Occasionally, like a blind squirrel, Reason [1] occasionally finds a nut.
In the end, The New York Times’ dual Democratic presidential endorsements—bestowed upon both Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.)—were like the points on Whose Line Is It Anyway?: They just didn’t matter.
Nor did the media’s fawning over South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, early flirtation with Beto O’Rourke, and absolute worship of Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) resonate with the millions of Americans living outside the Acela corridor.
Instead, Democratic voters indicated over and over again that they were most interested in the popular former vice president and the iconoclastic but well-respected runner-up from the 2016 Democratic race. Before the actual primaries, Biden consistently led in polls and Sanders performed well—and then the eventual voting followed this pattern, with early wins for Sanders and a comeback surge from Biden. The idea that any other candidate had a particularly likely shot at the nomination was always pundit-driven misdirection from a class of commentators demanding more interesting, intersectional characters, because the commentators themselves are more interested in identity-based diversity than the rest of the country.
Indeed, the media stumped for Warren so hard that Vox’s Matt Yglesias recently had to write a post explaining to people why she was losing “even if all your friends love her.” By your friends, he meant friends of people like you, a reader of Vox. Yglesias famously described Vox’s audience as “a graduate of or student at a selective college (which also describes the staff and our social peers)” and lamented that “if you assigned me the job of serving a less-educated audience [I’d] probably need to think about how to change things up.” He’s right; outside the Vox bubble, there was little interest in the kind of cultural progressivism represented by Warren.
There’s a number of little nuggets in this thing, one of which is the constant charge from the left of anti-intellectualism.
But what’s really driving the American voter against trusting everything to the smartest guy in the room? Why are they turning their back on the promise of the IGY [2]?
Here at home we’ll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets, one for everyoneWhat a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be freeOn that train, all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure for artists everywhere)A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young
Maybe all that is being rejected because in reality, the world that we are in was brought to us by the supposedly smartest guys in the room. People have a tendency to judge by actual results, not what the dreams were supposed to result in. You know, the people that told us that those jobs weren’t reappearing. That America being an also-ran third world country is The New Normal, etc.
Then along comes a guy who the “smartest guys in the room” universally despise. The establishment of both parties has gone to extreme effort to discredit and eliminate him. Yet, he’s still with us and oh by the way, the economy that the smartest guys in the room said would never recover, not only recovered but is thriving in a way that hasn’t been happening for over 70 years. No wonder the supposedly smart people despise him. He’s shown quite clearly and quite graphically just how empty their promises have always been.
How bad is the push against the liberal elite, the supposed smartest guys in the room? Its to the point where even the ostensibly liberal Democrats voters are telling these far-left elete to get it out of the sunshine. There is no other conclusion to draw from the numbers we are seeing coming in as this is being written. It’s to the point where they’re backing the gaffe -prone Joe Biden… As Tucker Carlson said last night…
It should be pointed out that in extremist California Bernie Sanders took that particular state but only by a small margin….
As I say… the remaining numbers at this point are not all in yet, but it appears to me that the weight of the votes going to Joe Biden has now even preclude the idea of a brokered election, that even we predicted here.
However that may be, there seems no doubt that by vast majority, the liberal elite has been pulled down even within the Democrat Party, even at the cost of backing somebody who has absolutely no chance whatsoever in the general election. How bad has the Democrat Party gotten, when even those within the party rank and file recognize that somebody like Joe Biden, bad as he is, is less of a threat to the party than are Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Tulsi Gabbard, Etc?