I listened to The Bulwark podcast yesterday and heard Mona's frustration -- bordering on anger -- that some folks on the Twittersphere confused her with being part of The Lincoln Project. To my mind, we need a robust ecosystem of allies moving forward to defeat Trumpism and the authoritarians. Each has its own role to play. I support the Bulwark, the Repub. Accountability Project, TLP, and now the Renew America movement. Tactics and roles are different, but we all have the same overarching objective. TLP went through a near-death experience and has come back, and we need them to be the point of the spear. No one gets inside the head of the Orange Poobah better than they do. I am probably not alone among your subscribers in financially supporting both Bulwark and TLP
So keep doing what you do -- and let's not speak or think ill of our allies in this existential fight.
Here's some history: (Pres Election Year/Winner-Party/VA Gov Winner-Party/% of vote)
1980/Reagan-R/Robb-D/54%
1984/Reagan-R/Baliles-D/55%
1988/HW Bush-R/Wilder-D/50%
1992/Clinton-D/Allen-R/58%
1996/Clinton-D/Gilmore-R/56%
2000/W Bush-R/Warner-D/52%
2004/W Bush-R/Kaine-D/52%
2008/Obama-D/McDonnell-R/59%
2012/Obama-D/McAuliffe-D/48%
2016/Trump-R/Northam-D/54%
2020/Biden-D/Youngkin-R/51%
As you can see every single time, with the exception of 2012/2013 the candidate of the party opposed to the President has won the VA governorship and usually by a hefty amount. Even after Reagan's blowout 1984 re-election where he carried VA by +25(!!) the Democratic candidate won with 55% of the vote.
The only time it didn't happen? Obama's second term with Terry McAuliffe as the candidate and he just squeaked by with 48% of the vote.
So please stop with the hair on fire and fingerpointing when something just happened that has happened every election since at least 1980/1981 (I didn't go further back than that).
Even when McAuliffe did win he won with the least amount of the vote (48%). And I'm supposed to sit here in sackcloth and ashes because history reasserted itself, especially with a candidate as weak as McAuliffe?
Green Lake: When one looks at McKelvey's Linked In page he seems an otherwise sensible guy. He's old enough to have been called "mick" as a child. He lists an association with "rinka" which is a design collective in Milwaukee. He was person of the year for the American Ligion [sic], and people seem to like him. He serves as a director for a woefully underfunded cancer “research center” ($154K per annum 2017 1040 EZ) supporting clinician based immunotherapy.
None of this either explains or excuses the downright meanness of his comments, except to say it closely mirrors the fear and hatred directed at the Irish up to and including the time of his childhood.
The last one in closes the gate? Stockholm syndrome? I have mine, the rest of you can P*** off?
I'm a bit disappointed in you again, Charlie. Because once again you say a lot without actually saying anything. Allow me to explain. If you wish to say that liberals lost because of being too 'woke' and being 'too far left' I'm going to need you to point out where and how this was the case. What you did was point to Virginia, where the former centrist governor ran on a centrist platform, refused to engage in the culture war, and ran on bread and butter issues. You also pointed to New Jersey where the popular governor did the same. Here's the thing: if you want to say that places like Virginia were lost because the democrats are too woke or too far left, I'm going to need you to bring receipts. You need to make a case. Just saying 'oh the left are too woke' without explaining what issues you think they've moved too far on is neither informative or helpful.
Since you've not explained the issue, let me take a stab at it. The problem the democrats have is one of messaging, in that they lack any message at all. They act like a parliamentary alliance between a bunch of different parties. Viewed like that, the GOP is the majority minority party; the largest party in a pie chart of other parties. But in our two party system, that would mean they'd take power most of the time. It also means that they can set the agenda even in the minority.
They can do this, because they possess intense message discipline. They can take something from nowhere (CRT! Obama's Birth Certificate! Benghazi!) and pound away at it until people assume there must be something there, that there must be some kind of truth to it. Liberals always assume that people are smarter than they seem, that surely they see through the propaganda. This is false. Most voters, most people, are morons. I am, you are, we all are about something. Humans cannot be smart about everything all the time. As a result, most people who do not pay attention to politics, ingest it in small, bite size pieces.
Liberals need to stop pretending that they don't need to engage with the culture war. They need to stop pretending that voters will simply take their data and their promises, when most voters can't see a difference between the parties. If liberals want to win, it's going to take hard message discipline, and they're going to need to take it to the GOP.
Make no mistake. The reason the dems lost in Virginia is because their candidate kept trying to avoid the issues that were set out for him, meaning CRT, because the GOP created this and made it an issue. You can talk about bread and butter issues all day long, but as Virginia showed us, it doesn't matter if the electorate is more worried about a boogeyman conjured up through message discipline.
I think it was yesterday's podcast with Mona where one of items they brought up was some professor at Wellesley College saying something super-Lefty in the classroom as a reason people are rejecting the Democrats. My first thought was, "I am shocked that there's leftism on the Wellesley campus . . . shocked!" And then I rolled my eyes because of course there's leftism at Wellesley and Democrats have still won elections and will continue to win elections.
I'm not sure if Charlie sometimes doesn't lapse back into familiar patterns from his talk-radio days.
It's true that we live in a world where every minor incident is broadcast in order to create a knee jerk reaction in people. That's not the problem. The problem is that the left, meaning the Democrats, have zero offensive strategy. They're cowering and trying to avoid the culture war. You can't do that. You either win it or you lose it.
The fact is, I think, that liberals rely too much on data and not enough on emotion. They spend too much time trying to ignore things, like CRT and Obama's Birth Certificate, and then are baffled when these become issues. Because people aren't rational beings. You need to be able to hammer home your message and get it into their heads.
The thing about the right is they are very good at maintaining message discipline. And they are very good at flooding the zone. As a result, they can create easy bite size messages that fit in. Build the Wall! Lock her up! Make America Great Again! These are BRANDS. And the fact is, it doesn't matter if they are true or if they happen, they illicit an emotional response. As a result, they work. Democrats have nothing like that, at least not in a majority of their voters. Because the Democrats are basically a coalition party in a place like Germany. A bunch of different parties that happen to run together. But the GOP is the majority of the minorities. So it can do what it wants in a way that Democrats can't.
One thing that democrats have to learn: all things being equal, people fighting for something will always defeat people fighting against something. It's not enough to simply be standing athwart history yelling stop. You have to be FOR something, which is why Trumpism has become so very powerful. It's FOR things. Horrible things, yes, but for them all the same. Democrats can't just be against Trumpism. They need to be for something too, and create a message and stick with it.
I mean, I'm not saying he's wrong! What I am saying is 'if you believe that the democratic candidate, the former governor in 2013 that refused to talk about culture war issues and ran on bread and butter dinner table matters' is too far left, the we need to ask what exactly people want from the democrats. Because the democratic candidate in Virginia ran as a moderate the same way Manchin does. And he lost. So if the democrats are too far left, the question is 'what exactly isn't too far left?'
I'm with the Never-Trumpers, Dr. Christian DeFeo from across the pond, and James Carvelle on this, 100%. I tuned into MSNBC last night to be vehemently told that the GOP won because we're all racists who support White Supremacy. How lovely for Progressives and the show's moderator that they don't have to do anything but have a knee-jerk reaction devoid of any responsibility, and no delving into the weeds to see what the exit polls had to say.
I'm a life-long democrat in my seventies, and I have lived my entire life by MLK's maxim to judge a person by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. I resent being told that I'm racist simply because I'm white and might prefer a candidate not of their choosing.
Unless and until this changes, expect today's GOP to amass all power in the next 3+ years and kiss democracy as we've known it goodbye. The fight will continue, but if we can't save it with all of the levers of government in our hands, how in the world do we reclaim it when we don't?
Why you buying into patently Republican narratives?
I'd venture that the last eleventy-seven occurrences of the phrase "de-fund the police" were by Republicans trying to put it into the mouth(s) of (a) Democrat(s)
Hey MoosesMom -- I hear you and raise you a couple. I left the GOP in 2016 over Trump. I am disgusted by the lack of courage displayed by GOP Senators and House members during his 4 years in the White House and since.
I am a dues paying member of the Lincoln Project but I am not sure that I agree with their assessment of Youngkin or the Virginia results. I am closer to the Bulwark -- there are reasons.
I disagree with MSNBC's panel of women who saw White Supremacy in a Virginia election. Virginia elected a white governor, a black women Lieutenant Governor and an Asian American Attorney General!!!! But they've got their narrative --
Three things ring out for me in the Virginia election result (and elsewhere) --
1) 40% of the Biden vote was to get rid of Trump and get a return to normalcy. There was NO other mandate -- COVID, ECONOMY, JOBS, COMPETITIVENESS, CLIMATE --
2) Economics is always king in an election -- and run away inflation and shifting labor market dominated the contest (Yes, passing the Bi-Partisan Infrastructure Package and demonstrating bi-partisan progress on JOBS creation would have helped Democrats.)
3) Education was the second driver in the Virginia race. Of course CRT and the "wokeness" stuff played a part -- but Youngkin's acceptance speech focused on "quality education", more choice, greater voice for parents.
After a year of "teaching" their children, parents realize the ongoing slippage in education: less emphasis on teaching the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic -- compared to their own k to 12 education. And theirs wasn't what their parents' received.
Especially after what the "learned" during the last academic year of remote schooling --non-college educated women did not want to hear that their opinion of education policy had no value compared to someone with a masters degree. Talking down to voters is never a winning strategy -- American Federation of Teachers!
Youngkin focused on getting results -- not feelings. Parents, whose feelings don't put dinner on the table, wanted someone with a track record. Youngkin is a businessman -- who started out as with a basketball scholarship and climbed the corporate ladder, the hard way -- he worked for it. Unlike Trump who inherited and scammed his way to "wealth" --
Much as I hate Trump. In Virginia, I would have voted for Youngkin. Just to set the choice in perspective, I voted for Newsom as California governor and I voted against his recall. And I have a Masters Degree.
I don't think it was the entire MSNBC panel of women who saw racism in the Virginia election, in particular the education issue. That was all Joy Reid. She even brought in a guest to backup her claim about racism. I was surprised when Nicole Wallace actually pushed back on the narrative. I don't recall Rachel Maddow addressing the racism issue during the coverage. She appeared to be playing the role of impartial host. I actually have a lot of respect for Maddow. She is way too liberal for my taste, but I admire how she researches issues and is always prepared when doing interviews. Unlike other cable hosts, she doesn't do the panel format which is too often about killing time for hosts who don't spend the time preparing like Maddow does. Not a fan of Reid or Wallace, but I greatly appreciate that they put people like Charlie Sykes and Michael Steele on the air.
I think liberals and conservatives talk about different things when they say the word 'racism.' For those on the right, 'racism' is entirely made up of overt actions: people saying racial slurs, people wearing hoods, segregation, hate crimes, ect. For the left, racism is more than the overt, it's the things you don't realize are racist most of the time. When they say 'white supremacy' what they usually refer to is the way black kids are unfairly targeted by police, or the disparity in incomes. Much in the same way 'sexism' is more than just assaults against women, the left includes lots of things that are not as overt or obvious.
The problem is that the left assumes that because it's obvious to THEM that it's obvious to EVERYONE. They fail to realize that most people equate the word 'racist' with something much more direct and distinct, and not as accidental.
When they say the results were due to racism, what they primarily mean is a guy ran on CRT, a fictional idea that says white people should be ashamed of themselves, and then won. He won by inciting a moral panic over race, and the left sees this as a continuation of previous racial panics, such as willie horton, or the various screeds made against immigrants, or what have you.
But that doesn't gel with what most people think of as racism. Most people imagine racism in the guise of people shouting racial slurs at people. They imagine it in blackface. They don't really see the same thing in 'parents are worried about telling their kids about how their ancestors kept people as property.' The right thinks we should avoid most of the unsettling bits, as they view education as primarily a device for creating workers and citizens. The left thinks we should focus on those bits, so we can create a better society. Where you fall is up to the individual. But when they left talks about racism, they're primarily talking about actions that are not overt, open acts of racism the way most people imagine them.
They came right out and said that Younkin's victory showed that white women embrace White Supremacy. Period. No nuance. And even if they should have meant to say that white women who voted for Youngkin embrace White Supremacy, even that is far too broad of a brush. A person can choose a candidate for myriad different reasons.
I don't know. I hear the same remarks but I don't believe they are talking to me, personally. You and I both know that there were plenty of white women that didn't vote for Orange Mango-Lite. I know my own actions and the reasons for them. I don't feel judged by people on TV. Why would you let someone have that power over you?
They don't have power over me and I certainly could care less whether someone on tv is "judging" me or not. Sorry, but long before you're in your seventies, you are way past caring what anyone thinks about you. All I said is that I resent the politics of calling anyone racist simply because they might prefer a candidate that you don't approve of. It's lazy to make everything about race rather than looking into why so many of the people that came together to give the Democrats power in the 2020 election are fed up and migrating away from them a year later. And it matters because today's GOP will use the power they regain to turn our nation into an autocracy that keeps them in power for decades. Once lost, it will be incredibly hard to get our democracy back.
"I tuned into MSNBC last night to be vehemently told that the GOP won because we're all racists who support White Supremacy."
Yes, and that particular host was also saying that McAuliffe lost because he wasn't progressive enough. Seems contradictory.
I don't mind liberal (or conservative) election night hosts as long as they are straight shooters. I think Rachel Maddow does a very good job at hosting election nights. Nicole Wallace also did a good job of bringing some balance to the conversation. I'm not generally a fan of hers because I think on her regular program she does let her opinions too heavily influence her hosting duties. Plus, I still resent MSNBC taking away Chuck Todd's time slot to give her a second hour. Todd has one of the sharpest political minds on television and is one of the best interviewers.
And, of course, MSNBC has the best election night analyst in the country, Steve Kornacki.
If I were to make a list of hosts who are most knowledgeable about politics, at the top of that list would be Jake Tapper, Chuck Todd, George Stephanopoulos and Chris Wallace. They are also extremely good interviewers. Todd and Steph. often let their liberal views creep into how they are doing their jobs, but they usually at least try to approach issues in a balanced matter. I can't say that for most of the other hosts on MSNBC and CNN. (And of course, most hosts on Fox are a joke.) Some of them are just horrible when it comes to inserting their very left-wing opinions into everything they do. They don't even try to be fair or balanced. Todd at least tries.
The flaw in most liberal democrats, I think, comes from the manner in which they view various groups of people. They, especially PoC, tend to extrapolate their lived experience onto society, and while this is an extremely human tendency, it creates a lot of flaws that are easy to explain. For example, we tend to view black voters, to use an example, as a bit of a monolith with general tendencies in how they vote and behave. Why? Because as a minority group the members of that group tend to view themselves as being part of this group. To put it bluntly, the racism and exclusion they face from certain parts of society causes them to bond together and thus behave similarly in ways you can see from a macro level.
However, this only works for groups that see themselves as being part of a group. White women, simply put, do not. If you asked them how they would label themselves, in terms of what's most important to them, I imagine most of them would say their class/economic status is more important than their race or sex. Part of this is privledge. Being part of an in group means you don't need to think about who you are all the time. But part of it is that as a majority, they don't see themselves as being members of a tribe the same way black women do, for example. They vote based on their own, individual interests, but those interests are calculated without thinking of their own identities.
When liberals go 'why would white women vote for open sexists' they reach for lots of explanations that never actually hit the truth. The reality is that most white women see themselves through the lens of their economic status/class first, their sex second, and their skin tone last. Thus, their appeals don't work.
One last bit. Most people don't see themselves as being racist in their own minds. As a result, liberals that spend their time being extremely aggressive about it waste their time, because most people don't think it applies to them. If the people you're talking to don't think that what you're saying applies to them, they're not going to listen.
Sadly, most of them don't seem to be able to understand that in order to change behavior you must first convince people that there is a problem. And writing off most of society like fire and brimstone preachers saying the world is fallen is hardly going to win many converts.
Charlie, what you quoted someone saying (see below) sounds to me like deeply felt but superficial bs. People are making up words and using metaphors to attack supposed factions. People with no actual knowledge are attacking verbal symbols (CRT). It's truly a mess.
" And based on the tweets I’m seeing from the left, progressives are doubling down on wokeness by declaring “White women voters are footsoldiers of white supremacist patriarchy,” whose win, they say, was merely the result of white supremacy, “whiteness,” and a “whitelash.”
This reaction to Youngkin’s victory tells you all you need to know about why he won—about why normie suburbanites feel threatened and under assault by the left."
Will Saletan may be right that encouraging Trump to butt into future elections would be bad for Republicans and good for Democrats, but that's only because Trump's presence has reached the point of diminishing returns. Ie, the GOP has become so identified with him by now that his active manifestation is no longer necessary to spur a massive turnout by his voters. For the same reason, Saletan overemphasizes the impact of disaffected suburban swing voters compared to the Trumpy rural and exurban blowout. Sure, the suburbs were a contributing factor, but Youngkin would not have won were Trumpism not baked into Republican identity. Youngkin's success was - among other things, obviously - in getting suburbanites to look the other way.
Your theory is that GOP turnout will always be massive, even when Trump is not on the ballot.
The problem with your theory is that 2018 disproves it. The GOP got swamped that election even though the Republican base was totally Trump driven. In fact, Trump drove Democratic turnout through the roof that election.
Biden is very unpopular right now. The GOP rural voters showed up to vote against him, while the Democratic-leaning voters stayed home. If Biden's numbers were better there would not have been the massive Republican turnout to vote against him, to send him a message. And Democrats would have went to the polls. Trump right now is viewed (wrongly by the way) as ancient history which is why trying to use him to motivate D voters didn't work.
Youngkin should send a thank you basket to the House Progressives which tanked Biden's ratings and, by association, McAuliffe's campaign.
Eh, maybe. I don't think the base truly fell in love with Trump until he had a powerful foe in Congress starting in 2019. The Mueller investigation and later the first impeachment gave him and his followers someone to focus on. Complaining about Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff is not very useful when they're in the minority.
I think it's safe to say that after 2020 for Republicans that Trump is always on the ballot, for Democrats not so much.
Sarah's focus groups even prove that out where her MAGA/Republican groups are all fired up hating Democrats and Trump won!!1! and the Democratic focus groups hardly mention Republicans at all. You have to pull their teeth out to get them to talk about Republicans.
A few things. First, this from the Matt Lewis take: "Of course, the hottest issue in Virginia had to do with education and the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT). And based on the tweets I’m seeing from the left, progressives are doubling down on wokeness..."
One of the biggest mistakes of far too many of those opining for a living is to mistake Liberal Twitter as being representative of the Democratic party and Democratic voters, like me. Well -- it's not. Twitter and Facebook are places where nuance and complexity go to die. I pay little attention to them. Newsletters like yours make up the bulk of my "social media" presence these days.
What made my city's election go in the completely opposite direction from the ones everyone's moaning about is that it was focused on the issues that matter to the people who live here. I'm sure there were voters who would willingly engage on all the social flashpoints, but none of the candidates running for any office engaged on anything other than issues. We had a Democratic sweep.
The current state of the media, with so many local news outlets decimated, means that almost all the news we consume these days is national and focused on relatively few media markets. How different and more nuanced the political climate might be if more reporting dug into the complete picture rather than cherry-picking the races they've already decided will be the national bellweathers for all political prognostication.
I don't know about you, but I'd sure like to know where things went well for Democrats, and what the national party can learn from us. I've yet to see much reporting on that, though.
Last week I was talking to someone about Amanda's brilliant article about how Fox News has eaten the GOP's tongue to such a degree that they decide what the issue is on any given day and the GOP has to go along. https://www.thebulwark.com/the-gop-is-a-propaganda-party/
My friend suggested that's how Twitter is for the left. Every Democrat feels compelled to address or react to whatever the main story on Twitter is every day. That worked okay when Trump was in office because pretty much every day main story was something idiotic he did or said. That doesn't work any more.
Blaming "the Democrats" for the behavior and attitudes of woke Twitter is a cynical ploy on the part of propagandists. Why thoughtful people would engage in this is a great mystery.
Also, UK politics are so different. If he thinks people in California are going to do soul searching, it ain’t gonna happen. We don’t have a parliamentary system here where you can build a coalition government. Also, Boris believes in climate change and they have universal medicine… so super apple to oranges to me. The geographical and rural/urban divide will only deepen if the pundit echo chamber keeps airing our dirty laundry.
I just would love to read or listen to any political analysis that does not include "look what Twitter is saying". I follow online and politics in general and when I talk to other people about the so called controversies and problems facing democrats (or republicans for that matter), most people have NO IDEA what is being talked about here. Twitter is not real life and it is time to stop acting like it. These people on MSNBC or Twitter calling VA voters racists are not real life. There may be some analysis that says Youngkin played on the race/CRT factor to garner support - okay. But the Twitter folks claiming blah blah blah in Matt Lewis's piece are not real life.
In the same way people on Twitter care about racists in VA or the mob attacking the Capitol on 1/6, real people out in real America do not care about this. They also don't care about process of legislation. Honestly, they barely care about actual legislation and improving peoples lives. How is it that some random school in VA changing policies for admission could impact a race so much, yet the actual problems of crime or inflation or covid don't really move needles. And if they did, where are the proposals to solve those issues? Americans are dumb and this is not really about anything other than simple marketing and the media moving voters based on what they can input into their minds vs. how actual government can impact their lives.
James Carville needs to stop using the word “woke.” Again, anytime a by-gone Clinton advisor says things like “stupid wokeness” it further enables the left to double-down.
I think sloganeering is EXTREMELY stupid, but repeating the slogans you dislike only gives GOP more excuses to hammer us with them and increases the divide. The far left will just paint Carville as completely out of touch, which he is (as much as I enjoy him). If you want a center-left party you need to not go to war with the progressives, but help them better shape a message. Instead of “defund the police” replace it with “fire white supremacist/anti-govt cops” something I think we can all agree is a problem. Instead of socialism say “capital for the workforce.”
Repeating the slogan is as much of a problem as the slogan itself. We are partners in a bad marriage, and we need new, better ways of speaking to each other.
James Carville is probably the most brilliant political mind the Democrats have. They would be wise to listen to him. Progressives make up 20% of the electorate. They're not going to start winning elections in purple districts/states by just using different words to describe their leftist policies. Carville is as liberal as any of those progressives. He's just a realist when it comes to politics.
I like Carville, but he’s wrong to keep harping on “wokeism” because he isn’t changing anyone’s mind on the left, rather he makes it worse. Your argument is the left would be wise to listen to him. Wisdom is a pipe dream in politics. The GOP would have been wise to have rejected Trump and/or embrace the vaccine. Progressives would be wise to stop using the word “socialism” which scares off many hispanic voters. So let’s start dealing with reality which often leads wisdom at the door.
This is a language issue and Carville is playing into the GOP hand just as much as the hysterical Twitter lady blaming white women. None of it is helpful and continues to feed the Right-wing media sphere’s giant amplifier that screams “DEMS IN DISARRAY.” We need to go local and get good candidates and stop squabbling on the national level.
I think your position though is that if progressives would just change how they communicate their issues, they could sell those policies in purple and reddish districts/states. I think Carville would agree Democrats (not just progressives) have a messaging problem. But he would argue that it's more than that - Democrats need to run people who fit the district/state they want to represent. Sometimes that's a progressive, sometimes that's a moderate. That's a position that progressives refuse to accept as valid. By holding that position, they argue that Carville is out of touch. But in fact, it's the progressives who are out of touch ... with reality. An AOC is not going to win Abigail Spanberger's Virginia district. It's someone like Spanberger or a Republican. A progressive is not going to win the Senate in West Virginia. It's Joe Manchin or a Republican. That is just a reality that progressives refuse to accept. Totally agree on the lack of wisdom when it comes to the GOP and its future. Don't get me started on that topic.
I 💯 agree with you that we should run candidates that fit the district, and I don’t fault Joe Manchin, he’s from a Trumpy state. I’m saying we need to stop amplifying the extremes of the party by using their language. My personal politics are much more libertarian leaning. I just can see both sides because I’ve lived the Urban/Rural divide, and I know how progressives view James Carville and when he says their causes are “stupid.” It does nothing to help. “Woke” is a term coined to show white people finally waking up to the realities of racism. It has now been co-opted by everyone to just mean progressive. A lot of progressives hate the term too because it watered down the original intent. SO WHY DO WE USE IT??? Nobody is running on the issues I care about (ending the drug war, simplifying the tax code, and rolling back harmful farming regulations) so I personally don’t have much passion for either party. I can just see how deep this disconnect is. Policy isn’t the issue here. It’s the culture war pure and simple. Critical Race Theory won Virginia last night, and we keep saying this word “woke” like it’s already happened, and we aren’t even actually woke. It’s all so dumb and painful.
I agree. Channeling George Lakoff in saying stop letting your opposition frame the issues in their own language. Every time we adopt the language the right uses against their Democratic opponents (woke, CRT, defund the police, etc.), we just reinforce it in voters' minds. None of this was on the ballot or part of the political discussion in my city's election this year, and it was a Democratic sweep.
I listened to The Bulwark podcast yesterday and heard Mona's frustration -- bordering on anger -- that some folks on the Twittersphere confused her with being part of The Lincoln Project. To my mind, we need a robust ecosystem of allies moving forward to defeat Trumpism and the authoritarians. Each has its own role to play. I support the Bulwark, the Repub. Accountability Project, TLP, and now the Renew America movement. Tactics and roles are different, but we all have the same overarching objective. TLP went through a near-death experience and has come back, and we need them to be the point of the spear. No one gets inside the head of the Orange Poobah better than they do. I am probably not alone among your subscribers in financially supporting both Bulwark and TLP
So keep doing what you do -- and let's not speak or think ill of our allies in this existential fight.
A little perspective on the Virginia race.
Here's some history: (Pres Election Year/Winner-Party/VA Gov Winner-Party/% of vote)
1980/Reagan-R/Robb-D/54%
1984/Reagan-R/Baliles-D/55%
1988/HW Bush-R/Wilder-D/50%
1992/Clinton-D/Allen-R/58%
1996/Clinton-D/Gilmore-R/56%
2000/W Bush-R/Warner-D/52%
2004/W Bush-R/Kaine-D/52%
2008/Obama-D/McDonnell-R/59%
2012/Obama-D/McAuliffe-D/48%
2016/Trump-R/Northam-D/54%
2020/Biden-D/Youngkin-R/51%
As you can see every single time, with the exception of 2012/2013 the candidate of the party opposed to the President has won the VA governorship and usually by a hefty amount. Even after Reagan's blowout 1984 re-election where he carried VA by +25(!!) the Democratic candidate won with 55% of the vote.
The only time it didn't happen? Obama's second term with Terry McAuliffe as the candidate and he just squeaked by with 48% of the vote.
So please stop with the hair on fire and fingerpointing when something just happened that has happened every election since at least 1980/1981 (I didn't go further back than that).
Even when McAuliffe did win he won with the least amount of the vote (48%). And I'm supposed to sit here in sackcloth and ashes because history reasserted itself, especially with a candidate as weak as McAuliffe?
Does it sting? Yep.
Does it feel bad? Yep.
Is it the end of Biden's presidency? Nope.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Green Lake: When one looks at McKelvey's Linked In page he seems an otherwise sensible guy. He's old enough to have been called "mick" as a child. He lists an association with "rinka" which is a design collective in Milwaukee. He was person of the year for the American Ligion [sic], and people seem to like him. He serves as a director for a woefully underfunded cancer “research center” ($154K per annum 2017 1040 EZ) supporting clinician based immunotherapy.
None of this either explains or excuses the downright meanness of his comments, except to say it closely mirrors the fear and hatred directed at the Irish up to and including the time of his childhood.
The last one in closes the gate? Stockholm syndrome? I have mine, the rest of you can P*** off?
I'm a bit disappointed in you again, Charlie. Because once again you say a lot without actually saying anything. Allow me to explain. If you wish to say that liberals lost because of being too 'woke' and being 'too far left' I'm going to need you to point out where and how this was the case. What you did was point to Virginia, where the former centrist governor ran on a centrist platform, refused to engage in the culture war, and ran on bread and butter issues. You also pointed to New Jersey where the popular governor did the same. Here's the thing: if you want to say that places like Virginia were lost because the democrats are too woke or too far left, I'm going to need you to bring receipts. You need to make a case. Just saying 'oh the left are too woke' without explaining what issues you think they've moved too far on is neither informative or helpful.
Since you've not explained the issue, let me take a stab at it. The problem the democrats have is one of messaging, in that they lack any message at all. They act like a parliamentary alliance between a bunch of different parties. Viewed like that, the GOP is the majority minority party; the largest party in a pie chart of other parties. But in our two party system, that would mean they'd take power most of the time. It also means that they can set the agenda even in the minority.
They can do this, because they possess intense message discipline. They can take something from nowhere (CRT! Obama's Birth Certificate! Benghazi!) and pound away at it until people assume there must be something there, that there must be some kind of truth to it. Liberals always assume that people are smarter than they seem, that surely they see through the propaganda. This is false. Most voters, most people, are morons. I am, you are, we all are about something. Humans cannot be smart about everything all the time. As a result, most people who do not pay attention to politics, ingest it in small, bite size pieces.
Liberals need to stop pretending that they don't need to engage with the culture war. They need to stop pretending that voters will simply take their data and their promises, when most voters can't see a difference between the parties. If liberals want to win, it's going to take hard message discipline, and they're going to need to take it to the GOP.
Make no mistake. The reason the dems lost in Virginia is because their candidate kept trying to avoid the issues that were set out for him, meaning CRT, because the GOP created this and made it an issue. You can talk about bread and butter issues all day long, but as Virginia showed us, it doesn't matter if the electorate is more worried about a boogeyman conjured up through message discipline.
I think it was yesterday's podcast with Mona where one of items they brought up was some professor at Wellesley College saying something super-Lefty in the classroom as a reason people are rejecting the Democrats. My first thought was, "I am shocked that there's leftism on the Wellesley campus . . . shocked!" And then I rolled my eyes because of course there's leftism at Wellesley and Democrats have still won elections and will continue to win elections.
I'm not sure if Charlie sometimes doesn't lapse back into familiar patterns from his talk-radio days.
It's true that we live in a world where every minor incident is broadcast in order to create a knee jerk reaction in people. That's not the problem. The problem is that the left, meaning the Democrats, have zero offensive strategy. They're cowering and trying to avoid the culture war. You can't do that. You either win it or you lose it.
The fact is, I think, that liberals rely too much on data and not enough on emotion. They spend too much time trying to ignore things, like CRT and Obama's Birth Certificate, and then are baffled when these become issues. Because people aren't rational beings. You need to be able to hammer home your message and get it into their heads.
The thing about the right is they are very good at maintaining message discipline. And they are very good at flooding the zone. As a result, they can create easy bite size messages that fit in. Build the Wall! Lock her up! Make America Great Again! These are BRANDS. And the fact is, it doesn't matter if they are true or if they happen, they illicit an emotional response. As a result, they work. Democrats have nothing like that, at least not in a majority of their voters. Because the Democrats are basically a coalition party in a place like Germany. A bunch of different parties that happen to run together. But the GOP is the majority of the minorities. So it can do what it wants in a way that Democrats can't.
One thing that democrats have to learn: all things being equal, people fighting for something will always defeat people fighting against something. It's not enough to simply be standing athwart history yelling stop. You have to be FOR something, which is why Trumpism has become so very powerful. It's FOR things. Horrible things, yes, but for them all the same. Democrats can't just be against Trumpism. They need to be for something too, and create a message and stick with it.
My vote is with Sykes.
I mean, I'm not saying he's wrong! What I am saying is 'if you believe that the democratic candidate, the former governor in 2013 that refused to talk about culture war issues and ran on bread and butter dinner table matters' is too far left, the we need to ask what exactly people want from the democrats. Because the democratic candidate in Virginia ran as a moderate the same way Manchin does. And he lost. So if the democrats are too far left, the question is 'what exactly isn't too far left?'
I'm with the Never-Trumpers, Dr. Christian DeFeo from across the pond, and James Carvelle on this, 100%. I tuned into MSNBC last night to be vehemently told that the GOP won because we're all racists who support White Supremacy. How lovely for Progressives and the show's moderator that they don't have to do anything but have a knee-jerk reaction devoid of any responsibility, and no delving into the weeds to see what the exit polls had to say.
I'm a life-long democrat in my seventies, and I have lived my entire life by MLK's maxim to judge a person by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. I resent being told that I'm racist simply because I'm white and might prefer a candidate not of their choosing.
Unless and until this changes, expect today's GOP to amass all power in the next 3+ years and kiss democracy as we've known it goodbye. The fight will continue, but if we can't save it with all of the levers of government in our hands, how in the world do we reclaim it when we don't?
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Why you buying into patently Republican narratives?
I'd venture that the last eleventy-seven occurrences of the phrase "de-fund the police" were by Republicans trying to put it into the mouth(s) of (a) Democrat(s)
Same goes for Carville and "wokeness"
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Hey MoosesMom -- I hear you and raise you a couple. I left the GOP in 2016 over Trump. I am disgusted by the lack of courage displayed by GOP Senators and House members during his 4 years in the White House and since.
I am a dues paying member of the Lincoln Project but I am not sure that I agree with their assessment of Youngkin or the Virginia results. I am closer to the Bulwark -- there are reasons.
I disagree with MSNBC's panel of women who saw White Supremacy in a Virginia election. Virginia elected a white governor, a black women Lieutenant Governor and an Asian American Attorney General!!!! But they've got their narrative --
Three things ring out for me in the Virginia election result (and elsewhere) --
1) 40% of the Biden vote was to get rid of Trump and get a return to normalcy. There was NO other mandate -- COVID, ECONOMY, JOBS, COMPETITIVENESS, CLIMATE --
2) Economics is always king in an election -- and run away inflation and shifting labor market dominated the contest (Yes, passing the Bi-Partisan Infrastructure Package and demonstrating bi-partisan progress on JOBS creation would have helped Democrats.)
3) Education was the second driver in the Virginia race. Of course CRT and the "wokeness" stuff played a part -- but Youngkin's acceptance speech focused on "quality education", more choice, greater voice for parents.
After a year of "teaching" their children, parents realize the ongoing slippage in education: less emphasis on teaching the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic -- compared to their own k to 12 education. And theirs wasn't what their parents' received.
Especially after what the "learned" during the last academic year of remote schooling --non-college educated women did not want to hear that their opinion of education policy had no value compared to someone with a masters degree. Talking down to voters is never a winning strategy -- American Federation of Teachers!
Youngkin focused on getting results -- not feelings. Parents, whose feelings don't put dinner on the table, wanted someone with a track record. Youngkin is a businessman -- who started out as with a basketball scholarship and climbed the corporate ladder, the hard way -- he worked for it. Unlike Trump who inherited and scammed his way to "wealth" --
Much as I hate Trump. In Virginia, I would have voted for Youngkin. Just to set the choice in perspective, I voted for Newsom as California governor and I voted against his recall. And I have a Masters Degree.
I don't think it was the entire MSNBC panel of women who saw racism in the Virginia election, in particular the education issue. That was all Joy Reid. She even brought in a guest to backup her claim about racism. I was surprised when Nicole Wallace actually pushed back on the narrative. I don't recall Rachel Maddow addressing the racism issue during the coverage. She appeared to be playing the role of impartial host. I actually have a lot of respect for Maddow. She is way too liberal for my taste, but I admire how she researches issues and is always prepared when doing interviews. Unlike other cable hosts, she doesn't do the panel format which is too often about killing time for hosts who don't spend the time preparing like Maddow does. Not a fan of Reid or Wallace, but I greatly appreciate that they put people like Charlie Sykes and Michael Steele on the air.
I think liberals and conservatives talk about different things when they say the word 'racism.' For those on the right, 'racism' is entirely made up of overt actions: people saying racial slurs, people wearing hoods, segregation, hate crimes, ect. For the left, racism is more than the overt, it's the things you don't realize are racist most of the time. When they say 'white supremacy' what they usually refer to is the way black kids are unfairly targeted by police, or the disparity in incomes. Much in the same way 'sexism' is more than just assaults against women, the left includes lots of things that are not as overt or obvious.
The problem is that the left assumes that because it's obvious to THEM that it's obvious to EVERYONE. They fail to realize that most people equate the word 'racist' with something much more direct and distinct, and not as accidental.
When they say the results were due to racism, what they primarily mean is a guy ran on CRT, a fictional idea that says white people should be ashamed of themselves, and then won. He won by inciting a moral panic over race, and the left sees this as a continuation of previous racial panics, such as willie horton, or the various screeds made against immigrants, or what have you.
But that doesn't gel with what most people think of as racism. Most people imagine racism in the guise of people shouting racial slurs at people. They imagine it in blackface. They don't really see the same thing in 'parents are worried about telling their kids about how their ancestors kept people as property.' The right thinks we should avoid most of the unsettling bits, as they view education as primarily a device for creating workers and citizens. The left thinks we should focus on those bits, so we can create a better society. Where you fall is up to the individual. But when they left talks about racism, they're primarily talking about actions that are not overt, open acts of racism the way most people imagine them.
How do you know they were talking to you?
They came right out and said that Younkin's victory showed that white women embrace White Supremacy. Period. No nuance. And even if they should have meant to say that white women who voted for Youngkin embrace White Supremacy, even that is far too broad of a brush. A person can choose a candidate for myriad different reasons.
I don't know. I hear the same remarks but I don't believe they are talking to me, personally. You and I both know that there were plenty of white women that didn't vote for Orange Mango-Lite. I know my own actions and the reasons for them. I don't feel judged by people on TV. Why would you let someone have that power over you?
They don't have power over me and I certainly could care less whether someone on tv is "judging" me or not. Sorry, but long before you're in your seventies, you are way past caring what anyone thinks about you. All I said is that I resent the politics of calling anyone racist simply because they might prefer a candidate that you don't approve of. It's lazy to make everything about race rather than looking into why so many of the people that came together to give the Democrats power in the 2020 election are fed up and migrating away from them a year later. And it matters because today's GOP will use the power they regain to turn our nation into an autocracy that keeps them in power for decades. Once lost, it will be incredibly hard to get our democracy back.
"I tuned into MSNBC last night to be vehemently told that the GOP won because we're all racists who support White Supremacy."
Yes, and that particular host was also saying that McAuliffe lost because he wasn't progressive enough. Seems contradictory.
I don't mind liberal (or conservative) election night hosts as long as they are straight shooters. I think Rachel Maddow does a very good job at hosting election nights. Nicole Wallace also did a good job of bringing some balance to the conversation. I'm not generally a fan of hers because I think on her regular program she does let her opinions too heavily influence her hosting duties. Plus, I still resent MSNBC taking away Chuck Todd's time slot to give her a second hour. Todd has one of the sharpest political minds on television and is one of the best interviewers.
And, of course, MSNBC has the best election night analyst in the country, Steve Kornacki.
Just came here to say that Chuck Todd is the worst.
If I were to make a list of hosts who are most knowledgeable about politics, at the top of that list would be Jake Tapper, Chuck Todd, George Stephanopoulos and Chris Wallace. They are also extremely good interviewers. Todd and Steph. often let their liberal views creep into how they are doing their jobs, but they usually at least try to approach issues in a balanced matter. I can't say that for most of the other hosts on MSNBC and CNN. (And of course, most hosts on Fox are a joke.) Some of them are just horrible when it comes to inserting their very left-wing opinions into everything they do. They don't even try to be fair or balanced. Todd at least tries.
Chuck Todd is no liberal. He often only presents the conservative view on his show and rarely pushes back when his guest lies right to his face.
We adore absolutism. Especially when based solely on bald-faced opinion.
The flaw in most liberal democrats, I think, comes from the manner in which they view various groups of people. They, especially PoC, tend to extrapolate their lived experience onto society, and while this is an extremely human tendency, it creates a lot of flaws that are easy to explain. For example, we tend to view black voters, to use an example, as a bit of a monolith with general tendencies in how they vote and behave. Why? Because as a minority group the members of that group tend to view themselves as being part of this group. To put it bluntly, the racism and exclusion they face from certain parts of society causes them to bond together and thus behave similarly in ways you can see from a macro level.
However, this only works for groups that see themselves as being part of a group. White women, simply put, do not. If you asked them how they would label themselves, in terms of what's most important to them, I imagine most of them would say their class/economic status is more important than their race or sex. Part of this is privledge. Being part of an in group means you don't need to think about who you are all the time. But part of it is that as a majority, they don't see themselves as being members of a tribe the same way black women do, for example. They vote based on their own, individual interests, but those interests are calculated without thinking of their own identities.
When liberals go 'why would white women vote for open sexists' they reach for lots of explanations that never actually hit the truth. The reality is that most white women see themselves through the lens of their economic status/class first, their sex second, and their skin tone last. Thus, their appeals don't work.
One last bit. Most people don't see themselves as being racist in their own minds. As a result, liberals that spend their time being extremely aggressive about it waste their time, because most people don't think it applies to them. If the people you're talking to don't think that what you're saying applies to them, they're not going to listen.
Sadly, most of them don't seem to be able to understand that in order to change behavior you must first convince people that there is a problem. And writing off most of society like fire and brimstone preachers saying the world is fallen is hardly going to win many converts.
Charlie, what you quoted someone saying (see below) sounds to me like deeply felt but superficial bs. People are making up words and using metaphors to attack supposed factions. People with no actual knowledge are attacking verbal symbols (CRT). It's truly a mess.
" And based on the tweets I’m seeing from the left, progressives are doubling down on wokeness by declaring “White women voters are footsoldiers of white supremacist patriarchy,” whose win, they say, was merely the result of white supremacy, “whiteness,” and a “whitelash.”
This reaction to Youngkin’s victory tells you all you need to know about why he won—about why normie suburbanites feel threatened and under assault by the left."
I thought baseball season was over, but I wake up this morning and see Mona Charen and Abigail Spanberger have hit home runs. Yeah!
Will Saletan may be right that encouraging Trump to butt into future elections would be bad for Republicans and good for Democrats, but that's only because Trump's presence has reached the point of diminishing returns. Ie, the GOP has become so identified with him by now that his active manifestation is no longer necessary to spur a massive turnout by his voters. For the same reason, Saletan overemphasizes the impact of disaffected suburban swing voters compared to the Trumpy rural and exurban blowout. Sure, the suburbs were a contributing factor, but Youngkin would not have won were Trumpism not baked into Republican identity. Youngkin's success was - among other things, obviously - in getting suburbanites to look the other way.
Your theory is that GOP turnout will always be massive, even when Trump is not on the ballot.
The problem with your theory is that 2018 disproves it. The GOP got swamped that election even though the Republican base was totally Trump driven. In fact, Trump drove Democratic turnout through the roof that election.
Biden is very unpopular right now. The GOP rural voters showed up to vote against him, while the Democratic-leaning voters stayed home. If Biden's numbers were better there would not have been the massive Republican turnout to vote against him, to send him a message. And Democrats would have went to the polls. Trump right now is viewed (wrongly by the way) as ancient history which is why trying to use him to motivate D voters didn't work.
Youngkin should send a thank you basket to the House Progressives which tanked Biden's ratings and, by association, McAuliffe's campaign.
Eh, maybe. I don't think the base truly fell in love with Trump until he had a powerful foe in Congress starting in 2019. The Mueller investigation and later the first impeachment gave him and his followers someone to focus on. Complaining about Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff is not very useful when they're in the minority.
I think it's safe to say that after 2020 for Republicans that Trump is always on the ballot, for Democrats not so much.
Sarah's focus groups even prove that out where her MAGA/Republican groups are all fired up hating Democrats and Trump won!!1! and the Democratic focus groups hardly mention Republicans at all. You have to pull their teeth out to get them to talk about Republicans.
A few things. First, this from the Matt Lewis take: "Of course, the hottest issue in Virginia had to do with education and the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT). And based on the tweets I’m seeing from the left, progressives are doubling down on wokeness..."
One of the biggest mistakes of far too many of those opining for a living is to mistake Liberal Twitter as being representative of the Democratic party and Democratic voters, like me. Well -- it's not. Twitter and Facebook are places where nuance and complexity go to die. I pay little attention to them. Newsletters like yours make up the bulk of my "social media" presence these days.
What made my city's election go in the completely opposite direction from the ones everyone's moaning about is that it was focused on the issues that matter to the people who live here. I'm sure there were voters who would willingly engage on all the social flashpoints, but none of the candidates running for any office engaged on anything other than issues. We had a Democratic sweep.
The current state of the media, with so many local news outlets decimated, means that almost all the news we consume these days is national and focused on relatively few media markets. How different and more nuanced the political climate might be if more reporting dug into the complete picture rather than cherry-picking the races they've already decided will be the national bellweathers for all political prognostication.
I don't know about you, but I'd sure like to know where things went well for Democrats, and what the national party can learn from us. I've yet to see much reporting on that, though.
Last week I was talking to someone about Amanda's brilliant article about how Fox News has eaten the GOP's tongue to such a degree that they decide what the issue is on any given day and the GOP has to go along. https://www.thebulwark.com/the-gop-is-a-propaganda-party/
My friend suggested that's how Twitter is for the left. Every Democrat feels compelled to address or react to whatever the main story on Twitter is every day. That worked okay when Trump was in office because pretty much every day main story was something idiotic he did or said. That doesn't work any more.
100%.
This is Laura Ingraham-level nonsense.
Blaming "the Democrats" for the behavior and attitudes of woke Twitter is a cynical ploy on the part of propagandists. Why thoughtful people would engage in this is a great mystery.
Also, UK politics are so different. If he thinks people in California are going to do soul searching, it ain’t gonna happen. We don’t have a parliamentary system here where you can build a coalition government. Also, Boris believes in climate change and they have universal medicine… so super apple to oranges to me. The geographical and rural/urban divide will only deepen if the pundit echo chamber keeps airing our dirty laundry.
I just would love to read or listen to any political analysis that does not include "look what Twitter is saying". I follow online and politics in general and when I talk to other people about the so called controversies and problems facing democrats (or republicans for that matter), most people have NO IDEA what is being talked about here. Twitter is not real life and it is time to stop acting like it. These people on MSNBC or Twitter calling VA voters racists are not real life. There may be some analysis that says Youngkin played on the race/CRT factor to garner support - okay. But the Twitter folks claiming blah blah blah in Matt Lewis's piece are not real life.
In the same way people on Twitter care about racists in VA or the mob attacking the Capitol on 1/6, real people out in real America do not care about this. They also don't care about process of legislation. Honestly, they barely care about actual legislation and improving peoples lives. How is it that some random school in VA changing policies for admission could impact a race so much, yet the actual problems of crime or inflation or covid don't really move needles. And if they did, where are the proposals to solve those issues? Americans are dumb and this is not really about anything other than simple marketing and the media moving voters based on what they can input into their minds vs. how actual government can impact their lives.
James Carville needs to stop using the word “woke.” Again, anytime a by-gone Clinton advisor says things like “stupid wokeness” it further enables the left to double-down.
I think sloganeering is EXTREMELY stupid, but repeating the slogans you dislike only gives GOP more excuses to hammer us with them and increases the divide. The far left will just paint Carville as completely out of touch, which he is (as much as I enjoy him). If you want a center-left party you need to not go to war with the progressives, but help them better shape a message. Instead of “defund the police” replace it with “fire white supremacist/anti-govt cops” something I think we can all agree is a problem. Instead of socialism say “capital for the workforce.”
Repeating the slogan is as much of a problem as the slogan itself. We are partners in a bad marriage, and we need new, better ways of speaking to each other.
https://revealnews.org/article/inside-hate-groups-on-facebook-police-officers-trade-racist-memes-conspiracy-theories-and-islamophobia/
James Carville is probably the most brilliant political mind the Democrats have. They would be wise to listen to him. Progressives make up 20% of the electorate. They're not going to start winning elections in purple districts/states by just using different words to describe their leftist policies. Carville is as liberal as any of those progressives. He's just a realist when it comes to politics.
I like Carville, but he’s wrong to keep harping on “wokeism” because he isn’t changing anyone’s mind on the left, rather he makes it worse. Your argument is the left would be wise to listen to him. Wisdom is a pipe dream in politics. The GOP would have been wise to have rejected Trump and/or embrace the vaccine. Progressives would be wise to stop using the word “socialism” which scares off many hispanic voters. So let’s start dealing with reality which often leads wisdom at the door.
This is a language issue and Carville is playing into the GOP hand just as much as the hysterical Twitter lady blaming white women. None of it is helpful and continues to feed the Right-wing media sphere’s giant amplifier that screams “DEMS IN DISARRAY.” We need to go local and get good candidates and stop squabbling on the national level.
I think your position though is that if progressives would just change how they communicate their issues, they could sell those policies in purple and reddish districts/states. I think Carville would agree Democrats (not just progressives) have a messaging problem. But he would argue that it's more than that - Democrats need to run people who fit the district/state they want to represent. Sometimes that's a progressive, sometimes that's a moderate. That's a position that progressives refuse to accept as valid. By holding that position, they argue that Carville is out of touch. But in fact, it's the progressives who are out of touch ... with reality. An AOC is not going to win Abigail Spanberger's Virginia district. It's someone like Spanberger or a Republican. A progressive is not going to win the Senate in West Virginia. It's Joe Manchin or a Republican. That is just a reality that progressives refuse to accept. Totally agree on the lack of wisdom when it comes to the GOP and its future. Don't get me started on that topic.
I 💯 agree with you that we should run candidates that fit the district, and I don’t fault Joe Manchin, he’s from a Trumpy state. I’m saying we need to stop amplifying the extremes of the party by using their language. My personal politics are much more libertarian leaning. I just can see both sides because I’ve lived the Urban/Rural divide, and I know how progressives view James Carville and when he says their causes are “stupid.” It does nothing to help. “Woke” is a term coined to show white people finally waking up to the realities of racism. It has now been co-opted by everyone to just mean progressive. A lot of progressives hate the term too because it watered down the original intent. SO WHY DO WE USE IT??? Nobody is running on the issues I care about (ending the drug war, simplifying the tax code, and rolling back harmful farming regulations) so I personally don’t have much passion for either party. I can just see how deep this disconnect is. Policy isn’t the issue here. It’s the culture war pure and simple. Critical Race Theory won Virginia last night, and we keep saying this word “woke” like it’s already happened, and we aren’t even actually woke. It’s all so dumb and painful.
I agree. Channeling George Lakoff in saying stop letting your opposition frame the issues in their own language. Every time we adopt the language the right uses against their Democratic opponents (woke, CRT, defund the police, etc.), we just reinforce it in voters' minds. None of this was on the ballot or part of the political discussion in my city's election this year, and it was a Democratic sweep.