A DOCKED TAIL ATTEMPTS TO WAG A BIG DOG.

Pew Research have a new crack at stratifying voters by political inclination.  The full report is long, with lots of tables and analysis.  For the moment, a London Daily Mail summary is available without the paywall and registration hassles. The report doesn't come out and say there is an aggregation problem in governance.  But read between the lines.  "Yet the gulf that separates Republicans and Democrats sometimes obscures the divisions and diversity of views that exist within both partisan coalitions – and the fact that many Americans do not fit easily into either one."  The point of research, though, might be to classify and group, and the report offers nine archetypes: faith and flag conservatives, 10% of the population; committed conservatives, 7%; populist right, 11%; ambivalent right, 12%; stressed sideliners, 15%; outsider left, 10%; Democratic mainstays, 16%; establishment liberals, 13%; and progressive left, 6%.  Not only that, it's not easy to construct a bundle that appeals to a median voter, because there's no easy way to construct that median.

Yet the typology study finds that the three groups with the largest shares of self-identified independents (most of whom lean toward a party) – Stressed Sideliners, Outsider Left and Ambivalent Right – have very little in common politically. Stressed Sideliners hold mixed views; Ambivalent Right are conservative on many economic issues, while moderate on some social issues; and Outsider Left are very liberal on most issues, especially on race and the social safety net. What these groups do have in common is relatively low interest in politics: They had the lowest rates of voting in the 2020 presidential election and are less likely than other groups to follow government and public affairs most of the time.

But in the same way that there is something absurd about a continent governed by an island, there is something absurd about a polity being governed by a vanguard.  "Progressive Left, the only majority White, non-Hispanic group of Democrats, have very liberal views on virtually every issue and support far-reaching changes to address racial injustice and expand the social safety net. Establishment Liberals, while just as liberal in many ways as Progressive Left, are far less persuaded of the need for sweeping change." That is to say, dear reader, the faction fight in the Democrat government is a faction fight of two small factions that would like to impose their vision on the country.

So how is such a shorthanded militia this influential? The answer says more about the group’s targets than it does about its membership.

Progressives have capitalized on the cowardice of the country’s influencers and decision-makers. The far-Left may be small in size, but they possess destructive ammunition in the form of messaging. They’ve trademarked terms like racist, sexist, transphobe, bigot, and middle-aged white guy and made them so poisonous that they have the power to ruin almost anyone.

Those epithets are poison only if people go along. Sticks and stones and all that.  It's also worth reminding both the leftists and the establishment liberals that but for Donald Trump injecting himself in those Georgia runoff elections, we would have seated a gridlocked government in January, and whatever combination of Obama ambition and Biden vanity that has led us to where we are would not have happened.  “Mr. Biden did not win the Democratic primary because he promised a progressive revolution. There were plenty of other candidates doing that. He captured the nomination—and the presidency—because he promised an exhausted nation a return to sanity, decency and competence.”  No matter what two archetypes of the progressive left might wish for.  Let them get the mugging by reality they deserve.

Biden and the Democrats have been caught once again failing to appreciate why they were sent to Washington, D.C. They underestimated just how toxic their intersection with the cultural curators would be for them — with those constantly telling voters they are insurrectionists and racists and lying about voting laws in Georgia and Texas and Pennsylvania or smearing them because they don't want idiotic ideas driven into their children's skulls. On Tuesday, those voters gave Democrats a piece of their mind, not just here in Pennsylvania but also in Virginia, New Jersey, and nationwide.

Will the curators continue to underestimate and insult the electorate? Look to 2022, an inside-out midterm election. It will not be about Trump — oh, how the Democrats misunderstood that on Tuesday. It will not be about spending more money and passing bills people never requested. It will be about their lives, their children, their communities, and their future.

Never, though, to the self-styled progressives. "There’s no problem America faces that can’t be solved with ever more robust progressivism."  Bear in mind, though, that those are the docked tail on that big dog.  I wonder, also, if the more they push, the larger the voter turnout, against them, might be.

But then, I'm not alarmed by low voter turnouts.  That's evidence that the governing class is staying in its lane.  As a Badger Herald editorialist had it in 1984, when Ronald Reagan's seeming disengagement worried the commentariat, "The average American looks about and sees a robust economy and renewed respect for America, breathes a sigh of relief, and goes back to raising a family and making ends meet with enough left over to take the kids fishing."  Put another way, when the relatively disengaged voters are paying more attention to politics, that's when you have a problem.