The Affluent Progressive Lifestyle Is Unsustainable

Hillary Clinton inadvertently reveals a truth.

It hasn’t really hit the headlines yet — it’s only being passed around as a piece of video samizdat — but, during an interview at the 92NY as part of the Newmark Civic Life series, Hillary Clinton uttered a barely utterable truth: lifestyle liberalism, and the feminist ideal it embodies, is the privilege of affluent Americans, and it has been supported by mass immigration, legal and illegal. By implication: progressivism is not economically or socially sustainable beyond two or three generations.

Of course, any admission against interest was inadvertent. Clinton meant to attack conservative figures such as JD Vance and Elon Musk, who, she says, want to “make America great again by returning to the lifestyles and the economic arrangements of not just the 1950s — I mean let’s keep going back as far as we can.” Clinton says these people promote “the nuclear family, return to being a Christian nation, and return to producing a lot of children,” even though they, she alleges, have no interest in paid family leave or in “funding quality child care” and are “cutting Head Start,” the early-childhood education program for low-income families.