Posted on 02/09/2018 4:24:39 AM PST by Kaslin
Amid the brouhahas about the Nunes memo and immigration, an item from Greg Hinz of Crain's Chicago Business caught my eye. Demographers crunching census data estimate that Chicago's black population fell to 842,000, while its white non-Hispanic population increased to 867,000. National political significance: In our three largest cities -- New York, Los Angeles and Chicago -- gentry liberals have become the dominant political demographic.
That's consistent with election results. Gentry liberals -- the term is urban analyst Joel Kotkin's -- are the political base of those cities' mayors, Bill de Blasio, Eric Garcetti and Rahm Emanuel. That's something new in American politics. Modest-income Jews used to be the key group in New York. White married homeowners were it in Los Angeles. "Bungalow ward" ethnics dominated in Chicago. In time, they faced challenges from candidates with nonwhite political bases -- blacks, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York, Mexicans in Los Angeles, and blacks and Hispanics in Chicago. Now gentry liberals are on top.
This reflects demographic change. Blacks have been moving from central cities to suburbs and the South. Mexican immigrant inflow largely shut down circa 2008. Affluent professionals and single college graduates have colonized -- gentrified -- neighborhoods such as Park Slope, Silver Lake and Wicker Park, with bedraggled but potentially attractive housing stock convenient to downtowns.
The trend is visible elsewhere -- not only in San Francisco, Seattle and Portland but also in Washington, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and even Cleveland and Detroit. It's widespread and strategic enough to be changing the face of the Democratic Party.
There's irony in this. Gentry liberals have produced the metropolitan areas with the highest income inequality in the nation. They decry gentrification -- and the accompanying movement of low-income blacks and Hispanics out of their neighborhoods -- even as they cause it. They sing hymns to diversity even as they revel in the pleasures of communities where almost everybody believes and consumes exactly the same things -- and votes Democratic.
Gentrification thus inevitably reshapes the Democratic Party, which, from its beginnings in 1832, has been a series of coalitions of people regarded as somehow unusual Americans but who, taken together, are a national majority.
Consider two of Democrats' priorities during the presidency of Barack Obama, who has lived all his adult life in gentrified neighborhoods: increased taxes on high earners, which gentry liberals are happy to pay (if they weren't, they would have joined other affluent folk moving to Florida and Texas), and an infrastructure bill that was, as the American Enterprise Institute's Christina Hoff Sommers documented in The Weekly Standard, titled and tailored at the behest of feminists to invoke higher pay for teachers and nurses rather than new jobs for "burly men."
Similarly, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through passage of cap-and-trade legislation, a priority of her fellow Bay Area gentry liberals, which predictably cost Democrats multiple Rust Belt House seats.
This year, New York's Andrew Cuomo and California's Jerry Brown have been bellowing against the Republican tax reform for eliminating most of the deduction for state and local taxes. But that provision has virtually no impact on people who aren't in high-tax states and don't make over $100,000 a year -- i.e., who aren't gentry liberals. First constituencies first.
And whom are Democrats eyeing as possible 2020 presidential nominees? Identity politics, a favorite talking point of gentry liberals, have them focusing mainly on women and minorities -- e.g., Kirsten Gillibrand, who met her husband while working in Manhattan, Elizabeth Warren of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cory Booker, raised in Harrington Park, New Jersey, and Kamala Harris, who is from San Francisco.
Not often mentioned is Sen. Sherrod Brown, who has won nine elections for national office in the classic swing state of Ohio. Brown has been a consistent critic of trade agreements, an issue that strikes gentry liberals as vulgar. Similar repugnance may explain the disinterest in Sens. Mark Warner, whose early victories were won by appealing to rural Virginians, and Michael Bennet, whose record as Denver school superintendent was not in lockstep with teachers unions. Gentry liberals may seek to appease other party constituencies, including blacks and Hispanics, but they insist on their own priorities.
Dominating the party is one thing; producing candidates and issues with appeal to the broader national electorate is another. Gentry liberals have the microphone and the money to dominate the Democratic Party. Whether they can overcome their snobbish disdain and bitter contempt for those beyond their comfortable enclaves and come up with a winning national strategy is unclear.
Interesting. I can’t help but wonder, as the Rats realize their attempt to gain and hold power in perpetuity by “Browning AMerica” has failed if they don’t realize their path to victory lies in an appeal to whites. Watch them dump minorities like a hot brick. The have only one principle, victory.
The gentrified are happy to pay, up to a point. The former hippy owner of a local trendy restaurant joined our conservative political group after the city decided on a one time fee on businesses to fund some harebrained scheme to help the homeless. (Which has always been a rathole to pee money into.) It was the equivalent of a year’s profit for her. She was upset. However, I question if her upsetedness translated to supporting a Republican. (Of course, a Republican hasn’t run for any significant job here as it is a waste of time and energy.) Thus, in these enclaves, there really isn’t any opposition worth mentioning. They are like little hothouses raising a bumper crop of Democrats.
there isn’t anything liberal about dems. we need to start calling them socialists or globalists. This also fits many republicans.
The Democrats are pretend Progressives-Liberals and the Republicans are pretend Conservatives-Constitutionalists who both do the bidding of big business and big banks at the end of the day.
They fool a lot of people, but not so many as they used to thanks to modern technology that exposes the hypocrisy of all “Mainstream” politicians.
Gentrified liberal for sale to highest bidding student SJW. Price negotiable.
I do think they realize that on some level. It’s probably a factor in their need to project racism onto conservatives.
But of course the Rat leadership is the most racist group in America. “Blacks are so dumb they need affirmative action”. If that isn’t racist I don’t know what is. Pelosi nauseatingly pandering to minorities of color is another classic example of the first order. I could go on all day.
Hmmm....... Perhaps. Somehow though, I doubt it
After this latest “budget deal” it would appear that they also own the GOP Establishment, too.
All you have to do is look at the electoral maps. Outside of the hood, the zip codes with the highest incomes vote Democratic, they are also overwhelmingly White. How can the Kennedys who live in ultra white neighborhoods and towns, went to tony elite private schools and the Ivies, get to portray themselves as the voice of working people?
Same way these idiots move South from the Northeast and Midwest who continue to vote Democrat when they move here, even though that was exactly what caused them to flee where they came from.
Dems are sitting on the powder keg of a full-on brawl between Blacks and Hispanics for the title of America’s #1 Most Aggrieved Minority.
Don’t believe me? Look at polling numbers of Black support for Trump’s immigration policies.
This will be a lose-lose for Democrats.
bkmk
It will be interesting to see. While it may seem to you and I that the GOP just cant lose by turning all this into Watergate 2.0 something keeps telling me they have failed in the past at “poring piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel”.
I think that’s just something they were indoctrinated with as a reason to hate conservative even though the charge is 50 years old and never had much truth to it seeing as the Democratic party was the part of racism not the Republican Party.
That said this propaganda has infistructure their ranks and remains one if the main reason they vote Democrats. Their isolation from Republicans in city centers simply make it easier to keep telling this and other lies.
The point is we need to somehow reach out to this group and prove we ain’t anything like the Democratic claim we are. That Democrats are and always have been the racist liers not Republicans.
There isn’t anything liberal or non-racist about the Democratic party in general. All of their primary propaganda about themselves and us is a lie. Not even a very well hidden one.
If you talk to that people you will find they don’t know any better. They are the product of a public indoctrination systen. They have been trained to be crusaders against Americas evil past and spesficly that means the Republican party.
This is where the Democratic Monopoly on public information really paid off. They who controls the schools controls the future. Republican of the 80s,90s,2000s basically lost this fight by allowing the teachers to sell this crap on the tax payer dimes.
Trump’s tax cut will however drive many of them out of the cities, this will make it possible to reclaim their vote and prove thou peer pressure that Democrat are liers.
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