In the wake of the Democrats' drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the GOP, you'd assume the party would be all-in on a fundamental rethink, starting with some serious soul-searching on how the party came to be so out of sync with the majority of America on key cultural questions.
Questions like: Is America a "white supremacist" society? Is it racist to question levels of immigration? Are citing one's personal pronouns necessary? Is anyone who questions the differences between trans women from biological women a bigot who should be expunged from polite society? For each of these questions, the answer for the overwhelming majority of Americans is an obvious no. But in elite Democratic circles, it's a different story. For a party pondering its unpopularity, you might think that this gap would be a good place to start.
Well, if the six weeks since the election is anything to go by, you'd be wrong. Instead, much of the party is maneuvering to change as little as possible on the cultural front. Why? Because many of today's Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues to be real issues. Instead, they see them as fictions, distractions, or expressions of bigotry that are to be opposed, not indulged.
Consider Greg Casar, the new chair of the powerful Congressional Progressive Caucus. In a recent interview with NBC News, Casar urged the Democrats to "re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up." He said that "when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn't deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did--with Republican help." Casar said that "the Republican Party obsession" with culture war issues is "driven by Republicans' desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket."
Massachusetts Democratic representative Jim McGovern echoed Casar's thoughts recently with this rhetoric about Republicans: "They want to blame trans people? Guess what? Trans people aren't the ones raising people's grocery prices. Big corporations are." Republicans, he added, "want to blame immigrants. . . . Immigrants aren't the ones denying health insurance claims. . . . it's the billion-dollar insurance companies that do that."
Get it? These aren't real issues. They're just distractions ginned up by Republicans for nefarious political purposes. The logical conclusion of this argument is that Democrats don't need to actually change their position on any "culture war" issue. Instead, they just need to change the subject and talk about mustache-twirling corporate villains.
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Or perhaps the real problem, some Democrats argue, is that the party hasn't communicated its wonderful positions adeptly and thoroughly enough. With the right spin, maybe their positions on everything, from the economy to transgender issues and immigration would be popular. This seems to be the view of the two leading candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Ken Martin, head of Minnesota's Democratic Party (technically its Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party), has a 10-point plan that calls for a "massive narrative and branding project." Ben Wikler, head of Wisconsin's Democratic Party, believes Democrats must "become the narrator" of their own brand.
This all seems reasonable enough but, cutting through the verbiage, nowhere do these candidates for the DNC chair concede the party's cultural vulnerabilities. When reading their pitches for the powerful post, it's as if those problems don't exist.
The outgoing DNC chair takes things even further. Since the election, Jaime Harrison has strenuously resisted the idea Democrats should abandon "identity politics," saying they represent how "people of color" see Democrats fighting for them.
Invoking his status as a black man, he remarked: "That is my identity. . . . it is not politics. It is my life. And the people that I need in the party, that I need to stand up for me, have to recognize that. You cannot run away from that." In other words, Democrats should double down on so-called culture war issues like race and gender that are so off-putting to voters. This is a strange recommendation since, as Democrats have become ever more associated with identity politics, they have been doing ever more poorly among non-white voters, especially non-white working-class voters. Their advantage among the latter group has declined by more than half since 2012.
I was wondering when the Democrats would change course, and I decided it probably wouldn't be for another 8 years.
It took the Democrats 12 years of losing the White House to finally pretend to moderate. Bill Clinton was their fig-leaf of "moderation."
But it took three crushing losses in a row to even get there.
The Democrat Cult will keep doubling down until they lose twice more.
They're in such a (Satanic) religious fervor now, and they are so ruthless in attacking and shaming and cancelling any heretics who question current cult doctrine, that they might not ever be able to moderate. The entire party might just have to collapse and be replaced by an emergent alternate-liberal party.
Ed Morrissey writes that Democrat strategist James Carville, campaign director for the "moderate" Bill Clinton, is making a similar argument.
The Daily Caller:
"Anybody that questions the absolute, unquestionable benefits of transition surgery is going to be called this equivalent of being against civil rights or being against women having the right to vote ... somebody can fact-check me, it's banned in Nordic countries," Carville said. "I think the liberal Labor government of Britain just passed legislation on that question." ...
"But you can't -- if you say the border, we should have had something different -- well, that makes you a racist. If you say that we should proceed with caution on this transition surgery ... then you're slammed. And the tyranny of the left is tyranny. And not only tyranny that it causes people grief, it loses us elections, people," Carville said. "And I got to tell you ... there are people that think this, and I'm increasingly agreeing with them."
"There are a substantial number of people in the Democratic Party -- almost exclusively coastal, almost exclusively white, almost exclusively higher-educated -- that would rather lose and feel superior about themselves than have to go through the trouble to do the stuff it takes necessary to win an election," he continued. "And as long as that philosophy is part of the Democratic coalition, it is going to continue to cause unbelievable damage to our electoral prospects. I cannot say it any simpler than that."
Morrissey comments:
This formulation is pure Carville. He structures this argument so that it's less concerned about the actual tyranny than it is about the elections. If tyranny won elections, you get the sense that Carville might gripe a bit, but he'd also appreciate it from an electoral-strategy point of view.
As it happens, though, tyranny turns out to be ... unpopular. In fact, that's it's defining characteristic. If these policies were popular, the Left wouldn't need to impose them with tyrannical methods, after all. Carville seems to miss that point in this rant, although to be fair, it's clipped from an obviously longer argument that Carville makes.
In fairness, you cannot tell these cultists that tyranny is bad, because they want the tyranny. This is what the revolution preaches: Tear down society until you can install yourself as dictators and impose your weird, sick vision of the anointed on the unwilling masses.
You can only make the argument that their tyranny will result in them giving the right the power to impose tyranny.
Morrissey acknowledges this as well:
Tyranny is both the strategy and the end goal.
Remember, though, "reporters" can't report on Biden's obvious senility until one of his top-raking aides/coup-conspirators admits he's senile:
Weird how they could all admit he was senile when Democrat megadonors began emailing them during the Trump debate, or when Friend of Obama George Clooney said it was okay to admit it.
But before they secured permission from Reid Hoffman and other Democrat billionaires and celebrities? Nope, can't report on it, you need official confirmation from a Democrat official.