Dems must reign in the insanity.
Serious self-reflection is needed if they hope to win back the working class.
Well, our year-and-half-long nightmare has ended (at least for the next couple of years) and Donald Trump will once again be our president. I definitely have mixed feelings about that. As someone whose politics bend towards the left, I am somewhat disappointed. There are things Trump will do in his second term that will be deleterious to the country. Of course, I feel the same way about a potential Harris administration. On the whole, I think working-class people would be financially better off under a Harris administration, but working-class folks are not a monolith, and some may end up better off under Trump. People are not spreadsheets, and their concerns go further than money. This is where I think sanity may have won the day. I get that postulating that a vote for Trump was a vote for sanity may, in fact, seem insane. No politician I can remember fits the description of “crazy” better than Trump, but what the Dems have become is another level of insanity altogether. I should be more specific, many, if not most, actual Dem politicians have not moved so far socially left as to be absurd. Their loudest voices in media and academia have become pure meme fuel though, and they denounce and shout over the sane Dems who dare to speak up. If that can’t be fixed we’re in for a long period Repub rule.
Yeah yeah I know, another “Dems are too woke” piece. It’s obviously not a super original thought. That’s what I find so frustrating, people have been warning Dems for years now that many of their ideas around race, gender, and society in general are not supported by regular folk. The win in 2020 seemed to be an excuse to ignore the writing on the walls, most regular people are not supportive of “woke” ideas. They could even get away with many of the social ideas that most voters don’t find appealing if they weren’t so condescending to those who disagree. Anyone willing to publicly disagree with one of the new tenets of the left has been quickly and loudly labeled as an istaphobe of one sort or another. Sometimes by politicians, but more often by talking head types. They show so much more deference to obnoxious activists with insane ideas than they do to folks with reasonable questions about those said ideas. I just don’t get it either. I don’t know if it’s NGO money, or if they assume since many of the stupidest ideas come from people with letters after their name they must be right and the rabble will come around. They have access to polling data, they know how regular people feel about these ideas. Maybe it’s Hollywood, (the only people more removed from reality than academia or the media) and all the money and endorsements they bring. We saw how that worked out this election though.
The derision and animus towards anyone who dares to raise questions is going to end up dooming the Dems if they don’t make some course corrections. As someone who disdains both parties, I’ve found to my surprise, that I can disagree with right-wingers with much more ease than lefties. This a broad generalization obviously, but I rarely get insults from right-wingers when I disagree with them, it’s become the default from left-wingers when I disagree with them. It really disappoints me. There seems to be little to no desire from the left to persuade at all. You see the worse from the talking head class. The general sense that they don’t need anyone who disagrees with any of their views. This is most pronounced in their reaction to the Harris loss. The endless shrieks of racism and sexism, accompanied by blatant racism and sexism towards anyone who voted Trump, is something to behold (The inability to acknowledge Harris is a vapid careerist who was a bad candidate is something too). The classism just oozes through whenever they talk about working people who may have voted for “wrong”. “Stupid rubes don’t know what’s good for them”. Why would anybody want to vote for people who view the American public this way? What motivation do they have to take a serious look at the next dem candidate, when they were called a racist/xenophobe/sexist/transphobe for not voting for the last one? Or they’re told they don’t care about democracy because you voted the wrong way?
If the Dems hope to win the presidency again anytime soon, they’re going to have to allow dissent amongst the ranks. They have now lost two elections to the host of The Apprentice. If that isn’t a cause for introspection, I don’t know what is. It doesn’t seem there’s a lot of introspection going on though. It seems like the dems message is “Voters need to look at themselves and figure out why they disappointed us so badly this time”. This is not a formula for electoral success. Their reluctance to self-examine signals to voters they see no fault in themselves. “We did everything right, and were gonna do the same thing next time”. Not exactly a convincing argument.