An Analysis of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election: On a Party's Self-Serving Elite

The 2024 U.S. Presidential election warrants a post-partem analysis, not so much to affix blame, but primarily so the electorate might grasp the perils when the elite of a political party refuses to apply self-restraint in order to keep the party-wide platform and campaign speeches from reducing to the elite’s own favorite ideology even though it is not held by a significant number of the “rank and file” members (i.e., voters), not to mention independents. In other words, running a massive political party to serve the ideological agenda of what Bertrand Russell calls “the inner ring” can cost a party dearly on election day. I contend that this applied to the Democratic Party, which had become a center-left party still dependent on its non-college, working-class, members, whose cultural values were not necessarily progressive. To be sure, substituting managerially-oriented political calculation for visionary leadership and broad policy proposals that are based on principles rather than particular political interests can easily be perceived generally as small, especially in the context of the horrific military attacks against civilians in Ukraine and Gaza. It is paradoxical that Harris lost too many voters who were socially conservative in being “anti-woke” (e.g., against men in women’s bathrooms and playing in women’s sports) and too many who believed that Harris, in following Biden, was too timid for refusing to stand up to Russia’s Putin and Israel’s Netanyahu, rather than enabling the latter with continued shipments of weapons.

The full essay is at "An Analysis of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election ."