Excellent diagnosis, bewildering prescription. But if you want to understand the most salient development in American politics in the past half century—the Democratic Party’s slow transformation from a coalition of working-class whites, racial minorities and disaffected hippies into a party of hypereducated urbanites, well-paid activists and expert-class virtue-signalers—Mr. deBoer’s “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement” is a fine primary source.
Mr. deBoer describes the “elite capture” of the American left as a “drift from the material and the concrete to the immaterial and symbolic.” As he writes in a nice summation of his complaint, “if you’re a Black child living in poverty and neglect in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, you might very well wonder how the annual controversy over the number of Black artists winning Oscars impacts your life.”
Why, asks this latter-day Bolshevik, did so few significant police reforms emerge from the white-hot revolutionary rage of the George Floyd protests and riots? His answer: Affluent activists and commentators, black and white, co-opted the issue and turned it into a choice between defending the men in blue (bad) and defunding police departments (good). “In statistical terms,” he writes, “the status of Black people in twenty-first-century America stands as a national disgrace,” but the left’s activist class found it impossible to acknowledge some concomitant realities: that the average black American faces little danger of being killed by a cop; that more policing reduces crime; and—I have to quote his words here, so rare are they from the pen of a leftist—that “things are getting better regarding race and racism.”