From the Guardian, on why Kamala Harris lost: “A party [Democratic] increasingly divorced from workers ran with the activist base that it had rather than the voting base it needed to have.”
These words should be inscribed on the brain of every “progressive” Democrat in America. The Democratic Party does have an “activist base,” but it’s far smaller than most Democratic bosses think and shrinking by the day. It accounts, at most, for a quarter of the electorate—not nearly enough to win a national election or, as it turns out, even a majority of either the Senate or the House.
Historians will have fun for decades relitigating the 2024 election, but I think what will stand the test of time is the truth contained in the above quote. The progressive era in American politics is over. Just as the Whigs didn’t last, neither could the woke left that was so out of touch with the vast majority of Americans. It will take years for the Democratic Party to fully purge itself of the maladies of wokeism. We can start—as we already have—by repudiating District Attorneys like Chesa Boudin, George Gascón and Pamela Price, and making sure later versions of them are never elected again. We can continue, as I think we will, to also reject woke politicians, like Nikki Bas and Sheng Thao.
The case of Carroll Fife is curious. Why did she handily win re-election, when all of her woke colleagues went down to defeat? I live in her district, D3, a part of the city I’ve inhabited for close to 40 years and understand. As it turns out, D3, a huge area than includes West Oakland, the waterfront, Old Oakland, Downtown, Lakeside, Uptown, Adam’s Point, and the Port, has emerged as the most radically left region in Oakland, more like Berkeley in its wokeness. There are lots of young people in D3, and young people, bless them, vote with their emotions, not with their heads.
I think most of my readers understand Fife for what she really is: a dangerous ideologue, an anti-White racist whose lifelong ambition has been to undermine our democracy, and form some kind of Black-led, communist-inspired dictatorship. The local media has done an awful job in conveying who and what Carroll Fife is. In part, this is because they themselves are leftwing pedants, and they’ll never criticize their own. It’s also because Fife is adept at hiding her tracks. She only reveals her anti-Whiteness behind closed doors and through code words. She’s become clever about dissociating herself from the defund the police movement she helped inaugurate. As she perceived public opinion shifting strongly in support of the police, she toned down her rhetoric. She didn’t change her actual views—she still wants to defund if not abolish the police—but she learned to tiptoe around the issue, knowing that reporters from the Chronicle, Oaklandside or KQED would never pressure her. As a result, most of the people who voted for Fife know nothing about her, beyond that she’s “for” the homeless and wants to “reform” a police department that doesn’t need reforming.
So we’re going to have to put up with Fife for a while longer. Her “activist base” is smaller than ever, and she has zero ability to expand it into a true voter base. But the unions still back her, with all their tainted money. And while D3’s young voters show no inclination to learn from their mistakes, every time one of them becomes a victim of crime, he or she is more likely to understand the need for law and order.
If we’ve learned one thing from this election, it’s that when we’re united, we can accomplish miracles. Everybody said it would be impossible to recall Price and Thao, but we did (and kudos to our friends Carl Chan, Seneca Scott, Brenda Grisham and Brenda Harbin-Forte). Now, as we continue the work of undoing the poisonous hold that wokeism has on Oakland, we’ll be watching Fife very closely. With Bas, Kaplan, Kalb and Thao, gone, she no longer has any allies, and will stand alone, in all her malignity, with the disinfecting sunlight of truth shining on her.
Bas, who apparently has lost her bid for Supervisor, will now become interim mayor for a while. This represents a threat to our movement. We’re going to have to keep a watchful eye on her, as well as on Fife. I wouldn’t put anything past this unscrupulous, treacherous pair of politicians.
Steve Heimoff