Environmental and antibusiness regulations in the deep blue state are backing up port traffic. Joel Kotkin writes:
Here's a dirty secret: Great nations rest on a great common culture. I say it's a secret because it's become almost taboo to discuss this historic fact; progressives across the globe have turned decisively against national legacies, and it's progressives who by and large dictate mainstream culture. But if the Democratic Party wants to avoid further electoral disasters like those in Virginia, Long Island and elsewhere, it would do well to relearn the obvious truth that a common culture that binds us is not only good and necessary, but popular.
Though it's chic these days in progressive circles to oppose the notion of a common culture, there's nothing inherently at odds between this idea and the progressive agenda writ large. Great progressives like Eugene Debs, George McGovern or Martin Luther King were critics of America but also patriots. Phrases like "death to America"—recently tweeted by the student body President of Kansas University—or the Seattle DA's tweet that "I for sure hate this country" would have been as foreign to Dr. King as support for political violence. Yet things have gotten so out a wack that the National Archive felt the need to warn us that our founding documents like the Constitution and Declaration of Independence contain what they call "harmful language."
But this version of liberalism is not just alien to progressives of old. Only a very small fraction of Americans, well under 10 percent, consider themselves progressive, and most reject the view of America as uniquely fallen. And the prevalence of the "woke" view in the media and popular culture, despite how marginal it is in American society, goes a long way toward explaining the Democrats' astounding losses at the polls last week.
[Joel Kotkin, "America Is Built on a Great Culture. Progressives Want to Abandon It," Newsweek, November 14]
