Insitutional elites are not liberals anymore, just opportunists. Those Alumni funders are largely possible because ultra-wealthy elite institutions have tax-exempt status. Plus, they are allowed to admit whoever they want despite taking in lots of federal funding. So the offspring of oil-barons and politicians comingle with the top 0.1% of academic talent, creating the next generation of crony capitalists.
But they are the mainstream left's thought-leaders and popular politicians, and they get broad support and little criticism.
How many significant leftist politicians, journalists, news corporations, academics, or other commentators criticize this kind of rubbish coming from Stanford? How many polls of left leaning people would disagree with it? Very few I suspect.
I'm not. Clearly they've long since abandoned any pretense of being an actual labor movement, but this is what the left is now and everybody knows what is meant. The majority of self identified left-leaning people will vote for and support democrat party politicians.
It's just as unhelpful to try to claim there are no right wing politicians in the United States because none of them actually support free markets or small government. Technically true by at least some of the multitude of definitions, but it's just being contrary.
I get that a lot of leftists are probably deeply embarrassed and upset by what their movement has become. I was too. But language evolves and so do political movements, and it's more correct to say that the leftist movement in the United States (and largely the western world) are no longer of and for the worker.
They certainly aren't traditional liberals either, defined by support for liberty, individual rights, equality, ad tolerance.
No one knows what to call the Democrats' political philosophy. It's not really leftist, although it sometimes claims to want to be, and it certainly isn't liberal in this age of woke authoritarians.
