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.
The full essay is at "An Analysis of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election."
