Democratic analysts who say extreme wokeness is killing their party are right, but issue positions aren’t the whole problem. What’s worse is the use of government power to force everyone else to accept left-wing cultural ideals.
If Democrats want to understand why not even dedicated Never Trumpers could vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, and why so-called “double haters,” those who strongly disliked both major candidates, broke by wide margins in Trump’s favor, they need to remember that people historically have resented edicts and mandates. To recover, the Democratic Party should abandon its outlandish cultural positions, but if not that, then at least abandon compulsion, and relearn persuasion instead.
It is not in dispute that far-left cultural positions are unpopular. Against the Left, the vast majority of people think that allowing biological men into women’s sports and especially into private spaces such as changing rooms is wrong. The vast majority strongly disapprove of using tax dollars to pay for sex changes for prisoners and illegal immigrants. The vast majority disapprove of “defund the police” efforts and of ending cash bail. People overwhelmingly believe schools should not hide information from parents about their children wanting to change gender “identities,” much less enable the children to start doing so.
If most people saw the books that parent activists want removed from age-inappropriate library spaces and classroom use — note: not banned, but just moved and properly labeled — they would be up in arms, not against the parents but against those who try to put those books into the hands of children. Most people want some restrictions on abortion in the third trimester, and they want infants who are born alive after botched abortions to be given life-saving care by real doctors. Most support Israel, not Palestinian terrorists, and most are appalled by student protesters shouting down speakers, blocking classroom access, threatening Jews, and committing other abuses now common on college campuses. Most probably think college snowflakes are silly and that “safe spaces” with Play-Doh and puppy videos are contemptible and clearly unnecessary.
People dislike gender-neutral pronouns, especially bizarre ones such as “hu” and “ze.” They object to demands that people use “they” and “them,” which are attempts to control speech at all times rather than requests for sensitivity in the presence of people suffering from gender dysphoria. They oppose racial preferences for acceptance at colleges and hiring for jobs. Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and critical race theory aren’t popular. School choice is vastly popular, even though the Left opposes it. The Left’s openness to socialism is frowned upon.
The public believes passionately that illegal immigration should be curbed and that aliens who arrive without proper documentation should be deported rather than paroled into the country.
The wise analysts all agree
One of the wisest left-leaning academics in the country, Ruy Texeira, published an essay on Thursday that documented the damage these issue positions have done to Democrats’ popularity.
“For the first time in at least 80 years,” reads one paragraph he presented, “voters associate the Democrats more with sociocultural issues than with class and economic solidarity.” Another shows how “Democrats have shifted sharply leftwards on cultural issues in recent years, leaving the median voter behind.” Polls showed that among “swing voters” who, by the way, swung, especially late, more for Trump than for Harris, the “most powerful” reason to oppose Harris was the perception that she was “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”
Texeira noted that seasoned political professionals such as Adam Jentleson, a senior former aide to Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) and former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, complained that left-wing culture-issue groups “impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal. … [They are] people with the cultural sensibilities of Yale Law School graduates who cosplay as populists.” Both Jentleson and Texeira say Democrats must push back, sometimes forcefully, against these groups.
Wise and wizened Democratic consultants James Carville and Doug Schoen, among others whose winning ways date back to the years of President Bill Clinton or even before, have been warning for years that their party kowtows too much to “woke” extremes. From voluminous reporting week after week after week, so has the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito, whose conversations with “ordinary” people are anecdotal gold for those who want to understand the errors of national Democratic ways.
Carville, Schoen, Texeira, Jentleson, and Zito are, of course, correct.
Their advice is more easily understood than followed, as Carville and company understand and contend with every day. It is that people who sincerely and fervently believe something don’t easily give up their beliefs or principles just for political expediency. For people who participate in politics to achieve what they believe, it can come across as insulting to be told that the way to remain in politics is to jettison or downplay the beliefs that motivated them to start with.
If they won’t change positions, at least change methods
If Democrats won’t get rid of deservedly unpopular sociocultural issue positions, there is still a way to keep from being hurt so much politically while pushing those nostrums. Mere unpopularity more readily turns to defeat when the other side does not merely disagree with one’s positions but feels threatened by them. These days, those not on the cultural Left have good reason to feel threatened. The Left should stop threatening.
The Left hasn’t been content to push for societal acceptance of its desired changes in cultural norms. Instead, it has insisted that government and powerful institutions compel the rest of us to come to heel. It wasn’t enough, for example, for the Left to insist that standard health insurance plans cover abortifacients. Instead, the Left insisted that the government must force nuns to pay for abortion inducements or provide administrative approval for them.
For the Left, it wasn’t enough to persuade a cake artist to design a confection for a same-sex wedding. Instead, again and again, it used the court system to harass the baker, even after the baker won round after round. Instead of trying to persuade the public on transgenderism and be kind to those who transitioned, the Left bullies people into submission on the issue. Likewise, the Left does not accept being limited to offering counseling to children and parents if schools see children showing signs of gender confusion. Instead, the Left repeatedly, through school policies and legislation, treats parents as the enemy, hides their children’s problems from them, and even takes children away from parents who resist.
A father upset that his daughter was sexually assaulted by a biological male in a girls’ bathroom was physically dragged out of a school board meeting. The Justice Department agreed to investigate parents as “domestic terrorists” when they objected to pornography on library bookshelves. A Justice Department office considered orthodox Catholics possible domestic terrorists. The FBI director claimed this was just one rogue official, but then he lied — two other regional offices did the same.
Pro-life protesters are targeted with aggressive enforcement of a sketchy law known as the FACE Act, or prosecuted, after a major armed raid, for defending a child from an abortion activist who went out of his way to harass the child.
There are endless examples of leftist bullying and harassment. The Left doesn’t merely ask for kindness and acceptance but insists on using the force of law, or of strict rules by major institutions that carry quasi-legal authority, to punish all those who won’t sing their tune. Indeed, the Left, for so long, has tried to use government bullying to get its way that it has become a truism to say preachers of “tolerance” are the most intolerant authoritarians of all.
The public does not strongly resent seeing cross-dressers walk down the street. Yet when the Left threatens ordinary people with fines, arrests, or other punishments if they don’t call the cross-dressers by their desired pronouns, those same ordinary people fight back. They fight back hard, and they are right to do so.
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Liberal Democrats would do better in elections if they focused on their attractive-sounding economic message, their environmental warnings, or whatever their justifications are for regulations to ensure health and safety. All those positions are misguided, but they do not seem tyrannical. On some of the radical social changes that poll so poorly, they should keep them out of politics altogether. If they insist on politicizing those issues, they will reap the whirlwind if they go beyond advocacy to coercion.
It’s bad enough when a majority misuses government force. For a side with a host of minority positions to try hijacking government force against the will and latent counterforce of the large majority, it is flat-out stupid.