The Real Political Alignment

Few photos from the past weekend's news illustrate more clearly the current real US political alignment. With even legacy media beginning to ask whether President Brandon needs to change direction following a disastrous first year, let's parse out the current situation. My first observation is that the current Democrat coalition is anything but Marxist, pace Mark Levin. My second is that President Brandon has no choice but to do everything he can to appease that coalition as it exists.

The contradiction in the news photos of the looted container trains in Los Angeles over the weekend is the distant view of the alabaster city framed by stately palms contrasted with the third-world conditions on the rail right of way in the foreground. This is one key nexus of the current coalition, which the rail shippers fully recognize:

Photos and videos showing piles of empty boxes littered alongside rail tracks in Los Angeles County, California have gone viral as shipping companies say they've seen a dramatic spike in railroad theft. Some of the boxes are packages from companies like UPS, Amazon and FedEx.

Union Pacific, one of the country's largest railroad companies, says it may avoid operating in Los Angeles County following the spike in thefts, which it blames on lax prosecution of crimes. The containers and trains are locked, but can be broken into.

This reflects the alliance between wealthy elites and the Lumpenproletariat, Marx's criminal class, which is fostered by a new crop of prosecutors who won't prosecute violent crime, as well as bail reformers who oppose cash bail. On one hand, to Marx, the Lumpenproletariat are not reliable allies for the working class. On the other, petty criminals in the ghetto and barrio prey almost entirely on their own communities with drugs, shootings, robbery, and prostitution.

The most recent tendency for organized smash-and-grab retail theft and more wholesale looting of trains victimizes the poor and working class, where the retail stores close in their neighborhoods due to such losses, while the supply chain for consumer goods is interrupted, prices rise to compensate for the looting, and jobs disappear in the stores and shipping hubs. But so far, the demagogic politicians -- the Squad and others -- who claim to be acting on behalf of their consituents prevent attempts to remedy the problem and insist on defunding law enforcement. Regarding the lootings,

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has not appeared to take any action or issue a formal reaction to reports of looting from cargo trains near Los Angeles, even though he has taken credit for incremental progress on the supply chain crisis.

President Brandon and his allies in the Democrat establishment can't afford to alienate the Squad, and in any case, Secretary Buttigieg is not there to fix any real transportation issues. Meanwhile, the jobs of the elites don't depend on local retail and distribution, while they're protected from porch pirates in security buildings, well-policed enclaves, and gated communities.

A second factor emerged in the weekend's news, the reemergence of Islamist terrorism in the US, which had been largely inactive since the San Bernardino shootings of December 2015 and the Orlando nightclub attack of June 2016. It's especially significant that the FBI, a Democrat deep state ally, was forced to backtrack on its initial statement that the Coffeyville, TX synagogue hostage crisis was not "specifically related to the Jewish community." Clearly this is a sensitive issue to the Democrat coalition.

Antisemitism and the larger, related issue of "decolonization" are also a key issue for the Squad and its allies in the coalition. Again, the current extremely narrow majorities the Democrats hold in congress mean President Brandon can't afford to alienate even the most extreme adherents of these views. "Decolonization", the view that reason, responsive government, meritocracy, and economic choice are oppressive measures of European domination over people of color, has an associated anti-Christian component, as we saw in the post yesterday in which advocates attempted to restore the Aztec religion to remedy such grievances.

It's worth pointing out that Marxism is philosophically atheist and materialist, although Marx himself was of Jewish ancestry, and the early generations of Soviet and international communists were also of heavily Jewish ancestry. It would never have been part of Marxist doctrine to advocate revival of Islam or Aztec religion, and Marxism was far less specifically antisemitic than National Socialism, which which early Islamism was closely allied,.

Another part of the coalition is, broadly speaking, pansexualists, now including transgenderists. The goal here is increasingly strange, with the most prominent current public figure now Lia Thomas, an Ivy League biological male who competes as a female swimmer. Of all things, the Ivy League as a body has endorsed this:

The Ivy League is, and always has been, of, by, and for the wealthy established elites. It has consistently followed, and continues to follow, discriminatory admissions policies. Just as it endorses transgender athletes, it also now moots dropping standardized admissions tests, once thought to be a meritocratic innovation. Marx never had anything to say about gender dysphoria, although in his personal life he appears to have been well beyond a mere traditionalist in his view of the dominant male role. These people are not Marxists by any stretch.

The public is incresingly aware of the current alignment and is making decisions accordingly. Gallup has found "a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter." Although Gallup themselves mention that the opinion shift is a remarkable reversal of the polls immediately following the 2020 election, they don't mention an inevitable takeaway from this, that the electorate is collectively reviewing that election and determining that it made a mistake.

The Democrat problem is that it can't change course in any meaningful way, since its current legislative majority is so thin that it can't afford to offend any of its allies.

In additioni, COVID and the associated moral panic were a major factor in the 2020 outcome. We're still coming to terms with what happened.