The Electoral College. White racism. Black sexism.
President Joe Biden. Should Kamala Harris lose the presidential election next month, those will be among the more convenient excuses Democrats will offer for falling short in a race against a staggeringly flawed, widely detested opponent. There will also be whispers that she was not the strongest candidate in the first place — that the party would have done better to elevate a more natural political talent like Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
There’s truth in all of it. But it lets off the hook the main culprit: the way in which leading liberal voices in government, academia and media practice politics today. Consider its main components.
The politics of condescension , typified by Barack Obama’s suggestion this month that Black men might be reluctant to vote for Harris because they “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” But perhaps those men are responding to something more mundane: Median weekly wages for full-time Black workers rose steeply during Donald Trump’s presidency and essentially stagnated under Biden, according to data from the St. Louis Fed.
Why reach for the insulting explanation when a rational one will do? The politics of name-calling, which happens every time Trump’s voters are told they are racists, misogynists, weird, phobic, low-information or, most recently, supporters of a fascist — and, by implication, fascists themselves. Aside fr.