THE LAST TOTTERS OF THE SILENT GENERATION?

That Democrat majority in Washington is slim in the houses of Congress, and ancient in its inclinations.  It's something we could have seen coming.  The failure of the Trump administration to deal with the Wuhan coronavirus in a coherent way gave them one more shot, but that's preserving the old order by default.

Although Matthew Walther took a pass on Deirdre McCloskey's Why Liberalism Works for the wrong reason (it's an economic historian's case for classical liberalism, not New Dealism) in his category error he diagnoses the senescence of technocracy as we understand it.

American liberalism in the second half of the twentieth century could not have survived (if indeed it really managed to do so) had it not been for the mostly thankless efforts of those silver-haired Green Party voters who put “No Blood For Oil” stickers on their ancient Volkswagens and interesting books in the hands of millions of teenagers. The Democratic Party, the New York Times, critical theory, C.N.N.—all of this has been epiphenomenal, I’m afraid, in comparison with what I have come to think of as “old lady liberalism.”

If you have ever visited a local library or were taught English in a public high school (especially in rural America) at any point in the last three or so decades, you will be familiar with the tendency I have in mind. The old lady liberal is a woman in her sixties or seventies. She wears wonderful baggy sweaters and odd jewelry that would probably get her accused of “cultural appropriation” in any other circles. She is an enthusiastic reader of the New York Times, even though it arrives a day late. She has an old-fashioned aspirational view of high culture and encourages teenagers to read Cervantes and Joyce and to listen to jazz CDs. She is a great baker, a grammatical prescriptivist, and a stickler for politeness. She is far more likely than the average liberal to be religious; often she is among the few remaining pillars of her local mainline Protestant congregation. She loathes what is sometimes called “safety-ism” and believes that even very young children are capable of riding their bicycles or visiting the mom and pop supermarket without adult supervision.

That last sentence probably didn't survive the past year-plus of fifteen days to slow the spread; it's otherwise not a bad caricature of the primary-season Elizabeth Warren fans.  It might be, though, that those old-lady liberals didn't carry to term and then raise enough pink-diaper daughters to carry the torch, or perhaps they raised those daughters' consciousnesses a little too high.  " Long after the culturally revolutionary New Left had carved its way into what was once a working-class party, bringing not only acid, amnesty and abortion but yuppie economics and new strains of identity politics, voters in what are now red states could still feel a connection to the party of FDR or JFK."  The replacement message might be turning off those voters who don't live in gated communities, or who live in the rough neighborhoods.  "As they make abundantly clear with every riot, the rising left wing of the Democratic party simply considers law enforcement the enemy. When their publicists write that they really and literally mean ‘Defund the Police’, Americans of all races must believe them."  That might be why pundits of the right keep fretting about rigged election rules, or about importing replacement voters.  "Joe Biden is alive, but his party is dead. And the newborn radical Democrats can’t win — not without rewriting the rules to get around competition at the state level, where elections are closer to the people."

Is it too much to ask that Democrats acknowledge the existence of those blue collar Milwaukee or Cleveland or Scranton constituents who bore much of the burden of desegregation in the late 1960s on, or that Republicans call attention to the coronavirus tyranny and the return of stagflation in a consistent and meaningful way?