Smoking the Copium
Prominent Democrats appear to be learning all the wrong lessons: Right now, political commentators are a study in contrasts. Consider this:
It is 1933. Hitler is in power. No time for a fucking seminar on Democrats messaging errors
— Jen Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) November 8, 2024
But also, this, from Julie Roginsky on CNN, excerpted at length:
“I’m going to speak some hard truths…We are not be party of common sense, which is the message the voters sent to us…When we address Latino voters…as Latinx, for instance, because that’s the politically correct thing to do, it makes them think we don’t even live in the same planet as they do. When we are too afraid to say that, hey, college kids, if you’re trashing the campus of Columbia University because you’re unhappy about some sort of policy and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning, that is unacceptable. But we’re so worried about alienating one or another cohort in our coalition that we do not know what to say when normal people look at that and say, wait a second, I send my kids to college so they can learn, not so they can burn buildings and trash lawns, right? And so on and so forth. When we put pronouns after names and say ‘she/her’ as opposed to saying, ‘you know what, if I call you by the wrong pronoun, call me out. I am sorry. I won’t do it again.’ But stop with the virtue signaling and speak to people like they’re normal.”
Also:
“We constantly try to parse out different ways of speaking because our focus groups or polling shows that so-and-so appeals to such and such. That’s not how normal people think. It is not common sense and we need to start being the part of common sense again. Joe Biden is not responsible for that, neither is Kamala Harris. That is a problem that Democrats have had for years. I’ve been banging the drum on this for I don’t know how—probably ten years on this. We need to get back to being the party of common sense that people look at us and say we understand you. We appreciate what you say because you speak our language. And, until we do that, we should stop blaming other people for our own mistakes.”
Pair this, also, with Matthew Yglesias’ prescription for, essentially, lefty centrism:
Here’s my pitch, one iPhone screenshot’s worth of principles for Common Sense Democrats to reform governance in the blue zones and be competitive in the red zones — delivering a coalition that can win on health care, reproductive rights, the safety net, and quality for all. pic.twitter.com/uCXUC4Jr8L
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 7, 2024
But then, you flip back to MSNBC, where they’re melting down and choosing the old “Trump voters are racists and sexists” refrain. It all paints a wild portrait of a Democratic Party that’s struggling to figure out how much self-reflection is required, the degree to which they ought to reflect on other people’s flaws or their own.
For what it’s worth, I think this take is roughly correct:
I see a lot of Dems coping with “she didn’t run on “X, Y, Z” unpopular leftist position
Yeah it doesn’t matter now because she was on tape following the current thing for a decade plus. The Dem party is paying the price for a decade of cultural insanity
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) November 8, 2024
Harris did not run a particularly far-left campaign, nor did she emphasize foolish policy prescriptions like defunding the police. But her 2019 run, in which she seemed to get swept up in the collective progressive hallucination that ultralefty policies would become enduringly popular, left an indelible mark on her. And the party became associated with these types of policies and ways of thinking f
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