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After a year of violence and unrest, large American cities serve as a cautionary tale for the progressives in Washington who want to move the country further to the left. The Democrats airtight lock on the urban vote has allowed political leaders to pursue ideological agendas without fear of reprisal, which has revealed just how much the elite left comprised mostly of affluent, liberal whites who dominate media narratives is out of step with the concerns of rank-and-file urban residents.

Take crime. Defund the police was always an unworkable project, but that never stopped progressives from working on it. Rep. Rashida Tlaibs infamous no more policing it can't be reformed may have been more extreme than the Democratic norm, but its basic sentiment dominates the elite lefts obsession with policing injustices and relative indifference to street violence. White House press secretary Jen Psakis inability to acknowledge America has a crime problem is but one example of the conventional lefts unwillingness to depart from the standard script.

Meanwhile, the five cities that reduced their police budgets the most in 2020 (Austin, New York, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Denver) saw murders spike over the past year well above the national average. Thirty-six of the 50 largest cities in America saw murders rise at double-digit rates. Compared to 2020, shootings and homicides in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles were way up. Crime in large progressive urban strongholds far outpaces more moderate and right-leaning cities.

Minority and urban residents know exactly what is going on, which is why we have seen mayoral candidates in New York City recently pivot to crime as a top issue. In a May 2021 poll, more than 60 percent of New Yorkers supported increasing the citys police budget, and a plurality named crime as their number one issue in this years mayoral race. In July 2020, as protestors and rioters filled city streets across the country, 81 percent of Black Americans said in a Gallup poll they would like police to spend the same amount of time or more time in their neighborhoods. In Minneapolis, the epicenter of the defund the police movement, Black residents were more opposed than white residents to reducing the size of the citys police force and more likely to perceive that crime had increased. In poll after poll, nationally and locally, city dwellers and racial minorities have consistently been at odds with the elite lefts views of urban policing.

Schooling is another example of the elite lefts disconnect with urban residents. Bill DeBlasios declaration during his failed 2020 presidential campaign that he hated the privatizers and wanted to get away from charter schools was merely a blunt articulation of the leftward drift of the Democratic elite over the past 20 years. The partys platforms have become increasingly hostile to charter schools since the 2000 presidential election, as Jonathan Chait has documented.

Despite this trend, Democratic voters in cities like their charter schools and want more of them. A recent poll in New York City found that 70 percent of Democrats favor opening more charter schools, a figure that grows higher among Black primary voters and Hispanics. A majority of Democratic voters said they would prefer a mayoral candidate who supports charter schools as well as traditional public schools.

A 2019 poll found that nearly two-thirds of white Democratic voters had an unfavorable opinion of charter schools, while majorities of Black and Hispanic voters support them. This isnt surprising. Charter schools are mostly non-white and urban. While only 25 percent of the nations traditional public schools are in cities, 57 percent of charter schools are located in urban areas. The pandemics unplanned experiment in forced homeschooling has further eroded the publics confidence in the lefts ironclad embrace of traditional public schools. A recent poll in California revealed that the number of parents who say they would send their children to a private school if they could has increased by a third in the past two years.

The disconnect between the elite left and people on the street extends beyond crime and schools to basic American aspirations. A greater share of Black and Hispanic Americans than whites believe they are on the way to achieving the American Dream, and considerably more Black and Hispanic working-class people than affluent white liberals believe anyone can start a successful business.

Half of affluent white liberals believe very strongly that public buildings and monuments named after confederate leaders should be renamed, compared to much smaller shares of Black and Hispanic working-class voters, and a much greater percentage of affluent white liberals than Black and Hispanic working-class voters would be very upset if their son or daughter married a Trump supporter.

With their power over the daily media narrative, sadly, the elite left has been able to ignore the opinions of non-elite urban constituents with little political impunity. But that does not make their hypocrisy any less damning.

Ryan Streeter is the director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

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OPINION | Will progressives learn from the cities? | Op-Ed | livingstonparishnews.com - The Livingston Parish News

We have reached the point at which Americas sophisticated opinion-makers are appending a trigger warning onto the Declaration of Independence.

Every year for the past 32 years, NPR began its Friday-morning news show, Morning Edition has broadcast a reading of the Declaration of Independence by NPRs staff. But after last summers protests and our country attempting to confront our history, we want and need to be honest about the words in this document.

What followed was a critique of that document, which was mostly a long list of grievances and charges against King George IIIa bizarre rebuke of the Declarations central purpose. NPRs hosts add that this tract declared all men are created equal, even though women, enslaved people, and indigenous Americans were not held as equal at the time. They note that the original draft of the declaration was amended to exclude references to Scottish mercenaries and the evils of the African slave trade, which offended some delegates to the Continental Congress and represented an obstacle to its adoption. Finally, a racist slur against Native Americans (that being merciless Indian Savages, who were excited to total war against the colonies by the Crown) remained.

NPR concluded that this piece of parchment encoded flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies into the nations political DNA. It was only ever a venue to express our collective aspirations and hopes for what this country might one day become but in many ways has never been.

This is how sophisticates within the ecosystem of respectable liberal discourse think youre supposed to talk about the American founding if youre an intellectually serious person. What this sort of talk reveals, however, is an astonishing parochialism.

The presentism on display in these remarks isnt just myopic. It contributes to the cumulative condition in which the left is ceding the miracle of American democracy to the right. Unconditional patriotism and veneration for the historical accidents that culminated in the American experiment are increasingly regarded by the left as unrefined and naive. That leaves us to tell the providential story of the American foundinga story that has the dual advantages of being both inspirational and true.

As anyone who has ever drafted a document by committee will tell you, most statements that are produced in such a manner end up as banal expressions of fealty to nothing at all. Its little short of a wonder that this process resulted in a statement of principle as revolutionarily egalitarian as it did. No government had ever committed itself to the Declarations enlightened liberal ideals in such a full-throated manner. And those ideals were very much a threat to the systems that kept men in chains all over the world, and not just in the American South. The fetters that bound people everywhere to monarchs, landed lords, feudal castes, hereditary nobility, and established churches were suddenly rendered breakable. And while the American capacity for compromise allowed the institution of slavery (among other evils) to survive for another 89 years, the predicate for its dissolution would not exist if these principles were not first articulated in this document.

The Declaration of Independence was not, as NPR insists, an expression of our unfulfilled aspirations; it was the codification of a set of values that preexisted the document by a century. Those values were rooted in the proto-democratic institutions established by Congregationalists and Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians, Anglicans and Catholics, Lutherans and Jews who privileged radical autonomy over the oppressive, hegemonic structures of the Old World. Their collective covenant with one another produced the worlds longest-lived experiment in religious pluralism.

The documents use of the word men was in no way designed to exclude women from the social compact, as the historically illiterate now contend. The early American republic restricted the franchise not just on the basis of demography but on property ownership, tooan injustice that chic crusaders for the new Identitarian paradigm omit as it detracts from the slander that the United States was founded by white people, for white people. The use of a racist slur was an expression of the colonists experience in a variety of scorched-earth Indian Wars, which the left-wing imagination now believes occurred in the absence of decades of diplomacy, inter-tribal conflicts, and great-power politicsall of which are well documented. Last, the insulting notion that this country has only just now committed to confront our history is an attack on the generations of thoughtful idealists who sacrificed more to realize this documents unfulfilled promises than the denizens of the faculty lounge ever will.

All the world over, what at the time was as much a founding document as a suicide pact has inspired liberty-loving people to demand their own emancipation. For centuries, revolutionaries and reformers of every political stripe have looked to the rights preservednot grantedby governments instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed to justify their own struggles against tyranny. Even today, 245 years later, this is so. When the Chinese Communist Party sought to crush liberty in Hong Kong, the citys populace didnt pour into the streets singing The Internationale and flying the banners of the fashionable separatist cliques to which American progressives are increasingly inclined. They sang the American national anthem. They flew the American flag. They demanded the liberties enshrined in Americas Bill of Rights. And they adopted the language crafted by Thomas Jefferson and ratified unanimously by the Second Continental Congress in their own Declaration of Independence. Their sacrifices and the risks they were willing to take in defense of their liberties shames the effete critics of our own.

All this is probably quite provocative for those whove steeped themselves in the dogmas popularized by Americas humanities departments. So much the better for the American right. By all means, progressives, concede the vision of a liberated human species conceived in the Enlightenment and pursued first by the United States to conservatives. Let us articulate the virtues of the American civic compact, the permeability of its social strata, and the opportunities it affords all who believe themselves capable of making it on merit and aptitude alone. Surrender to us the love of country that isnt alloyed by some laborious pedagogy about how awful we have always been. We will be good stewards of that noble tradition. It is an enlivening and inspiring observancea positive force, which has so much more capacity to arouse and animate than the hopeless pessimism that today masquerades as refinement. We will be its custodians. And we will reap its rewards.

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Please, Progressives: Go Ahead and Cede What Makes America Great to the Right - Noah Rothman, Commentary - Commentary Magazine

AUGUSTA, Maine A national Republican group was quick to put out a statement hammering Gov. Janet Mills after former Gov. Paul LePage officially filed to face her in 2022last week.

But the sharpest criticism directed at Mills in the past few weeks has been from fellow Democrats as she came into conflict with progressives, ultimately vetoing more than a dozen progressive bills including several on criminal justice, tribal gaming and prescription drug prices.

It is the sort of division LePage and his Republican allies could benefit from in 2022, especially if a third-party candidatejoins a race that will not use ranked-choice voting. But despite objections from fellow Democrats on policy in recent weeks, there is little sign that liberals would abandon Mills in big numbers, with lawmakers who have criticized the governor still likely to support her.

Progressives were disappointed by her vetoes, viewing them as a wasted opportunity to pass ambitious legislation with a trifecta in Augusta, said Betsy Sweet, a progressive lobbyist who finished in third place behind Mills in the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary. But she also noted Mills COVID-19 response and proposals to increase child carefunding as positives.

There have been some really good things done, she said. This is not all about vetoes.

The open divisions are somewhat new for Mills, who was quick to reverse controversial LePage policies after riding into the Blaine House with full Democratic control of the Legislature in 2018. She signed an order to expand Medicaid on her first day in office.

Last years legislative session was cut short with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, which abruptly flipped the tenorof Mills first termfrom good times to crisis. But Maine weathered the pandemic relatively well and federal funding helped avert what could have been a state budget crisis, allowing for a new, bipartisan state budget that met Maines K-12 education funding goalfor the first time. While Mills has sharply raised state spending, she has held the line on taxes.

Behind that approach, Mills has weathered limited backlash given increasing polarization. She maintained a 57 percent approval ratingin a Digital Research Inc. poll released last month, which is 10 points higher than LePages highest markduring his tenure as governor.

Mills careful path so far made recent criticism from Democrats stand out. Maine Conservation Voters, which endorsed Mills during the 2018 general election campaign, said it was disappointed in Mills after she vetoed a bill to ban the use of aerial herbicides. Maine Youth Justice, a group that advocates for criminal justice reform, called Mills veto of a bill to close Maines only youth prisona grave misstep.

Senate President Troy Jackson, D-Allagash, said Mills did not have the courage to stand up to pharmaceutical companies after she vetoed bills he championed targeting prescription drug prices. (Mills, in her veto message, argued the bills would be unlikely to withstand constitutional scrutiny and may not accomplish Jacksons intended goals.)

That was a sharp remark, but the Mills squabbles look quaint next to the wars between LePage and Senate Republicans. The latter group largely allied with Democrats on budget issues in the run-up to a 2017 government shutdown. LePage vetoed a record 642 bills during his tenure in a mostly divided government; Mills has vetoed 16 as of Friday after 10 in her first two years in office. Two Democratic-led Legislatures have sustained all vetoes so far.

Mills recent decisions have also kept her in good graces with groups that might be more likely to oppose her. Ben Lucas, executive director of the Maine Jobs Council, a conservative-leaning business advocacy group, pointed to a bill aimed at reforming the unemployment system as the only recent major one the governor backedthat was opposed by the business community.

Mills vetoed several other bills that business interests had spoken against, including a graduated real estate tax and a bill limiting referendum spending by companies owned by foreign governments.

We certainly appreciate the governor holding the line on a lot of these very anti-jobs proposals, Lucas said.

Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Windham, a moderate who praised Mills recent vetoes, said there would be a clear philosophical difference between the governor and LePage. Sweet said progressives would not defect, but that their enthusiasm to help Mills could wane due to recent actions.

Theyre not going to vote for LePage, she said. But I think its really the difference between voting, and then enthusiastically working, canvassing and helping.

Mills has not formally launched her reelection campaign, though she resumed fundraising in late March. The campaign against her has already begun, with the Republican Governors Association, in a statement after LePage filed, saying she had driven Maine into a ditch with her extreme liberal pet projects.

Advocates have still begun to step up on her behalf. Recent bills, such as the bipartisan budget, showed Mills is willing to work with conservatives and progressives to achieve shared goals, said Emily Cain, a former Maine lawmaker who now is executive director of EMILYs List, a group that helps elect Democratic women and aided Mills in the 2018 primary.

When you consider the combination of the pandemic, along with heightened partisanship in our country, Janet has remained true to her Maine values with every decision that she has made, Cain said.

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Janet Mills stalls progressive priorities as race with Paul LePage kicks off - Bangor Daily News

Can progressives win broad numbers of the Black and brown voters they say their policies will benefit most?

That provocative question is one that a lot of Democrats find themselves asking after seeing the early results from New York Citys mayoral primary this past week.

In a contest that centered on crime and public safety, Eric Adams, who emerged as the leading Democrat, focused much of his message on denouncing progressive slogans and policies that he said threatened the lives of Black and brown babies and were being pushed by a lot of young, white, affluent people. A retired police captain and Brooklyns borough president, he rejected calls to defund the Police Department and pledged to expand its reach in the city.

Black and brown voters in Brooklyn and the Bronx flocked to his candidacy, awarding Mr. Adams with sizable leading margins in neighborhoods from Eastchester to East New York. Though the official winner may not be known for weeks because of the citys new ranked-choice voting system, Mr. Adams holds a commanding edge in the race that will be difficult for his rivals to overcome.

His appeal adds evidence to an emerging trend in Democratic politics: a disconnect between progressive activists and the rank-and-file Black and Latino voters who they say have the most to gain from their agenda. As liberal activists orient their policies to combat white supremacy and call for racial justice, progressives are finding that many voters of color seem to think about the issues quite a bit differently.

Black people talk about politics in more practical and everyday terms, said Hakeem Jefferson, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University who studies the political views of Black people. What makes more sense for people who are often distrustful of broad political claims is something thats more in the middle.

He added: The median Black voter is not A.O.C. and is actually closer to Eric Adams.

In the 2016 Democratic presidential primary race, Senator Bernie Sanders struggled to win over voters of color. Four years later, Black voters helped lift President Biden to victory in the Democratic primary, forming the backbone of the coalition that helped him defeat liberal rivals including Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

In the general election, Donald J. Trump made gains with nonwhite voters, particularly Latinos, as Democrats saw a drop-off in support that cost the party key congressional seats, according to a postelection autopsy by Democratic interest groups. In the 2020 election, Mr. Trump made larger gains among all Black and Latino voters than he did among white voters without a college degree, according to the Democratic data firm Catalist.

On issues beyond criminal justice, data indicates that Black and Latino voters are less likely to identify as liberal than white voters. An analysis by Gallup found that the share of white Democrats who identify as liberal had risen by 20 percentage points since the early 2000s. Over the same period, the polling firm found a nine-point rise in liberal identification among Latino Democrats and an eight-point increase among Black Democrats.

As votes were being tabulated in New York, Mr. Adams tried to capitalize on that tension between progressives and more moderate voters of color, casting himself as the future of Democratic politics and his campaign as a template for the party.

I am the face of the new Democratic Party, he said at his first news conference after primary night. If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, theyre going to have a problem in the midterm elections and theyre going to have a problem in the presidential elections.

Extrapolating national trends from the idiosyncratic politics of New York is a bit like ordering a bagel with a schmear in Des Moines. Youll probably get a piece of bread, but the similarities may end there.

Liberal activists argue that theyve made important breakthroughs among nonwhite voters in recent years, pointing to Mr. Sanderss gains among Latinos and younger voters of color over the course of his two presidential bids. Progressive congressional candidates, like the members of the so-called Squad, have won several heavily Democratic House districts with meaningful support from nonwhite voters.

And of course, Black and Latino voters, like any demographic group, are hardly a monolith. Younger voters and those with college degrees are more likely to trend left than their older parents.

Still, the traction some more conservative Democratic candidates like Mr. Adams have gained in Black and Latino communities threatens to undercut a central tenet of the partys political thinking for decades: demographics as destiny.

For years, Democrats have argued that as the country grew more diverse and more urban, their party would be able to marshal a near-permanent majority with a rising coalition of voters of color. By turning out that base, Democrats could win without needing to appeal to affluent suburbanites, who are traditionally more moderate on fiscal issues, or white working-class voters, who tend to hold more conservative views on race and immigration.

But a growing body of evidence indicates that large numbers of Black and Latino voters may simply take a more centrist view on the very issues race and criminal justice that progressives assumed would rally voters of color to their side.

The New York mayoral primary provided a particularly interesting test case of that kind of thinking. As crime and gun violence rise in New York, polls showed that crime and public safety were the most important issues to voters in the mayoral race.

The limited public polling available showed nuanced opinions among voters of color on policing. A poll conducted for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, found that just 17 percent of Black voters and 18 percent of Latinos wanted to decrease the number of police officers in their neighborhoods. But 62 percent of Black voters and 49 percent of Latino voters said they supported defunding the New York Police Department and spending the money on social workers instead, the poll found.

Other surveys found that Black and Latino voters were more likely than white voters to say that the number of uniformed police officers should be increased in the subways and that they felt unsafe from crime in their neighborhoods. Fears of violent crime led some leaders in predominantly Black neighborhoods to reject efforts to defund the police.

Progressive activists who backed Maya Wiley, one of the more liberal candidates in the race, accused Mr. Adams of fear-mongering over rising crime rates in the city.

Voters were offered a false dichotomy between justice and public safety by the Adams rhetoric, said Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York state director of the Working Families Party. We worked hard to dismantle that framework, but that dog-whistling does strike the real fear that people have when our streets are increasingly unsafe. Its a very human experience.

Yet Mr. Adamss personal history may offer particular appeal to voters with complicated views on criminal justice. A former police officer, he built his political brand on criticizing the police, speaking out against police brutality, and, later, the departments stop-and-frisk tactics. After years in New York politics, hes a member of the party establishment, enjoying the advantages of name recognition and decades-old relationships with community leaders.

Its the kind of biographical narrative likely to appeal to voters more likely to have intimate personal experiences with policing, who tend to live in neighborhoods that may have more crime but where people are also are more likely to face violence or abuse from officers.

Some scholars and strategists argue that Black and Latino voters are more likely to center their political beliefs on those kinds of experiences in their own lives, taking a pragmatic approach to politics thats rooted less in ideology and more in a historical distrust of government and the ability of politicians to deliver on sweeping promises.

These standard ways of thinking about ideology fall apart for Black Americans, Dr. Jefferson said. The idea of liberalism and conservatism just falls to the wayside.

He added, Its just not the language Black folks are using to organize their politics.

Nate Cohn contributed reporting.

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Progressives Urgent Question: How to Win Over Voters of Color - The New York Times

The American left has a romantic self-conception as a movement of the masses. But its actual strength is concentrated in the minority of the population that is highly educated. This tension has led to an odd dynamic: To put it bluntly, the fewer people paying attention, the better the left does.

Consider last weeks election in New York City, which saw the largest turnout for a primary since at least 1989. A long-planned progressive breakthrough fizzled as left-wing candidates Maya Wiley, Scott Stringer and Diane Morales combined for a disappointing 30% of first-choice ballots in a field dominated by tough-on-crime ex-cop Eric Adams. Wiley is still technically still in the hunt under the citys ranked-choice voting system, but a victory is unlikely.

In contrast, progressives did well in a number of down-ballot races in New York City, including for Brooklyn borough president and Manhattan district attorney. And in the less-covered and lower-turnout race happening upstate in Buffalo, socialist India Walton scored a stunning upset against the longtime incumbent mayor.

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This speaks to the lefts current source of strength in American politics: Its adherents are highly educated and engaged, and can deploy their social and cultural capital to great effect in low-turnout or low-salience races.

Social media does not pick a candidate, Adams quipped at his quasi-victory party last week. People on Social Security pick a candidate. Thats true only if the people on Social Security know a lot about a race already.

But with both the quantity of local news coverage and the audience for it in decline, social media is in fact a key vector for political information in many races. A Pew study last fall found that 10% of Twitter users are responsible for 92% of its content. Of that 10%, 69% are Democrats. And heavy-tweeting Democrats are younger, better educatedand further left than Democrats as a whole.

Candidates such as Adams (or Joe Biden) can crush tweeting leftists when voters are highly engaged, as they were last week. The benefits of the lefts online engagement are evident down ballot.

Its conceivable that this dichotomy can work to the benefit of the party as a whole. In the 2020 cycle, for example, Democrats running in special elections for state legislatures beat Hillary Clintons margin in 2016 by 4.7%. This year so far, the pattern of Democratic overperformance is holding up. And sometimes engagement works even in a highly publicized race with large turnout, such as the two U.S. Senate elections in Georgia at the beginning of the year.

Conventional wisdom long held that high turnout benefits Democrats. But the pattern seems to have changed as Democrats have added college graduates to their coalition while Republicans have picked up non-college voters. These new Trump Republicans appear to be disproportionately low in social trust, socially isolated, and disengaged from civic life. In short, they seem to be more interested in conspiracy theories than in voting in obscure races.

This helps to explain the Republican strategy of ensuring that there is no such thing as an obscure race. And it may lead to a perverse conclusion for Democrats: The key to success in 2022 may be to keep races obscure enough that they have a chance, yet not so obscure that not enough Democrats vote.

The real impact of the Social Capital Gap, however, is evident outside of elections. Essentially any white-collar setting will, in practice, exclude the big conservative-leaning cohorts of senior citizens, rural residents and people who didnt attend college. That means corporate HR policies, redesigned curriculums or new public-health initiatives are likely to skew left. Conservatives can win by dragging things into the arena of electoral politics, where their constituents have a voice.

The left may relish its self-image as the force that mobilizes the masses to exert more democratic control over elite-led institutions. But the right is in fact acting as that force. And while the lefts tactics may strain Democratic Party politics, the rights pose a fundamental challenge to the core ideological tenets of conservatism. Whither free markets, decentralization, localism and limited government if the rights game plan is to fight wokeinstitutions by extending government control into as many spheres of life as possible?

(Corrects ninth paragraph to say that high turnout has generally benefitted Democrats.)

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:Matthew Yglesias at Matt@slowboring.com

To contact the editor responsible for this story:Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net

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Progressives Can Win Only One Kind of Election - Bloomberg