Among the elections that took place across the US this week, perhaps the most symbolically significant was a ballot initiative voters were asked to approve in Minneapolis. In the city where George Floyd was murdered last year by a police officer, prompting weeks of protests and violence, the Democrats who run the city council proposed abolishing the Minneapolis Police Department and replacing it with a Department of Public Safety.
The title of the institution may not have been intended as an echo of its late 18th-century French forerunner, but for the little Robespierres in control of many American cities the move certainly represented an important step in the realisation of their revolutionary ambitions.
Getting rid of police officers, eliminating bail and establishing equity-based community law enforcement have all been high on the priority list of the radicals who have seized the political high ground in the Democratic Party in the past year. But the voters of Minneapolis — where, since the city has been busy trying to “defund the police”, crime has skyrocketed — had other ideas. The initiative was rejected by 57 to 43 per cent on a high turnout.
The popular counter-revolution in Minneapolis was far from the only repudiation of the modern Democratic Party at the polls this week. Across the country the Jacobin tendency that has been driving progressive politics got a comprehensive comeuppance.
The elections in a handful of states for governor, state lawmakers, mayors, judges, school board members and others offered a clear warning and a message for President Biden and his unexpectedly radical turn leftwards: stop the revolution, I want to get off.
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Just a year after he and his party took control of Washington and committed to a transformational agenda of massive government spending and cultural re-education on race and gender, Democrats and their ideas were defeated in territory that has been markedly friendly to them in recent years.
The headline came in Virginia, a state Biden won a year ago by ten percentage points, where the Democratic candidate for governor, Terry McAuliffe, lost to his Republican challenger, Glenn Youngkin. Perhaps more surprising, in New Jersey, the other state with an election for governor, Phil Murphy, the Democrat, held off a challenge from the almost unknown Republican Jack Ciattarelli by just a couple of percentage points — in a state Biden won by 16 last year.
In Buffalo, New York, the Democratic candidate for mayor, a self-declared democratic socialist, was beaten by a candidate who wasn’t even on the ballot, as voters wrote his name on their papers. In Pennsylvania, where they elect members of their Supreme Court, a Republican won a hard-fought contest for an open seat.
For further symbolism after a year of historical revisionism and year-zero cultural nihilism, voters in several counties in Virginia rejected by overwhelming margins proposals to remove statues of Confederate leaders in front of public buildings.
The response from many Democrats and their supporters in the media was predictable. Explanations fell into two categories: the results were either a routine event, a mere swing of the political pendulum against the party in power, or they were the result of devilish messaging and behaviour by the Republican Party.
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There is something to the first point. The governor contests in Virginia and New Jersey, held a year after a presidential election, have historically gone against the party that won the White House, especially in the first term of a presidency. But this is cold comfort. The party in question often goes on to suffer similar or even bigger losses in the nationwide midterm elections the following year.
The second explanation, however, highlights the depth of the pathology that grips the modern Democratic Party. Their self-comforting delusion is that, rather than representing a repudiation of their ideological overreach, the election results simply reflect a victory for and confirmation of the racism of their opponents.
The epicentre of this self-delusion is Virginia. The Democrat there lost in part because voters were furious over the introduction of an educational ideology in many schools in the state — in common with much of the country — that demands white students embrace their inherent racism and privilege, and emphasises the dominance of race in all aspects of life.
Opposition to this is, in the minds of Democrats, itself racist and the Republicans who ran promising to change it were therefore appealing to white supremacist sentiment. Joy-Ann Reid, a reliable voice of the fantasy left on the progressive news channel MSNBC, tweeted in angst after the results: “It’s pretty much a constant of US history that we have this cycle of brief progress toward a true multiracial, ecumenical, progressive democracy followed by long periods of white backlash.”
This accusation of a white backlash sits oddly with the fact that the Republican elected as Virginia’s lieutenant governor on Tuesday, Winsome Sears, is a black woman, the first in the state’s history. As she put it in her victory speech: “In case you haven’t noticed, I am black. And I have been black all my life, but that’s not what this is about.”
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She’s right. The reality is that after four years of Trumpian excess, Democrats are now the extremists. An exit poll conducted in Virginia found that more voters think the Democratic Party is too liberal than think the Republican Party is too conservative: this in what has been for years a reliably Democratic state.
If the message Democrats take away from this election is that they have been the victims of racist opponents and voters, and that all they need to do is double down on the revolution, they look set to go the way of all Jacobins.