There’s a Simple but Subtle Point in the Latest Analysis of Left-Wing Dysfunction

Common sense hiding in plain sight

Built from an image by Riwat Sambat via Getty.

Democrats continue to soul search after losing a popularity contest to perhaps the worst person in the entire country. This soul searching has led many people to a recent analysis by the Financial Times, which found that — just as you thought — much of the left has turned into a cesspool of cultural weirdness that makes Jonestown look like a model of Enlightenment thought. Here’s a graph — you can almost hear an audible “whhoooooaaaaaa!” as the blue line lurches left.

This analysis provides epistemic evidence for a thing that many of us felt happening, but couldn’t prove. After all: It’s hard to glean cultural shifts based on the number of times that you’re informed that the phrase “master bedroom” has been replaced by the phrase “bedroom of equal moral worth to all other bedrooms that nonetheless has an attached bath with a jacuzzi”. Data helps, and the Financial Times is now the latest to produce some data suggesting: Yes, that thing you thought was a thing was, indeed, a thing.

The leftward lurch is also apparent in bell curves that the Financial Times produced from data in a 2021 study:

The implication is obvious: Democrats should stop listening to the inhabitants of the Long Blue Tail, who might as well be an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon given how little their culture resembles mainstream America. But I think a second implication has been largely missed, even though it’s extremely simple. And that is that the bell curves — warped as they are — are shaped like bells. They’re high in the middle and low at the tails. Which means that lefties who threaten to withhold their vote if Democrats don’t move left are making an absurd bluff that should fool exactly no one.

Let me single out the Uncommitted/Abandon Harris movement,¹ because they perfectly illustrate the dynamic I’m talking about. These groups wanted Harris to move left on Gaza, and from an issue-neutral standpoint, that’s fine — everyone wants candidates who hold their views. The notable thing about the movement, though, was their strategy: Instead of merely trying to convince Harris and/or the American people that their views were good, they threatened to do everything within their power to throw the election to Trump if Harris didn’t move left. Even though Trump is even friendlier with Netanyahu than his second-best friend in the whole wide world: Jeffrey Epstein.