Opinion
Maureen Dowd
Democrats
and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics
Nov. 9, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/opinion/democrats-identity-politics.html
Maureen Dowd
By Maureen
Dowd
Opinion
Columnist, reporting from Washington
Some
Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke.
Donald Trump
won a majority of white women and remarkable numbers of Black and Latino voters
and young men.
Democratic
insiders thought people would vote for Kamala Harris, even if they didn’t like
her, to get rid of Trump. But more people ended up voting for Trump, even
though many didn’t like him, because they liked the Democratic Party less.
I have often
talked about how my dad stayed up all night on the night Harry Truman was
elected because he was so excited. And my brother stayed up all night the first
time Trump was elected because he was so excited. And I felt that Democrats
would never recover that kind of excitement until they could figure out why
they had turned off so many working-class voters over the decades, and why they
had developed such disdain toward their once loyal base.
Democratic
candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John
Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a
worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and
it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge
terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).
This
alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many
college campuses certainly didn’t help.
“When the
woke police come at you,” Rahm Emanuel told me, “you don’t even get your
Miranda rights read to you.”
There were a
lot of Democrats “barking,” people who “don’t represent anybody,” he said, and
“the leadership of the party was intimidated.”
Donald Trump
played to the irritation of many Americans disgusted at being regarded as
insensitive for talking the way they’d always talked. At rallies, he referred
to women as “beautiful” and then pretended to admonish himself, saying he’d get
in trouble for using that word. He’d also call women “darling” and joke that he
had to be careful because his political career could be at risk.
One thing
that makes Democrats great is that they unabashedly support groups that have
suffered from inequality. But they have to begin avoiding extreme policies that
alienate many Americans who would otherwise be drawn to the party.
Democrats
learned the hard way in this election that mothers care both about abortion
rights and having their daughters compete fairly and safely on the playing
field.
A revealing
chart that ran in The Financial Times showed that white progressives hold views
far to the left of the minorities they champion. White progressives think at
higher rates than Hispanic and Black Americans that “racism is built into our
society.” Many more Black and Hispanic Americans surveyed, compared with white
progressives, responded that “America is the greatest country in the world.”
Gobsmacked
Democrats have reacted to the wipeout in different ways. Some think Kamala did
not court the left enough, touting trans rights and repudiating Israel.
Other
Democrats feel the opposite, calling on the party to reimagine itself.
Marie
Gluesenkamp Perez, a vulnerable Democrat in a red congressional district in
Washington, narrowly held her seat. The 36-year-old mother of a toddler and
owner of an auto shop told The Times’s Annie Karni that Democratic
condescension has to go. “There’s not one weird trick that’s going to fix the
Democratic Party,” she said. “It is going to take parents of young kids, people
in rural communities, people in the trades running for office and being taken
seriously.”
Representative
Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, said the party needs rebranding.
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone,” he said. “I
have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by
a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to
say that.”
On CNN, the
Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky said that Democrats did not know how to
talk to normal Americans.
Addressing
Latinos as “Latinx” to be politically correct “makes them think that we don’t
even live on the same planet as they do,” she said. “When we are too afraid to
say that ‘Hey, college kids, if you’re trashing a campus of Columbia University
because you aren’t happy about some sort of policy and you’re taking over a
university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning,
that that is unacceptable.’ But we’re so worried about alienating one or
another cohort in our coalition that we don’t know what to say.”
Kamala, a
Democratic lawmaker told me, made the “colossal mistake” of running a
billion-dollar campaign with celebrities like Beyoncé when many of the
struggling working-class voters she wanted couldn’t even afford a ticket to a
Beyoncé concert, much less a down payment on a home.
“I don’t
think the average person said, ‘Kamala Harris gets what I’m going through,’”
this Democrat said.
Kamala, who
sprinted to the left in her 2020 Democratic primary campaign, tried to move
toward the center for this election, making sure to say she’d shoot an intruder
with her Glock. But it sounded tinny.
The Trump
campaign’s most successful ad showed Kamala favoring tax-funded gender surgery
for prisoners. Bill Clinton warned in vain that she should rebut it.
James
Carville gave Kamala credit for not leaning into her gender and ethnicity. But
he said the party had become enamored of “identitarianism” — a word he uses
because he won’t say “woke” — radiating the repellent idea that “identity is
more important than humanity.”
“We could
never wash off the stench of it,” he said, calling “defund the police” “the
three stupidest words in the English language.”
“It’s like
when you get smoke on your clothes and you have to wash them again and again.
Now people are running away from it like the devil runs away from holy water.”
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Maureen Dowd
is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for
distinguished commentary. @MaureenDowd • Facebook
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