The postmodern triumvirate of race, gender, and class has been torn apart. The split seems irreparable and permanent.
Although left-wing militants talk obsessively about race and gender, they now rarely mention class. Tune into NPR, a precise gauge of shallow ideological fashion, and within a sentence or two, the story you’re hearing will reveal itself as yet more hair-splitting about “transphobia” or racism. There is nothing for the blue-collar millions.
Some old Democratic warriors, President Joe Biden among them, still invoke class divisions as though they were still real motivations. But don’t be fooled by talk of “good-paying union jobs.” It’s not about sympathy or understanding of working-class concerns, just cover for siphoning taxpayer money into the pockets of organized labor. It’s about funding political paymasters who kick back cash into Democratic Party coffers.
America’s workers, “deplorables,” have become a deeply uncomfortable subject for the Left because honest discussion of class exposes the dishonesty of progressive dogma on race and gender.
It is fatal to the Left’s religious pieties about critical race theory and “white privilege” that there used to be and still are penniless white people. Data, fact, and photographs debunk them. Critical race theory pigeonholes all white people as irredeemably privileged oppressors of darker races. If white people have often been dirt poor, too, or have been themselves enslaved by darker-skinned people, as they have, the Left’s shallow modish orthodoxy falls to pieces. The existence of oppressed and impoverished white people in American and world history gives the lie to the racialist garbage that dominates left-wing thinking.
Likewise on gender. It is wealthy white people who mostly propagate the Left’s diktats on sexual identity. Cringing upper-middle-class liberals, comfortable in their expensive homes and other material circumstances but not in their white skins, simply won’t point out that the emperor has no clothes. They cannot acknowledge what everyone knows — that men cannot give birth, biological males should not compete in women’s sports, it’s improper for them to be in women’s changing rooms, and sexualized drag shows for elementary school children are predatory, perverse, and wrong. Put such absurdities to ordinary working people and you’ll get a blunt answer.
Ideological claptrap is driving working-class voters, including black and Hispanic ones, away from the Democratic Party. It no longer represents them. For many years, it’s shown contempt for their concerns. Working people who happen to come from a racial minority are like their fellow citizens in being motivated chiefly by economic issues, and where they are moved by culture, it is mostly in a traditional direction, not toward radical innovation. Race and gender don’t come into it.
Until fairly recently, race, class, and gender seemed the three horsemen of the woke apocalypse, thundering down shoulder to shoulder on to the trembling defenses of traditional culture and values. But one of the horsemen has now veered away and is galloping across the political battlefield to join the other side.
The hideous three have become the ridiculous two.
