Quote (bogie160 @ 3 Jan 2024 17:50)
Both of those are true. The 2016 election completed a realignment in American politics that dates back to at least Obama. Where the Democrats gained was specifically in the blue state professional classes that are in charge of our major bureaucratic institutions. We're seeing the march through the institutions play out like a game of blitz chess.
It was not just the march through the institutions, but also a shift in the balance of the US economy.
Since the 90s, the industrial base deteriorated, millions of working-class jobs got offshored and the real wages for the bottom ~40% or so of society have stagnated for nearly 3 decades. In parallel, an increasing share of the GDP, productivity and innovation of the US economy is concentrated in just two places: Silicon Valley and Wall Street. As small town and working-class America withered away, the coasts and professional-class jobs like software egineers, financial analysts or biotech researchers were thriving and became increasingly central to the economy. This shift in power, affluence and importance from working-class toward college-educated people and from the heartland toward the coasts was eventually reflected in the culture (Hollywood) and the institutions (media, universities).
Since politics is downstream from culture, both the academization of the Democratic party and the re-orientation of the GOP toward populism were a long time coming. If it had only been an attempt at some sort of "top-down coup d'état" by a tiny class of out-of-touch leftists who had captured a few key positions inside institutions, but without any wider public support for their agenda, then the political change of the past 15 years would never have been so profound or lasting. The policies and general direction of the contemporary Democratic party are underpinned by a large backbone of professionals with liberal and cosmopolitan values who genuinely agree with these policies.
The educational realignment we have seen over the past 15 years could not have occurred much earlier than it did. In the 70s or so, there simply wouldn't have been enough college-educated folks, so that such a realignment would have been a political death sentence. Only since roughly the 2000s are the social conditions ripe for this kind of realignment.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 4 2024 12:40am