The Winged Nike of Pennsylvania Avenue: How the Left Lost

The Winged Nike of Pennsylvania Avenue (full series)
It Wasn’t Just the Presidency | The Current American Plurality
How the Left Lost | Cautions and Conclusions

How the Left Lost

So how, then, did it all come to pass? The answer can be found in the liberal-progressive-Democratic coalition’s process ideology, Everything Leftism. The Biden administration operationalized Everything Leftism throughout its government, with a series of whole-of-government initiatives on issues ranging from union organizing to environmental justice to racial equity.

But the public was less excited about the prospect of another four years of whole-of-government Everything Leftism than Big Philanthropy, the Democratic Party, and the liberal activist class—together known as “the Groups” in election postmortems. Indeed, they were so un-excited that some Everything Leftist proposals from the mouth of the Democratic candidate herself were not believed by the public, in what a Tablet magazine writer dubbed “Democrats’ Insanity Defense.”

The Trump campaign pummeled the excesses of Everything Leftism. Its most notable advertisement featured Harris, then a Senator running for president in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, telling an activist from the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund that she supported providing gender reassignment to transgender prisoners at taxpayer expense. The Biden administration’s extremely permissive border policies were another line of attack. And the inflation at least partly induced by the Biden administration’s first-year, FDR-inspired spending spree and the continued fallout from restrictive blue-state COVID lockdowns were the substratum on which the whole election was built.

When Democratic polling group Blueprint asked voters what had soured them on Vice President Harris’s campaign, Everything Leftism was the clear reason. The top three issues among swing voters who chose Trump were that Harris focused more on cultural issues like transgenderism rather than helping the middle class, that inflation was too high, and that the administration had allowed too many migrants to illegally cross the border.

Other Everything Leftism cases provided further drags on the progressive-Democratic alliance. Vice President Harris, a Californian, pointedly refused to disclose whether she intended to vote for or against the overwhelmingly popular Proposition 36 to increase criminal penalties. And degrowth-environmentalism, one of the Biden administration’s whole-of-government beneficiaries, proved highly unpopular with working-class voters. Taken together, the 2024 results show a reaction to the woke coordination of the #Resistance and whole-of-government eras.

Even Democrats and liberals concluded that the Groups had lost the election for team blue. The Big Philanthropy–fueled voter registration network that Capital Research Center has extensively chronicled did not deliver the results its funders would have hoped. As liberal Nevada political commentator John Ralston, who had predicted a narrow victory in his state for Vice President Harris, noted in his postmortem after former President Trump carried the state: “The Democratic machine DID turn out its voters—young, Hispanics, nonpartisans who leaned left—but they didn’t do what they usually do: vote for the Democrats.”

Ezra Klein of the New York Times invited Michael Lind, an old-fashioned class-first social democrat, to criticize the entire structure of the liberal-nonprofit advocacy infrastructure. Klein noted that the identity politics representative groups with influence in progressive-left politics “are claiming to speak for very, very wide swaths of the electorate and persuading Democrats of things that those parts of the electorate simply don’t believe.” He specifically identified Hispanic groups’ pushing de facto open borders and Black groups pushing “defund the police” as examples. Lind affirmed, dryly remarking, “If all of the leaders of these various communities are career nonprofit people or academics funded by the Ford Foundation and other big grantors, they’re AstroTurf.”

Foundation funders, a multi-billion-dollar pillar of the American Left, had driven the left-of-center movement far from the American median. Ira Stoll, writing at the Wall Street Journal, noted:

On three big issues of the presidential campaign—inflation, immigration and transgenderism—charitable foundations and their grantees supported policies that wound up damaging the Democrats. The culprits include the $25 billion Open Society Foundations, the $16 billion Ford Foundation, and the $12.8 billion William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Stoll charged the Hewlett Foundation’s campaign to undo free-market capitalism, the “Economy and Society Initiative,” with exacerbating inflation, especially since the Biden administration invited Hewlett alumna Jennifer Harris into the administration. Meanwhile, Open Society Foundations and Ford funded the International Refugee Assistance Project, which advocated for many Biden administration immigration policies, among other de facto open-borders groups. Ford and Hewlett also funded the ACLU, a core advancer of transgender vanguardism in American law.

When the dust settled, one could argue that Winged Nike was driven from the Left by the actions of its own institutions, driving the Democratic Party, its supporters, and its activist cadres further and further from the “median voter” who is assumed to decide elections.

In the next installment, governing may prove harder than winning for the new Republican coalition.