Excerpts from Joel Kotkin, Is America’s Future Progressive?

From the solid re-election of President Obama, to a host of demographic and social trends, the progressives seem poised to achieve what Ruy Texeira predicted a decade ago:  an “emerging Democratic majority” .

Virtually all the groups that backed Obama — singles, millennials, Hispanics, Asians — are all growing bigger while many of the core Republican groups, such as evangelicals  and intact families, appear in  secular decline…

Yet I am not sure all trends are irredeemingly progressive.  For one thing, there’s this little matter of economics. What … [progressive] boosters often predict means something less progressive than feudalist. The Holy Places of urbanism such as New York, San Francisco, Washington DC also suffer some of the worst income inequality, and poverty, of any places in the country…

The now triumphant urban gentry have their townhouses and high-rise lofts, but the service workers who do their dirty work have to log their way by bus or car from the vast American banlieues, either in peripheral parts of the city … or the poorer close-in suburbs. This progressive economy works from the well-placed academics, the trustfunders and hedge funders, but produces little opportunity for a better life for the vast majority of the middle and working class…

The Obama-Bernanke-Geithner economy has done little to reverse the relative decline of the middle and working class, whose their share of national income have fallen to record lows. If you don’t work for venture-backed tech firms, coddled, money-for-nearly-free Wall Street or for the government, your income and standard of living has probably declined since the middle of the last decade…

These economic shortcomings are unlikely to reverse themselves under the Obama progressives…

Arguably the biggest challenge for the blue supremacists may prove the millennials, a group I have called the screwed generation. They have been vulnerable in a torpid recovery following a deep recession since they depend on new jobs or having their elders move to better ones; more than half of those under 25 with college degrees are either looking for work or doing something that doesn’t require tertiary education…

Now that the first wave of millennials are hitting their thirties, they may not want to remain urban Peter Pans, riding their bikes to their barista jobs, as they age. A growing number will start getting married, looking to buy homes to raise children. The urban developers and gentry progressives may not favor this, preferring instead they remain part of “generation rent” who remain chained to leasing apartments in dense districts.

And then there’s the economy. What happens if in two or four years, millennials find opportunity still lagging? … One has to wonder if, at some point, they might rebel against that dismal fate. Remember the boomers too once tilted to the left, but moved to the center-right starting with Reagan and have remained that way.

Of course, the blues have one inestimable advantage: a perennially stupid Republican party and a largely clueless, ideologically hidebound conservative movement… You can’t win new adherents by being the party of no and know-nothing. You also have to acknowledge that inequality is real and develop a program to promote upward mobility.

Unless that is done, the new generation and new Americans likely will continue to bow to the blue idols, irrespective to the failures that gentry progressivism all but guarantees.

Kotkin’s commentary reminds me of the ‘Culture Wars’ from the early 1990’s.  I was a grad student and it was front and center on campus.  Nominal liberals were up in arms over issues of identity politics meanwhile jobs which paid a living wage were being relocated to Mexico as fast as corporations could manage and most of them hardly seemed to notice.

ADDENDUM:

“How do you invite the radical right to take power? Start with thirty years of stagnant of declining living standards for most people. Then add a financial crisis made on Wall Street. Next, elect a Democratic president who raises hopes, but who turns out to be a close ally of the same forces that caused the collapse. Give that president a temperament that refuses to blame the right, and is mainly about seeking accommodation. The right then gets to put Washington and Wall Street in the same bucket, and blame the Democrats.”
-Robert Kuttner, 1 Aug 2011

The danger that Kuttner identified a year and a half ago remains today.  Recall that 2006 and 2008 preceded 2010.