Saturday’s New York Times Sums Up Why Democrats’ Core Supporters Are Unhappy and How the Party Uses Identity Politics to Keep Them in Line

It’s rare to get a picture of a whole political strategy in one read of a newspaper, but that was the reality of Saturday morning’s New York Times. You could read one column and find out how the people who are becoming Democrats’ core supporters—upper-income, multiracial, urban professionals with college and post-college educations—are trapped in lives they don’t necessarily want and didn’t knowingly choose. You could read another and see how the Democrats use media corporations like The Times to assure these supporters that they’re on the right side of their own lives and of history. To the extent that knowing your opponents’ tactics, motivations, and weaknesses is important, these pieces are worth reading.

The column about Democratic supporters’ unhappy reality comes from Ross Douthat, who sympathizes with Republicans but opposes Donald Trump as a “race-baiter.” This isn’t a view shared by many people on the ground, considering the proportion of immigrants Trump brought to the Party in 2020 and Blacks who voted for the party he still heads in 2022, but Douthat is in a strange situation. He makes his living writing from a conservative perspective for people who read the New York Times, and this means he doesn’t take strong conservative positions or even argue directly with his readers—what would be the point? Instead, he tries to gently lay out a different view.

His Saturday piece uses a recent movie to suggest to Democrats why their new core demographic is struggling inside the system of big government and government-underwritten institutions it ardently supports. That may sound like a joke, but it isn’t: it’s a 2023 version of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. These people are fighting against a rising tide of inflation and crime even as they’re trying to send their children to six-figure schools to ensure them entry into Harvard. Their “work-life” balance is nonexistent. Their default mode is low-or-mid-grade anxiety. They’re also alienated from the truly wealthy and powerful people who run the government-backed conglomerates and nonprofits where they work: Disney, Harvard, Apple, the Human Rights Campaign, Goldman Sachs. To Douthat, these peoples’ lives show the grim reality of upper-level handmaids in the system of concentrated power the Democrats have created. In this system,

people making hundreds of thousands of dollars annually can get stuck in a strange kind of “no man’s land” — a territory of privilege but also exhaustion, where you can “see” the world of the truly wealthy, the people with enough money to live off capital income, but you don’t have an obvious path to joining them. That’s because even though you’re making lots of money, it’s mostly salary income, you’re facing “lifestyle inflation” with kids and home prices and private schools and so forth, the marginal dollar you make gets taxed heavily, and so “your ability to move the net worth range is collapsing.” You may be technically a millionaire, but the money is bound up in your home, every kid is potentially a half-million-dollar college price tag down the road, and all your work goes toward sustaining your current lifestyle. You have the demands of wealth, basically, without its promised sense of security and ease.

Eventually, this can have consequences:

different attitudes toward ambition and work and money…different experiences of childbearing and parenthood…different responses to the stress of professional competition, lead to mutual unhappiness and…crisis that undermines the position they’ve attained.

Ross Douthat is talking about an entrapment that might help explain some things. It might help explain why depression rates at elite colleges are off the charts: the children of these people know enough to be worried about where they’re going. It also might help explain why Democrats who have been educated at society’s best institutions to “think critically” are often so angry when they’re challenged. Thinking critically won’t make them happy about where they are.

What will make them happy?

To find The New York Times’ answer to that question, you can scroll up to the top column on the website by Maureen Dowd. “Nancy Pelosi: Liberated and Loving It” gives a pretty clear idea of how the paper read by the people who work for the structures is trying to justify the way they live. The title sounds like something out of Vogue or maybe even a less hard-hitting issue of People. It’s the type of piece you read for entertainment, knowing it’s entertainment: a ‘day in the life’ interview with a celebrity where, in exchange for access, no tough questions get asked and interior decorating tips get shared. But this piece, which comes to a 14 minute-read in a section where the average is around 4, is about politics: the way leaders do or don’t represent the people who elect them. This means it’s also about journalism: the way leaders account for themselves to reporters who are supposed to keep them honest. Considering what the piece really is next to what it should be, it’s real genre is what one writer called “political pornography.”  

Political pornography creates a story of heroes and villains, with lushly described settings and designer items that make readers’ eyes pop and their mouths water, tugging at their instincts, hopes or fears, and distracting from real issues like where power lies or whether a politician is delivering on his or her promises to voters. Another word for this genre is propaganda. Oddly, it’s what Democrats say that President Trump specialized in, and now Governor DeSantis: creating cults of personality where their supporters root for them no matter what. Republicans have an obvious response to this charge: President Trump and Governor DeSantis have done exactly what they promised to do. They’ve stripped power from corporations, nonprofits, and in Trump’s case the military-industrial complex, and tried to return it to the people. But after reading Maureen Dowd’s piece, Republicans can also respond another way: propaganda is not a Republican problem.

Here’s how the piece starts:

I went to lunch with Nancy Pelosi at the Four Seasons to find out how she was faring, now that she has gone from being one of the most powerful women in the world…I was expecting King Lear, howling at the storm, but I found Gene Kelly, singing in the rain. Pelosi was not crying in her soup. She was basking as she scarfed down French fries, a truffle-butter roll and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts — all before the main course. She was literally in the pink, ablaze in a hot-pink pantsuit and matching Jimmy Choo stilettos, shooting the breeze about Broadway, music and sports. Showing off her four-inch heels, the 82-year-old said, “I highly recommend suede because it’s like a bedroom slipper”… She spent last weekend at a hotel in New York. She and Paul went to see “Leopoldstadt” on Saturday afternoon and took Alexandra’s sons to the closing show of “The Music Man” on Sunday. The family went to Balthazar Saturday night, where Paul and Nancy previewed many of the songs from the Meredith Willson show. (Paul once played Prof. Harold Hill in a charity show.) “They have joy…” Alexandra said. “We sat there for three hours having all these courses. She never pulled out her phone. We used to sit down and tell the waiter: ‘Oh, we’re in a rush.’”

Pelosi’s steely adaptability is in contrast to the men in her world. And, the piece makes clear, it’s her identity as a woman that’s Pelosi’s real claim to history:

Pelosi did not accept an invitation to sit with her protégé, the new minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, for the speaker votes…Some in the room felt that Steny Hoyer, her old deputy, looked needy, still sitting up front behind the new leadership… Last month, Pelosi invited me, along with several other women reporters, to lunch in the Board of Education Room, which was once, as Jackie Calmes, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times, put it, “the Capitol’s most historic man cave.” Earlier speakers, like “Cactus Jack” Garner and Sam Rayburn, both from Texas, had invited younger lawmakers, like Lyndon Johnson, for drinks, cards and bull sessions. Opposite a painting of the Texas state seal, Pelosi had ordered up two new frescoes of her own — the Golden Gate Bridge and suffragists marching outside the Capitol in 1919.

The reference to politics in this piece is limited, and, again, run through the lens of gender:

Pelosi’s accomplishments are stunning. Besides getting Obama’s health care bill passed, she saved the economy when she forced through the bank bailout in 2008. She shepherded the spending bill last year with a historic investment in climate change. She was that rare, courageous lawmaker who fought the Iraq invasion, while other top Democrats inexplicably went along with the tragic decision. When I asked other women in journalism what they thought I should ask Pelosi, they all said the same thing: “How does she do it?”

It’s hard to make a complete list of what an experienced reporter might have thought to ask a four-term House Speaker who passed legislation that shaped substantial parts of American life. But here are a few suggestions of what these reporters missed, and what’s missing from the piece:

There are no questions about whether any of these pieces of legislation might have had drawbacks for Americans on the ground: creating too-big-to-fail corporations that gave first-time Black homeowners bad mortgages and were rewarded for it; hurting small businesses forced to close to cover the cost of health insurance; weakening workers suffering from mass inflation off the recent climate bill. There are no questions about the costs and benefits of the centralization of power in the House under Pelosi to the detriment of individual representatives, which Republicans are pushing back against: Pelosi’s comment about the recent push-and-pull between the Freedom Caucus and Kevin McCarthy is that “it’s inexplicable.” There are no questions about the reasoning behind Pelosi’s opposition to antitrust regulation of Google and Apple, where her husband has significant stock holdings. There are no questions about the differences between older House speakers like Rayburn, who was more accountable to on-the-ground associations like private sector labor unions, and speakers like Pelosi, who is far more accountable to Washington nonprofits and corporations. There aren’t even questions about the higher taxes, inflation and crime that hurt the upper-income earners with two kids and hopes of Harvard who are reading the piece. (Pelosi says that crime is a problem in New York but doesn’t expand on the thought.) The one controversy that gets addressed, Pelosi’s refusal to ban lawmakers from trading stocks, is justified as supporting “the free-market economy.”

There’s a very good reason the professional journalists Dowd supposedly consulted with didn’t ask Dowd to ask Pelosi these questions. Or else there’s a very good reason why Dowd didn’t talk to these journalists at all but said she did. Actual questions and critical thinking are not the points of the piece. The point of the piece is to give upper-middle income urban progressives someone to root for. This hero is the women at the man’s table who’s succeeded as women and urban Democrats worry that sexism or racism might hold them back; the high-performing retiree who’s found joy and meaning when she’s stepped off the professional tightrope; the urbanite married to the wealthy husband living the cosmopolitan lifestyle of “security and ease” that they might want for themselves.

Democratic leaders often get accused of talking down to minorities, like when George Soros sponsors get-out-the-vote pushes to “empower” Black voters while encouraging the outsourcing that’s hurt working class Blacks for fifty years. That’s true, but in this piece, written by a veteran columnist with longstanding ties to Democratic leaders like Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, they’re doing something else. They’re talking down to, and playing, some of their closest supporters: the people who went to the same schools as them and who, give or take a good stock offering or successful IPO or better connections or a wealthy partner, might have been them. These are also the people who have lived in the structures long enough that they can see what’s happening in them, if they choose. If people like this started really asking questions about why they were unhappy, who’s to blame, who betrayed whom, who’s the real enemy…well, that would be an issue for the Democrats close to home.

So, instead, Democratic leaders are treating their own followers and even friends like what they say Republicans are: rubes. This makes Saturday’s New York Times is a snapshot of a bigger reality. While one side of our politics, the Republican side, is forcing hard questions about power and where it lays, the other is running pornographic political columns to keep its closest followers, and most threatening plausible opponents, in line.