I was sitting in the Plaza at Lincoln Center having coffee one day this past June with three fellow stagehands who were working with me on the Summer for the City buildout. All three were in their mid-20s, dressed in black with hair down to their shoulders, piercings and tattoos galore, and all three were ardent Trump supporters. By this time, while being somewhat surprised by this revelation as many stagehands in New York come off as being very liberal, these three were hardly the first guys in this business that I had met who were pro-Trump. Many would ascribe this to the fact that stagehands are essentially blue-collar workers, but by my guess, about half have college degrees. All three of the guys I was having coffee with that June day had either a college degree or had spent significant time otherwise in higher education. As such there's got to be something more to it than collar color and gender. They all complained about the high taxes and the high cost of housing and food that comes with living in New York City. None of the three could afford to live in Manhattan or any of the nicer neighborhoods just over the river in Brooklyn or Queens. All three said they were tired of all of the immigrants under foot and having to pay for them through their tax bills and all, rightly or wrongly felt that being a white man had put them at a disadvantage in life. Needless to say, and not surprisingly, I have met many more stagehands since that June day who are pro-Trump, to the point that nothing surprises me now.
I have had many discussions away from work about what it will take to defeat Donald J. Trump this coming Tuesday. My gut tells me that if more women who are infuriated with the assault on their ability to control their own bodies, combined with those of us who are concerned about the sanctity of our democracy turn out to vote than do those who are fed up with immigration, gender transitioning, defund the police, Woke, Me Too, Reparations, DEI and the imagined efforts to take their guns away, then Trump should be the loser. This is particularly the case in those states that are now considered tossup contests. My gut tells me that women will save the day and with it, our democracy. That said, I think there is a fading tolerance for many of the extreme positions that have been promulgated in the furthest reaches of the progressive movement. I have believed this for the past year or so based on what I have been hearing at work and in social circles and, as such, I wasn't surprised when I saw an article in this week's Sunday New York Times, "In Shift From 2020, Identity Politics Loses Its Grip on the Country", that addresses that very subject. Frankly the only thing that I found surprising was that article was published in the Times in the first place since it is a long-standing bastion of liberal thought, social and political positions.
If you've been involved in corporate sensitivity / human resources training to any extent you know what has taken place over the past several years with speech being evaluated on how it affects the listener without any real regard for the intention of the speaker being given any weight to DEI hires of people who are clearly unqualified but who must be hired to give the organization the appearance of being diversified to television commercials that would have us believe that every family driving into the Rockies in a Jeep Grand Cherokee is of mixed race. My favorite example of what I consider to be the excesses of the uber progressives is "unconscious bias training", a training that bears no real grounding in an individual's life experience or even established history. For instance, I was asked to name my childhood hero who happens to be the British Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson. I was told that my answer was typical of a person with unconscious bias as Nelson was a white heterosexual male. Well, my response was "Show me a lesbian woman in command of a major naval operation in 1805 and I'll give it a serious look." Of course, none existed so case closed. My answer wasn't at all biased, it was based on my interest in naval history and the people who played their part therein. Nonetheless I was told that I harbored unconscious bias, as absurd a notion as that would be seeing as I had little in the way of choice based on established history as it relates to my intellectual interests or choice of a childhood hero.
That these excesses would begin to lose their alure and become less appealing is not all that surprising. As the late Charles Krauthammer once observed, using a football metaphor, politics in the United States is played back and forth across the 50-yard line with the 20-yard line in either direction being the extremity to which politics would flow until eventually returning back towards the middle. The Times article sums things up as follows: "What seems to have shifted, according to scholars and political strategists who have closely watched how public views have evolved, is that people are now acknowledging that certain identity-focused progressive solutions to injustice were never broadly popular....By the middle of the 2020 primary, Democrats were engaged in policy debates that no voters asked for — and that had no enduring constituency....The primary debates featured candidates declaring support for slashing law enforcement funding, repealing laws that made unauthorized border crossings illegal and ending private health insurance. Since then, candidates who aligned themselves with progressive activists have fared poorly in many high-profile races, even in deep blue bastions." Thus, what we are seeing is just what Charles Krauthammer observed over the course of his political lifetime, the ebb and flow of American politics back and forth across the political median.
If we are fortunate enough to see Kamala Harris elected to the Presidency, I seriously doubt that this erosion of support for the aforementioned extreme Far-Left positions will be in any way reversed. Kamala Harris is likely to have to govern with the Senate controlled by the G.O.P. and moreover, her support, if it materializes among disaffected Republicans, will simply require a centrist approach to governing. She has emphatically stated that it is time to turn the page and that she will be the president for all the people. This in and of itself bodes ill for any policy or proposal which seems to be extremist or politically unsustainable. The last thing Harris wants for four years of her administration is to be portrayed by the Right as some sort of Far-Left California uber liberal out of touch with the rest of America. Thus, for the near future, if not beyond, extremist Far-Left positions and proposals will have little in the way of the political oxygen needed to survive or even, for that matter, to initially germinate. Political realities and the political dynamic mentioned above would certainly seem to suggest that the now emerging trend towards erosion of such policies and positions will continue.
Steven J. Gulitti
New York City
3 November 2024
References:
In Shift From 2020, Identity Politics Loses Its Grip on the Country;
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/02/us/politics/election-2024-harris-progressives.htmlSteve Gulitti is a political independent and graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of Illinois. He is a retired Chief Warrant Officer in the United States Coast Guard Reserve with 25 years of total service including active duty. He is a retired union ironworker as well. He currently lives in New York City where he presently works as a stagehand under the auspices of IATSE Local 1. He voted for Kamala Harris in early voting and had previously voted for Joe Biden.
