Tuesday, November 19, 2024

An Analysis of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election: On a Party's Self-Serving Elite

The 2024 U.S. Presidential election warrants a post-partem analysis, not so much to affix blame, but primarily so the electorate might grasp the perils when the elite of a political party refuses to apply self-restraint in order to keep the party-wide platform and campaign speeches from reducing to the elite’s own favorite ideology even though it is not held by a significant number of the “rank and file” members (i.e., voters), not to mention independents. In other words, running a massive political party to serve the ideological agenda of what Bertrand Russell calls “the inner ring” can cost a party dearly on election day. I contend that this applied to the Democratic Party, which had become a center-left party still dependent on its non-college, working-class, members, whose cultural values were not necessarily progressive. To be sure, substituting managerially-oriented political calculation for visionary leadership and broad policy proposals that are based on principles rather than particular political interests can easily be perceived generally as small, especially in the context of the horrific military attacks against civilians in Ukraine and Gaza. It is paradoxical that Harris lost working-class voters who were socially conservative, and thus “anti-woke” (e.g., against men in women’s bathrooms and playing in women’s sports) even as she lost some liberals who believed that Harris, in explicitly stating on The View that she would not deviate from Biden, was too timid in standing up to Russia’s Putin (e.g., by withholding long-range missiles) and Israel’s Netanyahu rather than enabling the horrific military crimes against humanity with continued shipments of weapons as if the UN’s court were irrelevant to international law.

I begin with the immediate historical context of center-left parties. The parties on the left in the U.S. and E.U. shifted to the center in the 1990s and 2000s. The parties were able to pick up moderate voters, but at the risk of losing ideological distinctiveness (from the center-right parties), and thus their raison d’etre in terms of broad principles and policies.  The 2024 U.S. Presidential election can be fit within the broader shifts since the 2000s that have rendered center-left (rather than far-left, or even socialist) parties less successful in elections. Bill Clinton brought the Democratic Party closer to the center in part due to the losses of Edward Kennedy in challenging the center-left Jimmy Carter in 1980 and of Walter Mondale in challenging Ronald Reagan in 1984. The party’s political elite paid attention to these losses, which went down like lead balloons, and Bill Clinton was a result of the ensuing effort to move the party closer to the political center. Crucially, both he and Barak Obama were able to win with support from the middle class (i.e., labor), which was still primarily voting on the basis of economic interest, including redistribution.

Then, two shifts began that caused the Democratic Party’s working-class, relatively conservative, faction to gradually peel off. The first shift can be described as a negative reaction to the increasingly business-friendly aspect of the party moving to the center. Historically, center-left parties in North America and Europe were critical of capitalism and wanted to constrain it. In reaction to the financial crisis of 2008, however, center-left parties let go of the even more important role of constraining capitalism that had frozen up from within due to uncorrected increased market volatility.

In the E.U. state of Greece, for example, the Syriza Party campaigned against austerity measures during the state’s legislative election in 2015 by promising to renegotiate the state’s bailout agreements. However, just after winning the election, the party’s head, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, accepted the existing austerity conditions in spite of there having recently been a referendum in which the Greek citizens overwhelmingly rejected those very conditions. Considering that the austerity resulting from the government’s required budget-cuts was especially harsh on the working class, Tsipras’ betrayal in going along with the creditor-beholden E.U. state of Germany doubtlessly cost the center-left party votes and Tsipras was ultimately defeated (though strangely, after being reelected again).  

In the U.S., Barak Obama entered the office of federal president in 2008 at the worst of the financial crisis, and he stocked his administration with plenty of folks from Wall Street. It is no coincidence that Obama went along with financial bailouts for the banks without conditions, even in terms of putting ceilings on the bonuses of the banks’ executives. Considering that they had displayed incredibly bad judgment in over-leveraging their respective banks by packaging and even buying bonds based on risky sub-prime residential mortgages, the bankers not only did not deserve bonuses, but arguably should have been fired as a condition of getting the funds appropriated by Congress and those created by the Federal Reserve Bank. Instead, the culpable bankers received hefty bonuses out of the TARP money provided by the U.S. Treasury—money that was supposed to be lent out to stimulate the economy so the working class would not suffer from traumatic unemployment. It was not lost on the Democratic Party’s non-college working-class segment that the incompetent but wealthy bank executives got bonuses in the political elite and the financial elite being cozy. Ironically, it was not until the first Trump administration that Treasury issued checks to every American.

Unfortunately, the trajectory of the partial unraveling of the Democratic Party is not so simple, for it was not only the growing perception that the party had joined de facto with the Republican Party in siding with corporate America at the expense of workers that caused the latter to gradually but steadily peel off from the center-left party—after having asked, perhaps, what was still left about the Democratic Party.

Firstly, structural changes in the economy also had an impact. Economic inequality was increasing, and workers could see that the Democratic Party had done nothing substantial to stop even the increase. That the party had missed an opportunity to come up with its own, alternative economic policies with which to differentiate itself from the Republican Party was especially important because the Democratic Party had moved closer to the center, and away from the wing associated with U.S. senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.  

Secondly, another structural change, not economic in nature, also had an impact. Since 2000, a shift towards identity/cultural grievances had been occurring in the middle class wherein a gradually increasing number of voters have been less interested in economic redistribution than in opposing the “woke” ideology, which is centered on legalizing rights of certain groups of Americans based on group-identity. Historically, religious wars in Europe had been based on the premise that group-identity is primary in human consciousness; race riots share that assumption. The failure of the Democratic Party to constrain the excesses of capitalism during the financial crisis may be a factor in this shift away from economic distribution, as increasing numbers of working-classed voters came to realize that both major parties had become bought and paid for by the business sector through its political campaign contributions and promises of executive jobs. Regulatory capture of the regulator agencies by the regulated companies is but one result of the inordinate influence of business in government.

The shift in the American working-class voting increasingly on social issues affected the Democratic as a wedge. The “woke” ideology in favor of defunding the police, transsexual rights (i.e., men in women’s bathrooms and sports), reparations for Black Americans, sanctuary cities wherein illegal immigrants are legally protected, university “cancel culture,” such as in mislabeling pro-human-rights protests as antisemitic, and diversity programs gripped the political elite of the party and its left-wing more generally even though Kamala Harris did not emphasize “woke” planks in her speeches. Meanwhile, the “anti-work” political reaction had been gaining speed since at least 2015 among the non-college-educated working folks. This reaction viewed the gay “rainbow” flag as a cult symbol that was being imposed seemingly everywhere, and was viscerally opposed to transsexual men being able to play in women’s sports and use women’s locker rooms, the notion that illegal immigrants somehow had a right to be in the U.S. even though they had committed a crime in entering the country illegally, the proposal that even people living paycheck to paycheck should be taxed more to pay for reparations to Black people, and that certain words could no longer be spoken or written in college courses and even in political protests. Indeed, protests against Israel had practically been banned at many universities, including Yale, where 47 pro-human-rights students were arrested by private university police employees, and Harvard, which had turned Harvard Yard into a preemptive police presence by September, 2024. So much for academic atmosphere and academic freedom; non-academic employees with guns were in charge as scared academic administrators looked on as if proud mice.  My point is that Harris didn’t have to say anything “woke” on the campaign trail; non-college educated workers in the Democratic Party had by then viewed their party’s elite as very “woke” indeed. 

It can be argued that in having no internal check or self-restraint, the party's political elite had pushed the “woke” ideology too hard and too far (and perhaps, most importantly, too fast), and thus naturally had prompted a political reaction against both the elite itself and its favored ideology. That is, the political elite of the Democratic Party refused to constrain itself from pushing its mandatory ideology even though it was clear, or should have been clear without the blocking self-centeredness, that non-college-educated workers, especially in small towns, would bolt. Even with the mistaken assumption that the working class would still vote on an economic basis, the fact that the anti-woke movement was gaining steam should not have been missed or so easily dismissed for being illegitimate. Presumptuousness can indeed be blinding or distortive, as can the underlying self-centeredness and primitive desire to use power to enact one’s own ideology. This is ultimately why Donald Trump was able to win in spite of his own voters acknowledging that he was admittedly a flawed man.

The elite of a political party does its party a disservice by stubbornly pushing whatever ideology that elite loves, as if it were a fact of reason and thus should be imposed on detractors whether they like it or not, rather than applying self-discipline and a little humility to back off the ideology so as to retain the socially-conservative workers for the sake of governing to constrain capitalism. The ancient Confucian scholar, Xunzi, points to “a degree of self-restraint and even virtue, namely trustworthiness ,” as one reason why a hegemon, a ruler who is not as virtuous as is a sage (i.e., a wise and virtuous person) but is more virtuous than is a vicious tyrant, can be “a strong and successful ruler.”[1] Even though a hegemon “is not committed to moral cultivation of himself or those he rules,” applying the virtue of self-restraint, such as channeling away one’s instinctual urge to promote one’s own preferred ideology over others in a political party, can make a ruler successful (and not tyrannical) anyway.[2] The political elite of the Democratic Party could have benefited from this ancient lesson. That an increasing number of voters in the working class were more interested in voting against the societally interlarding “woke” ideology and especially its demands than in voting for economic redistribution means that the self-centered and haughty ideological stubbornness of the Democratic political elite really costed Harris votes.

Thirdly, even given the ongoing shift among working-class Democrats toward voting on the basis of cultural issues, economic pressure from the price increases, especially in gas and groceries, even after the temporary bump from supply shocks and higher transportation costs during the pandemic, prompted a significant number of voters in the middle class (and poor), which is especially vulnerable to price increases on necessities such as food and transportation, to vote on the basic of their bank accounts.

Harris’s promise to reduce grocery-store prices rung hollow because Biden had failed to do it and she said she would not differ from Biden on policies. Even given the trend in the working class to vote on the basis of social over economic issues, the center-left party erred in failing to recharge its historic mission to constrain the excesses of capitalism. Pledges to use federal anti-trust law to break up the meat-producer and grocery-chain concentrated rather than competitive industries would have differentiated the party from Trump’s rightward shift of the Republican Party. Even the Democratic Party, in accepting so much corporate money from lobbyists, was susceptible to enabling rather than lessening the tendency of markets to consolidate—to go from competition, by which food prices would have gone down after the supply shocks during the pandemic, to just a few giant companies with enough market-power to hold prices high and even convince consumers to expect even higher prices in the expectation of inflation as inevitable. As my academic advisor at Yale, who was an Episcopalian priest, once said, “If you must sin, then sin boldly!” Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt would not have lost much time translating that advice into political terms in terms of bold policy in place of political calculation and capitulation to even the private powers behind the proverbial throne. Unfortunately, neither Biden nor Harris was a Jackson or Roosevelt.

Fourthly, as for the shock that many “far-left” Democrats and even some independents had after the election that a convicted felon and narcissist had just won the popular vote (as well as the Electoral College), the explanation for Trump’s success with labor is not only due to the reasons I have just discussed, but also because Trump was very wealthy and bold in a way that vote-maximizer politicians usually are not. That these personal attributes could possibly “trump” the man’s flaws, such as admitting that he could get away with touching women sexually without their consent, allegedly pressuring Georgia to come up with more votes for him, and allegedly prompting a mob to riot through Capitol Hill as electoral votes were being counted by Congress on January 6, 2021, would shatter the ideological view held by the Democratic Party’s elite on what matters in a presidential character. Indeed, the nature of the alleged crimes may actually have augmented or strengthened Trump’s stature to working-class voters, given that their paradigmatic criteria for leadership differed so from those of the political elite (of both parties!).

Whereas America’s political elite and the left-wing of the Democratic party believed that voters should vote at least in part based on whichever candidate is most wise and virtuous, Trump himself might counter that the masses vote instead on the basis of wealth and being bold even in speech as well as action, rather unlike the typical people-pleasing politician, such as Bill Clinton and Barak Obama. Taking into consideration the fact that the level of education (college versus no-college) had been the single best indicator during the arduously long campaign “season” of which candidate a voter favored, it is likely that the criteria valued by the working class differed paradigmatically from the criteria valued by college-educated voters, including the political elite. Unconsciously, the elite of the Democratic Party projected its own paradigm of character-leadership onto how the non-college-educated laborers of the party’s “rank and file” see things. This can explain why even the criminal charges against Trump did not dint his base.

According to Adam Smith in his text, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “the great mob of mankind are the admirers and the worshipers . . . of wealth and greatness.”[3] These two things are contrast to wisdom and virtue, which the masses “are perhaps incapable of even discerning.”[4] I don’t think Smith is being fair to the “masses” here, but his main point concerning the different criteria is important for college-educated Americans to grasp. Like people outside of a political (and economic) elite, Smith eschews “the proposition that people of superior wisdom and virtue possess a title to rule.”[5] He maintains that birth (family) and wealth are more visible and certain to the masses than are virtue and wisdom.[6] Wealth and greatness, Trump doubtlessly could have said during his 2024 campaign, “are my two middle names.” By “greatness,” even as he applied the adjective to the country itself in terms of its potential, consists not only of wealth, but also the kind of strength that is bold rather than timid, or limited to political calculation at home and abroad. Thinking that they too could someday be rich and admiring bold people, working-class voters could very well have loved him for being both. Again, the shift away from being concerned with redistribution to wanting to push back against the presumptuously encroaching, passive aggressive antagonistic “woke” advocates means that Trump’s “offensive” statements were viewed by the working-class as a plus rather than a minus in terms of character. In other words, few labor-union members would be likely to quote from Aristotle’s Ethics to insist that a virtuous person is necessary to put into effect Trump’s policies.

As for Trump’s pathological lying, the heads of the Democratic Party were hardly blameless in falsely claiming that Harris had been selected as the nominee in an “open, bottom-up” process. With a hundred days to go before election day, the party had time for a primary, which could have been set to take place forty days out, with the general election following after sixty more days. In the same year, the E.U. state of Germany set an election just sixty days after a scheduled no-confidence vote at a time in which that vote was just a month away. To claim that Harris’ chances were diminished by having only a hundred days fails to recognize that the year-plus long campaign season for U.S. president was excessively long. Lacking in boldness in terms of proposed policies was more of a hindrance than just having a hundred days. In other words, she had more than enough time to distinguish herself by departing from Biden’s policies, especially given his unpopularity for not going far enough in terms of a variety of areas. In fact, Harris’ lack of boldness took votes away even from the left-wing of the Democratic Party!

Going on the basis of political calculation, or “the political reality,” based on the presumed power of AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) in U.S. politics, produced political timidity just as cowering to corporate interests, even of the oil and food industries, presented Harris as a politician rather than as a leader. Leadership does not operate by calculation, but by broad principles. Whether those principles are standing up to an aggressor ravaging through Gaza rather than enabling him by being in favor of continuing to supply weapons to his military, or enforcing market competition (and a windfall-profits tax) rather than suggesting that the government give Americans money to spend in the oligarchic grocery chains that would feel free to raise prices even more rather than cut prices to compete for buyers, boldness of policy can be appreciated even more when it involves standing up to entrenched political and economic interests that have turned squalid in part because of the U.S. Government.

Management differs from leadership in part because management is narrowly focused and incremental rather than being oriented to formulating and promoting a vision of society in ideal, paradigmatic terms. I submit that both Biden and Harris were managerial in nature, whereas Ronald Reagan can be studied in terms of providing a vision (e.g., “Government is the problem.”). To be sure, not every vision that a political leader espouses is ethical. Hitler, for example, provided a vision of a strong Germany without weakness enervating the country from within. That vision can be challenged ethically both in regard to how Hitler conceptualized strength and weakness, and his government officials could be challenged for how they implemented Hitler’s vision by literally exterminating what they saw as weakness from the country and even in trying to free up living space for Germans from the U.S.S.R.—Hitler having promised Hindenburg that Communists would be eliminated within Germany, which in turn could mean going after the source further east.

What to a working-class Trump voter was boldness was viewed by some Harris voters and the Democracy Party’s elite as fascist. The claims that democracy was in the balance may have been fueled in part by the fact that Trump working-class voters tended to value wealth and political boldness over wisdom and virtue. To people who value or follow political calculation to minimize political risk, a candidate not speaking as a politician and advocating bold policies would of course be viewed with fear.

It is possible, even ironic in this case, that representative democracy can be put at risk by a cleft or division existing between a party’s elite and a significant part of its “rank-and-file” base. To be effective electorally and in sync with democracy itself, the elite of a party needs to remember that its perspective is not necessarily that of the whole of the party, and if the respective perspectives do indeed differ, the elite needs to exercise some self-constraint in place of self-centeredness and a self-assumed mandate to impose, ideologically, even on the party’s membership. In short, a party’s elite needs to put that membership first if electoral success is desired as a means to being in power.  The refusal to exercise self-restraint deserves to be voted against. Trump’s lack of self-restraint in his use of vitriol against his “enemies,” which included anyone who criticized him publicly, and even in his use of lying habitually to get out of trouble was in line with the boldness atypical of politicians that the working-class valued in a leader, whereas Harris’ lack of self-restraint regarding highlighting aspects of “wokeness” and in not standing up to big business and Israel worked against her. Not that Trump would stand up to big business, for he himself was a part of it, and not that he would stand up to Netanyahu (or Putin), but all that Trump too may have appealed to greatness-as-strength as construed and valued by enough of the the non-college-educated working-class voters.


1. Eric L. Hutton, “Introduction,” in Xunzi: The Complete Text, Eric L. Hutton, trans. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. xxviii.
2. Ibid.
3. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I. iii.3.2.
4. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), VI.ii.I.20, quoted by Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 42.
5. Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 44.
6. Ibid., p. 45.

Friday, November 1, 2024

The E.U.’s Parliament and the U.S.’s House of Representatives in Dialogue

On November 1, 2024, “All Saints Day” in Roman Catholic Christianity, the E.U. announced that a peaceful delegation of the elected representatives of the EU’s Parliament would be travelling to Texas during the following week to “meet American counterparts,” which is to say, a delegation of the elected representatives of the US’s House of Representatives.[1] The key word here is counterparts, for the European Parliament is indeed of the same type of legislative body and at the same level in its federal system as is the American House of Representatives.

Both legislative chambers consist of elected representatives who are elected by E.U. and U.S. citizens. Although the respective states are divided into districts, the representatives do not represent the state governments or the states themselves. Just because the state governments map out the districts does not mean that the elected representatives to the federal chamber represent the states. In fact, every party in the Parliament and the House consists of representatives from more than one state. To insist that political parties exist only on the state level, whereas only blocs or nebulous groups exist at the federal level is ideological nonsense geared to “States’ Rights advocates” in the United States and “Euroskeptics” in the European Union. It is significant that members of the European People’s Party in the E.U. Parliament sit together, and the party has members from various states, who, as stated above, do not represent their respective states, but, rather, the E.U. citizens in federal legislative districts. The same is true in the case of the U.S. House.

So it is fitting that a delegation of the members of the E.U.’s Parliament would meet with members of the U.S.’s House. “The inter-parliamentary meeting is usually an opportunity for lawmakers from both sides of the Atlantic to exchange views of their legislative agenda and priorities.”[2] The parity implied here is correct, and thus obviates any ideological claim that a state in one union is equivalent, or on the same political-system level as the other union. In terms of geography alone, Texas and France, and Montana and Germany, are both cases equivalencies. Similar equivalencies pertain to Arizona and California, and Italy and Spain, respectively. In terms of population, whereas many of the respective states of the two unions are in the tens of millions, both unions are in the hundreds of millions. The two clusters evince the qualitative (i.e., a jump, rather than an incremental change) as well as a quantitative difference between the respective state and federal levels.

The E.U’s delegation was set to be chaired by MEP Brando Benifei of the Socialists & Democrats party and the U.S.’s delegation was to be chaired by Rep. Nathaniel Moran of the Republican Party. That the possibility of a U.S. tariff on goods imported from the E.U. was on the agenda, and the E.U.’s executive branch, the Commission, has exclusive authority, or competency, on commercial law in the E.U. does not mean that only economic issues would be discussed, as if the E.U. were a “trading bloc.” The three pillars, or enumerated powers, of the E.U. extend beyond trade and even economics to include social policy and justice, including human rights, for example. The U.S. delegation could enquire of its counterpart whether the recent electoral fraud in the prospective E.U. state of Georgia (not the U.S. state of Georgia, even given the controversy in 2020!) adds to foreign-agents law in significantly reducing Georgia’s chances of gaining statehood. The E.U. delegation could in turn enquire as the viability of U.S. elections, given the accusations in 2020 from within the United States.

In short, both the E.U. and U.S. have federal systems in which governmental sovereignty is “dual,” which is to say that although the respective states have both stated and residual domains of authority, some of them was delegated to the federal institutions, which in both unions comprise governments rather than only multilateral international organizations. To be sure, an element of the latter has been retained in both unions; specifically in the U.S. Senate and the E.U. Council, both of whose members are polities (i.e., the states) rather than representatives of federal citizens. In fact, the citizens have E.U. and U.S. passports, respectively. In general, that the balance of governmental sovereignty is closer to the states in the E.U. than in the U.S. does not mean that the two unions are not both cases of modern (i.e., dual sovereignty) federalism, as distinct from confederalism, in which all of the sovereignty resides with the state governments. In 1603, Althusius distinguished between plena and non-plena federalism with this in mind even though he modeled his theory of federalism on the Holy Roman Empire. Federalism itself was originally confederal, and fit international alliances because the members differed even in terms of the type of government they had. The U.S., and then the E.U. en suite, mixed national and international elements in what is now called modern federalism to distinguish it from confederalism, which is still evinced in international alliances and organizations such as the United Nations.  To conflate either the E.U. or U.S. with such alliances and organizations is to commit a rather basic category mistake. Whether out of ignorance of ideological fervor, such a mistake prevents the two federal unions from looking at each other to gain insights so as to move towards more perfect unions.



1. Peggy Corlin, “MEPs Seek First Contact with Trump or Harris Regimes in Texas Next Week,” Euronews.com, November 1, 2024.
2. Ibid.