... well out of the public eye.”
These “groups” make claim to represent various constituencies Democrats wish to support - Blacks, Hispanics, Unions, LGBTQ+, etc. They actually push policies their supposed constituencies largely reject.
Barone notes there is a constituency for the ideas “the groups” favor, and that’s the barista proletariat. Found often around university campuses and a particular sort of urban neighborhood which he describes as.
Relatively low-rent, mostly but not all white neighborhoods, usually subway-accessible and marijuana dispensary-dotted quarters in our largest cities.
And who lives in these barista proletariat neighborhoods?
A segment of the electorate whose orientation is essentially adolescent — with no steady community tie through homeownership or job tenure, devoted to freedoms defined by lack of adult restraint or supervision, with an adversary posture to middle-class mores and American traditions. These are people aching with personal dissatisfaction and disposed of, often by lessons taught in schools and colleges, that their complaints can be easily assuaged by government bureaucracies.
The barista proletariat does populate the staffs of nonprofit groups and electoral politicians, the ranks of publishers’ assistants, and newspaper and magazine junior editors and writers. Their readiness to protest and shut down Democratic and media operations is a source of power, deployed often with the gleeful abandon of adolescents granting themselves a day off.
These were the Bernie Sanders supporters when he ran for the Democrat presidential nomination. More recently they forced the resignation of a New York Times editor. In Barone’s view they are the current Democrat core constituency, And therein lies the Party’s problem - its policies favor disaffected adolescents, unlikely to ever be, or become, a majority.
