A disconnect between the electorate and the Mandarins

The political right is feeling pretty pumped these days. Things are generally going well for them and they are blessed with, well . . . , with their opponents. This is a not uncommon type of article: Five reasons why campaign cash is rolling in for Trump and even Goldman Sachs is forecasting victory by Monica Showalter.

It makes a number of predictable points that are not wrong. For all that, all this prognosticating a year and half out is just space filler. Nothing is especially predictive this far ahead.

This is what caught my eye though.

They're also running on identity politics, with Democratic leaders blatantly manipulating these cookie-cutter socialists in a bid to present just the right black-woman-gay-Latino-Asian combination for the Trump-toppling vote. Already Democratic voters themselves seem to be resisting that cynical packaging, because the top Democratic candidates, according to the polls, are all white males — Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, undeclared Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg. Something is falling flat for the puppetmasters.

Strip away the snarkiness and there is a real underlying puzzle which I have been wondering about for two or three months.

You read the mainstream media and it seems like this is the year of the woman, almost certainly Karmala Harris or Elizabeth Warren. Or maybe it is the year of the racial/ethnic minority - Karmala Harris again, or Booker, or Messam, or Yang or a host of others. Or possibly there is a long shot for a LGBTQ candidate (Peter Buttigieg).

Those are the candidates being puffed by the New York Times (a Harris fan) or the Washington Post or any of the other MSM.

But Showalter (and others) points out, those are not the candidate who excite the grass roots of the party. Strikingly, the great bulk of the votes are for your traditional White Male - Sanders, Biden, Beto. 45% of the twenty-two declared or likely Democratic nominees are straight white-males but just three of those straight white-males are commanding some 60% or more of the support at this stage.

Why the disconnect between what the MSM wants to focus on and what the Democratic grassroots appears to want? Certainly name recognition is an important factor. As time goes on, some of the crowded pack will displace those who are riding a name recognition wave.

Is that all there is to it? Name recognition? I suspect that what we are seeing, at least in part, is further evidence, even within the Democratic Party between the average citizen and the postmodernist/critical theory love bugs of the Mandarin Class. The Mandarins and the citizen voters live in different worlds, with different objectives, and different truths.

Only one side can close that gap but I see little evidence of the Mandarin's displaying in level of self-awareness. They sometimes say the right words about getting closer to the grass roots and understanding the white working class and the less well off, but few of them act as if they believe those words. It is quite surprising because the Mandarin's don't lack for IQ and the truth is apparent.