Abstract

Michael Lind

The article focuses on the Democratic Party in the United States, following its defeat in the 2004 elections. In an era in which most U.S. population growth is occurring in the South, West and heartland, American liberalism is defined by people in the Northeast. At a time when rising tuitions are pricing many working-class Americans out of a college education, the upscale campus is becoming the base of American progressivism. In a country in which most working-class Americans drive cars and own homes in the suburbs, the left fetishizes urban apartments and mass transit and sneers at "sprawl." In an economy in which most workers are in the service sector, much of the left is obsessed with manufacturing jobs. In a culture in which the media industry makes money by pushing sex and violence, the left treats the normalization of profanity and obscenity as though it were somehow progressive. American progressivism, in its present form, is as obsolete in the twenty-first century as the agrarian populists were in the twentieth.