Republicans give WAY more to charities per capita. I live in high wealth upper class liberal territory and my extended family lives in low wealth working class MAGA territory, and although I care for many people that I call friends where I live, in my assessment of the people in both of these tribes, what I see is a general trait of great selfishness in the high wealth upper class liberal territory.
While the people in MAGA territory will give in ways that actually hurts them in order to help others, the people in liberal territory only virtue signal charity that does not result in any material adverse impacts to their own lifestyle.
There is probably something economic-class related to this... people that have less are less clutching to what they have, and people that have more have been determined to be more likely to crave retention of what they have, and to have a greater desire to get more.
However, the problem isn't this... it is the inauthenticity of Democrat virtue. I will give you just one example of many. Where I live, a university town where 80% voted for Kamala Harris, the population passed an ordinance that the majority had to approve any peripheral development project that would be annexed to the city. Since that ordinance was passed, in addition to the environmental impact lawsuits this wealthy NIMBY group throws out to kill every project, even infill, the voters have rejected every peripheral development project for the last 30 years. The result has been sky high housing costs as the supply does not keep up with demand, and the demographic problem of fewer young professionals and families living here. Homelessness has exploded, too low tax revenue leading to roads and parks not being maintained, programs cut... but the wealthy liberal property owners have managed to secure their own wealth in real estate values... while claiming they are affordable housing advocates donating their time to non-profits that advocate tax increases to "help" the homeless.
Well Frank, you might be surprised to learn that people in lower income tiers still overwhelmingly lean Democrat. People still get more Republican the more money they earn, until you get to around three times the median income, and then it starts to lean Democrat again.
And while we all probably agree that rich people have their hypocrisies and annoyances, it would hardly be fair to differentiate that by political party. After all, at least Democrats vote for policies that benefit the poor and working class.
In fact, aside from the fact that you're exaggerating the difference between charitable giving levels, the fact that Democrats vote for higher taxes—including their own—is one of the complications which render these statistics misleading. Those higher taxes generally do more good than private charitable action. According to one study on the charitable giving gap:
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"Those in favor of lower taxes have argued that individuals are more capable than the government of allocating money to important causes, including people in need of assistance. But the study found that was not true. Donations do not match government assistance, and without tax money, social services are not funded as robustly.
“The evidence shows that private philanthropy can’t compensate for the loss of government provision,” Dr. Nesbit said. “It’s not equal. What government can put into these things is so much more than what we see through private philanthropy.”
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That study emphasized that while they could measure the giving levels, they couldn't make any determinations about where the money went or how it was used. Another study, though, concluded that the distinction was almost entirely accounted for by a rather unsurprising factor—church donations:
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"Republicans are not only more likely to attend church than Democrats, but church attendance – among Democrats and Republicans alike – is strongly associated with charitable giving. Gaps in giving, therefore, are linked to differences in the social composition of the parties, in which the average Republican is more religious than the average Democrat. Moreover, the overall giving gap emerges because Republicans donate more to their own religious congregations, rather than nationally active religious charities. Republicans and Democrats give roughly equal amounts to religious organisations aside from their own congregations, and we also find some evidence that Democrats donate more to non-religious organisations than Republicans. In other words, the baseline difference in charitable giving emerges because Republicans are more religious than Democrats, and religious people donate generously to their religious congregations."
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You see, anything that you give to a tax-exempt charity organization can be classified as "charitable giving". When I was a young Catholic school boy, my parents dropped an envelope into the collection plate each week, part of which went to reductions in my tuition.
Evangelicals, in particular, engage in a practice known to the Biblically familiar as tithing—giving a certain percentage of your income automatically to the church. And if you've ever seen any of these modern-day mega-churches run by celebrity-seeking, wealth-worshipping Evangelical pastors (in addition to the ones we witnessed on TV growing up in the golden age of televangelism), well, let's just say I don't think you need to be incredibly cynical to feel dubious about where all of that money ends up going, and whom it ends up helping.
Oh, my. Are you an undergraduate or graduate student? This is an excerpt from which “paper” you are writing, hoping to get high marks in which subject?
Sorry if you think I sound too academic, but I was done with grad school over half my life ago. These are my spontaneous thoughts plus a few minutes of research.
I could be more colorful, but I have a history with Frank so I'm trying to be nicer. But this is generally representative of my writing style.
🤯 No, I don’t think you “sound too academic.” And I don’t care about your “writing style.” Your response seems very self-concerned/self-conscious. Introspection can gift you with self-awareness: try it some time.
"After all, at least Democrats vote for policies that benefit the poor and working class."
There is no evidence that Democrats vote for policies that benefit the poor and working class. There is more recent evidence that Democrat vote for policies that harm the poor and working class. Climate crisis policies for example.
"In fact, aside from the fact that you're exaggerating the difference between charitable giving levels, the fact that Democrats vote for higher taxes—including their own"
Advocating higher taxes, or in any case when spending other people's money, is not charitable. This is especially true given the case that Democrats tend to be higher income and wealth and their tax increase policies have an adverse impact on families at the lower income and wealth levels as per Laffer Curve realities.
The ideological weaponization of empathy is one of the most dangerous developments on the radical left. Empathy is an emotion, which some people are neurologically incapable of. But ethics is not based on emotions. Ethics can be based on a system of rules (deontological ethics) or on the consequences of one's actions (utilitarianism). But when you divide people into those who are empathetic and those who are not, you dehumanize your political enemies. The same people who are vehemently opposed to the biological determinism of race embrace their own biological determinism: "us", the kind people, versus "them", the cruel ones. It becomes a secular version of Calvinism, with the elect and the damned. This article correctly points out that many Trump voters, denigrated by the left, adhere to their own ethical system, which in fact may be more rational than DEI. Until this is recognized, the left will lose.
Most Americans are small-L liberal. We support civil liberties, equal opportunity, and equality before the law. We are also small-C conservative. We prefer incremental changes. We are reluctant to throw the baby out with the bath water.
The Left is anything _but_ liberal. The Democratic Party cannot win with its shrill, censorious factions in the ascendant.
I find this so shocking that it’s honestly hard to believe:
“The local Democratic organization sent out an email that framed the election as a choice between ‘two very different futures: one that embraces justice, diversity, equity and inclusion vs one that stands for fear, discrimination, othering, and law driven by extremist right-wing ideology.’”
Talk about blind spots! One great irony here is that this local Dem party message employs ideological extremism in order to accuse Republicans of “extremist right-wing ideology .”
Another irony is that this Dem message embraces the left wing version of “anti-racist” racism (racial discrimination against whites, Asians, and Jews) in order to condemn discrimination!
Rarely do pots meet kettles on such explicit terms.
And I’m well aware, of course, that jargon like “equity” and “othering” are employed to a woeful extent at left leaning institutions of higher Ed, but I’m astounded any political party would be dumb enough to associate itself with a fringe movement of radical identitarians.
So I say this as a Dem voter: if I had received a message like that from my local Dem party, I probably wouldn’t have voted. I certainly wouldn’t have voted for any political organization putting out that message. And I have never voted for a Republican in my life. Maybe if there was a compelling independent candidate, I would’ve gone in that direction, but that would’ve been the only possibility.
One has to be extensively cocooned in an ideological echo chamber to communicate with voters as poorly as that message does. How hard is it to simply state that you’ll fight to give everyone a fair shot to get ahead (thereby promoting the very popular concept of equality of opportunity)?
To their credit, the Harris campaign avoided any of those absurd references to identity. But a 90 day campaign cannot in and of itself fundamentally alter the negative and censorious branding that the Dems have now spent years developing. Dems may ultimately need their own kind of Trump to do an end-run around the fully indoctrinated party establishment.
Like you, I recoil when I read language like that.
In the summer of 2020, someone across the street from me put a sign in their window: “Protect black bodies. Serve black bodies.” It got me wondering what a black bus driver or sanitation worker or delivery driver might make of such alienated language if they happened to glance at it in the middle of the night as they were doing their job. Bemusement? Indifference? Both more likely than a recognition of solidarity, I think.
Jargon is a real horror, because it’s instantly divisive. And putting it into political campaign literature seems suicidal.
"How hard is it to simply state that you’ll fight to give everyone a fair shot to get ahead (thereby promoting the very popular concept of equality of opportunity)?"
Apparently pretty hard since we are unable to eliminate race and sex quotas that discriminate against white men.
Believing what they do about Trump's supposed "threat to Democracy", I cannot take them seriously when they don't try to field a candidate at least as stimulating as Trump. Bernie Sanders came the closest in 2016, but he has been bought by the establishment.
I’m sorry, but I’m tired of hearing about how democrats need to have more empathy for the people who voted for Donald Trump. I have long been opposed to and concerned about far left elitism and wokism. I think that is has been the major factor doing harm to the democratic party’s ability to win elections. I can understand how people are frustrated with having to worry about how they use pronouns when talking about people, and with the lack of effort by Biden and other democrats to take concerns about border security serious.
However, those reasons do not excuse voting for someone who, leaving aside his policy positions if you can call them that, has demonstrated to be corrupt, incompetent and an ego maniac, such that he truly poses a danger to our country. Whatever you think about Harris or Biden, these were not far left liberals. Harris clearly tried to make that clear. Let me ask you this question, was your sister a far left woke liberal elitist who looked down upon people and ignored their concerns? It doesn’t sound like she was. So why should we feel empathy for the people who just ignored the person she actually was and instead bought into the Fox News and on line lies about Trump, or just knew about them and chose to ignore them (putting the country in jeopardy). Why is that OK or understandable? I don’t think it is.
Trump is much worse that just a person who says disgusting things. Again, he is corrupt (cheats and breaks the law for his own personal benefit), incompetent (completely mismanaged the COVID crisis leading to ten or thousands of unnecessary deaths), narcissistic ego maniac (who, talk about no empathy) only cares about himself and has delusional views about himself). He is genuinely dangerous, as his first terms demonstrated, and we are very likely to see much worse in a second terms. I do emphasize to some degree about the frustrations about the far left that some people feel, but please, unless they are truly in a media bubble that shields them from the truth (which is likely in some cases), nothing excuses them from putting our country in such danger.
Trump may be all those things, but he also speaks to their priorities. They know all those things about him. But they chose him anyway. You can either conclude the did it because they are morally bankrupt, or you can acknowledge that not everyone values the things we value to the same extent that we value them. To them, the choice made sense. If you cannot understand *why* they made that choice, you will never be able to sell them *your* values as a Democrat.
And while I think it's a good idea to listen to Trump voters in general, I think the ones of most interest are the swing voters and the formerly-Democrat voters. The MAGA faithful are not going to be persuaded by a Democrat message in the foreseeable future. The voters who are, by definition, persuadable (because they have just been persuaded) are where we should focus our efforts.
It's a combination of policy and sales pitch and simple character -- Democrats lost those voters' trust and need to earn it back.
I agree with your point about focusing on the swing voters. I also understand that a lot of people were extremely frustrated that dems were’nt listening to them and hearing their concerns. I also think that divided information ecosystems and the level of misinformation is a huge part of the problem. We need to find a way to get back to defending truth and finding ways for truth to be shared.
As an independent who did not vote for Trump (and agrees with your assessment of him) but also could not bring myself to vote for Harris, I think more traditional Dems (not partisan in an insulting way, but people who are technically Democratic and get most of the information from traditional media), don't realize how ubiquitous misinformation is on both sides. Perhaps even more importantly, they miss how people who vote for Trump view his disinformation when compared to the Democratic Party.
The biggest example of this disinformation miscalibration is how non-dems view Joe Biden's cognitive state. For many Americans, hiding that was the most significant act of disinformation in recent memory (perhaps since Watergate) and they believe the media assist in this (which reinforces their belief that places like Fox News actually report the truth).
Trump will come out and say some bald-faced lies but be called on them repeatedly, while the fact that the president of the US could, at least at times, hardly construct a coherent sentence, and no one mentions it until it becomes a political liability. Before then, all the videos, etc., were "cheap fakes." People see this as disinformation that the media was broadly complicit in. In this I would agree with more Trump supporters...this was disinformation and it hurt America (not least of all by depriving the Dem party of an opportunity to select a more viable candidate).
Another less high-profile but equally damaging shift is Harris' attempt to shift to the middle. From speaking with family who voted for Trump, they generally viewed him as being more honest than Harris. Why? You know who Donald Trump is and what he is about. Most Americans do not like it, but the actual person is a pretty easy read. Harris, on the other hand, was a prosecutor who turned anti-law enforcement when convenient and turned back to an even harder-core prosecutor when convenient.
I say this as someone who supported Harris in her initial run back in 2019/2020. She was briefly my preferred candidate as someone who could inject some reason into issues related to criminal justice. Boy, was I let down. I think persuadable voters see this as duplicitous, in a way that contrasts very strongly with Trump pretty consistently being an ass and a blowhard. I think many people viewed his consistency in this area as genuine. The devil they know being less problematic than a candidate who has been all over the board and gone along with some pretty crazy ideas during 2020.
I want to emphasize that this post is in no way and attack on you. I think your post is broadly correct in most areas. I wanted to post this because I am hearing a lot from Dems about "disinformation" and that what they need to do is a better job of informing the public.
I don't think this is the case. What the Dems need to do is to stop trying to deceive the public (and themselves). This would begin with things like not trying to convince people that defunding the police does not mean defunding the police, not hiding a president's mental decline until it is unequivocally revealed on national television, not using word games to try and hide Harri's responsibility for immigration, etc.
I have said this in other posts, but my sense is that the Trump voters who could have been convinced to vote for Harris feel that Trump lies in the particular but that the Democrats deceived them more broadly. And people would rather be lied to than fooled.
"Another less high-profile but equally damaging shift is Harris' attempt to shift to the middle. From speaking with family who voted for Trump, they generally viewed him as being more honest than Harris. Why? You know who Donald Trump is and what he is about. Most Americans do not like it, but the actual person is a pretty easy read. Harris, on the other hand, was a prosecutor who turned anti-law enforcement when convenient and turned back to an even harder-core prosecutor when convenient."
This is really important: I think what you're getting at here is that Trump, while an inveterate liar, seems more authentic than Harris. Trump doesn't generally try to pretend he's someone he's not. He's totally inconsistent in terms of policies and promises and plans, but you never feel like the guy talking is afraid to speak his mind. Harris, on the other hand, didn't seem to want to speak at all, seemed afraid of it. And when we saw what she had to say, it really didn't feel like the "real Harris" was the one speaking (though it was hard to tell because no one really seemed to know who the "real Harris" was at all).
Very valid point on Biden. No question that he should have been a one term president and announced early that he wasn’t seeking a second term. I believed it then and of course now as well. I’m not convinced that he lacked the ability to govern, but he clearly lacked the ability to be an effective candidate, as we finally saw clearly at the debate. He also stayed in two long after the debate and then forced the decision to Harris by quickly endorsing her once she exited. All this definitely contributed to the fundamental problem that Dems face today, which is a lack of trust from the electorate. All of this still isn’t reason enough to put the who country in jeopardy, as Trump’s early appoinment choices seem to indicate. I just hope that our institutions hold up long enough for us to get to he midterms. In the meantime, Dems need to clearly meet people where they are, which is in the center — not the far left.
Thanks for your post. I think you’ve made come valid points. Harris was not my first choice and I was very concerned when Biden essentially ensured that she was the only option. I don’t think that she is actually a very ideological person. In 2019, I think she was told by many from the left that she needed to be acceptable to the progressives and she adopted several of those positions. This time, the opposite was the case, and she needed to move toward the center, but also was told that she could risk reducing the progressive turnout (which turned out to be a big mistake). If she would have won, I think that she could have been more of a centrist leader who could have brought different sides, including reasonable republicans together (given support from all the never Trumpers). Alas, we’ll never know. So I understand the distrust that many people had about her and the fear that she could be too heavily influenced by the far left. Why she didn’t separate herself from Biden, take a stronger stand on border security, respond to the negative trans ads, I don’t know, but I think it cost her the election. My concern about Trump, is that he is something more than one of two evils. I think that he could seriously do damage to our country and his proposed appointments seems to validate that concern. I also think that being corrupt, incompetent and narcissistic, present threats that go beyond any policy positions on immigration or other woke issues. But I do understand that far left progressives have caused many people to lose trust in democrats and that is the key issue that democrats need to address if they hope to win elections going forward.
My take: repair and reinforce our institutions that find and report facts. They are pretty obviously run by some of the more ideologically-driven elements of the liberal-progressive cohort. Not hard to see science journals which have editorials that argue for very unscientific ideas, which seem allergic to empirical observation, and which exercise pretty significant isolated demands for rigor. Combine that with things like scientists who refuse to release their data and then get "found out" in a big email dump that they have been talking about how they don't want to release certain things because it will be be misunderstood by conservatives (or worse) and it doesn't take long for anyone who's not already in the tank to become suspicious of the whole enterprise. And that's merely the science. The journalism is poor as well.
Want someone else to share the same truth you do? Convince them that truth is what motivates you and share how you got there.
By the way, I strongly recommend listening to John Heilman’s podcast “Impolitic” where he interview to democratic members of Congress, Seth Gouldin and Ritchie Torres. I think their views about the election and what democrats need to do are spot on.
The element that is missing from so much of this acrimonious debate is the one essential element.
I’m an old white guy who’s been an American for nearly 80 years. I’ve been a soldier, a construction worker, a merchant seaman, a camp counselor and director (and yes, even a paper boy on a bicycle), and for just over 40 years I taught American history at the elementary level.
America has always been split into at least two warring camps, if not more. Americans have always had differing visions of what America is or isn’t, should or shouldn’t be, has or has not done right and/or wrong, even what it really means to be an American.
I am and always have been willing to listen to anyone who honestly wonders about these varying visions, as I have often done myself along my way. I’m a plank owner in the first generation in human history to grow up knowing we have the power to utterly destroy ourselves. I served in the army during the most misbegotten and misunderstood war we’ve ever been involved in, all the while watching that army and my country tearing themselves apart over that war and the racial issues we’ve been unable to resolve since our founding. I watched the assassinations and the riots and American soldiers shooting American kids on college campuses. I lived, terrified, through those awful thirteen days in October of 1962 while the world waited with bated breath for resolution or Armageddon because we’d been too damn stupid to realize what four thousand years of warfare hadn’t seemed to teach us about our vast capacity for stupidity. But I was also there when after years of concerted effort we sent three human beings to another celestial body, a feat only imagined as science fiction for millennia. I was there for Martin Luther King’s dream. I was born exactly nine months to the day after the greatest armada of human justice ever assembled landed to begin the final defeat of the most hideous political regime ever to blacken our history. I’ve been able to read the thoughts of the most enlightened men and women who ever lived, and to marvel at the heights to which the human mind can reach, even if I was sure I only partially understood just how high. I’ve gloried in music created by men and women that sang with the voice of angels. I’ve seen humanly created pictures of stars and galaxies so distant in space and time that no human mind can fully comprehend either such distance or such time. I’ve read (and a couple of times participated in) our long and often difficult search for our origins as a species, and at the same time listened to the lunatic controversies surrounding that long, unfinished search.
There are times now when I think that this nation founded with so much hope in a land of such surpassing beauty and bounty is inhabited by a race of idiots. We had it all laid out for us. We were founded as the first nation on earth to define itself at its inception as that nation in which 'We the People’ might together find enough of the courage, the honesty, the understanding, the tolerance, the compassion, the humility, the wisdom, the humor, the hope, and the sheer and simple common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up. Yet how often in our history has our political, social, or religous conversation contained even a modicum of all those characteristics long enough to make a permanent impression.
Tomorrow is the anniversary of a speech made by a tall, famously ugly ex-lawyer, wrestler, and rail-splitter to honor the Americans who died in the worst battle ever fought on this continent. In two brief moments which went almost unnoticed by many who were there, he encapsulated the promise we’d been given and the task which that promise laid on us.
As I think on his words I know that the election of Donald Trump for second term is the absolute antithesis of Abraham Lincoln and the American he believed was possible, fought for, and in the end gave his life to. I’m not insensitive to the motivations of those who either for him or against Ms Harris, but I’m sorry, I cannot either sympathize or understand how any of whatever grievances they may have felt were sufficient to entrust the nation so many have lived, worked, fought, and all too often died for to a man who has absolutely no concept of what that nation was founded to be, nor any respect for the electoral process, the Constitution, or the rule of law which underpin it.
Whatever potentially repairable flaws one may feel exist in the house, the answer is not to bring in a mendacious, malevolent, amoral, vengeful, self-absorbed huckster, con man, and liar with a wrecking ball.
James, in your last paragraph you have neatly encapsulated exactly what the author of this article has pointed out is the rot at the root of the thinking of present day Democrats. Name calling, demonising, and dehumanisation of the elected President of America, shows us all exactly why the Democrats lost the election. The trouble is that as pointed out in another readers comment "The ideological weaponization of empathy is one of the most dangerous developments on the radical left" with which your utterances seem to suggest that your opinions are "not for the turning" and never will be.
You’ve rather missed the point. The Democrats didn’t lose this election - the nation did. And my last paragraph wasn’t an exercise in weaponization of anything. It was a thumbnail description of Donald Trump, entirely verified not by me or the Democrats (I’m actually an Independent) but by and through his own words and actions. When the character of the man or woman occupying the Oval Office ceases to be a matter of grave importance or needs to be sugar-coated in the name of empathy, then we have failed as a nation.
I repeat, do you ever actually listen to Trump? This is not a matter of who did or who didn’t vote for him. It’s a matter of listening to what he’s been doing and saying for his entire life - going right back to the Central Park Five and his days with his father and their racist housing policies. Do a little history.
I'm sorry; I know you're coming from a sincere place, but I just can't buy this argument anymore. We're doing nothing but rewinding the tape to 2017 as if we've learned nothing.
The Democrats, *as a party*, don't have an empathy problem. They have an appreciation problem.
Sure, you can say that many of the rank and file have a not so great opinion of their Republican counterparts, but so what? The feeling is clearly mutual; the Republicans demonstrate no shortage of animosity for their fellow Americans across the aisle.
But I honestly don't understand what people who level this criticism expect from the Democrats anymore. You all want to hyper-focus on making sure the working class feels "heard". Well we *do* hear them—for christ's sake I don't know how many times we've been over this exact same ground. The problem is that what they're saying is rife with poorly-informed opinions and misconceptions. What should Democrats do—cop to them? Tell them they're right that they suck, and will try to do better?
Don't misunderstand—I'm not saying Democrats should be telling people whether or not they're experiencing financial hardship. While there was some solid evidence that many people were judging the economy based on assumptions about other people's finances rather than their own, I argued they should avoid that question entirely. They just needed to impress on people that they're dealing with a global problem and that even though there's been a lot of progress, there's more work to be done. And of course, to make that case, they should point out how well the U.S. has done compared to other countries.
But what happens when the Democrats try to do something like this? They get told that they're condescending, and out of touch, and telling the working class that they don't care about the things they care about. All of a sudden the working class needs to be catered to, in just the way that we all criticize obnoxiously woke people for catering to favored minorities. Apparently, "standpoint epistemology" is just fine for some people, and grown adults can't be made to understand that their own personal situation isn't necessarily going to improve if they act on a misdiagnosis of a problem.
We keep hearing from people who want the Democrats to focus more strictly on economics, but they keep speaking as if Democrats haven't easily been the better party on economics overall, and especially for the working class. As if it's even close. The Democrats gave people healthcare, while many Republican governors sabotaged it for their own people, and Republicans throttled it even worse when Trump got into office. Democrats give tax breaks to the middle and working class, while Republicans give them primarily to the rich. Democrats extended the child tax credit, momentarily almost eliminating child poverty, while Republicans refused to vote to extend it.
And what's more, Biden was the most pro-union, and in many ways the most pro-working class President any of us have ever seen. He got pensions restored for a million union workers. One of the first things he did was clear out Trump's NLRB full of anti-union stooges and replace them with people who would actually serve labor interests. He brought jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into mostly red states that badly needed it, and for which Republican politicians tried to take credit, despite voting against it! He brought down inflation, wages have risen, and yes—he had to raise interest rates to do it, but now they're coming down again that inflation is under control.
And how much credit did he get for all of this?
Zero. Zilch. Nada.
And why? Because people don't understand that prices don't come back down, and that their employers didn't tell them that the wage increases they received were largely cost-of-living increases and not rewards for good work. Because people don't understand that Presidents don't control the economy, and that they are mostly just responding to macro factors, so it makes no sense to compare the economy today to the one we had before a world-changing pandemic. Because people like this nice fellow you've interviewed don't understand that the government is nothing like a business, because its job is to serve its people, not turn a profit, and thus credit Donald Trump for having a "CEO mentality".
This is not even to mention that Trump has actually proven to be a terrible businessman with a lousy grasp of economics. I guarantee you there isn't a single board of investors in America that would appoint Donald Trump as their company's CEO. And he doesn't have a CEO mentality—he's only ever been the head of his own, private, family-owned businesses, and thus has never had to disclose his income or personal finances. Most CEOs at least understand accountability to people who can fire them—not Trump.
Yet somehow, Trump gets a complete mulligan on his COVID mismanagement—this gentleman even blames the lockdowns which happened primarily under Trump, on Democrats—whereas Biden gets no slack for the fact he inherited a horrible economy and guided it back to health.
And yet our problem is that we don't listen to what's important to normal, working class Americans, and have no empathy.
I believe it was Noah Smith who pointed out recently that the old political order, where people could be relied on to mostly vote in their own financial interests—the affluent and wealthy voting Republican, and the working class and poor voting Democratic—has been replaced by something else. On one side, as Democrats have become better educated and wealthier, they've still chosen to back policies that redistribute wealth downward. And as Republicans have gotten poorer and less educated, they still support regressive economic policies that hurt the poor and working class and benefit the wealthy.
Needless to say, this does not demonstrate a lack of empathy on the part of the Democratic party, no matter how much insufferable wokeness people encounter on social media and in elite colleges—people whom Democrats unfortunately need to rely on to get voted into office because the people who should support them don't. And whom right wing media will never allow you to believe represent a small minority of the party.
As for what it says about working class Republicans, either it means they often don't realize what it is they're voting for—the argument I'm making here—or they consider cultural issues far more important. Which, let's be honest with ourselves, often includes the fact that Democrats try to show empathy to a wide swath of people, not just give voice to one particular group's grievances. Which, to be charitable, are typically nurtured by right-wing propaganda outlets, most of which are owned by Republican oligarchs who want people backing an ideology which keeps their taxes low.
And if people can afford to care that little about their real economic interests in favor of culture wars and lib-owning, it can hardly be said that they need our empathy. When polls show that people overwhelmingly support Democratic policies until they're told whose policies they are, that tells you something.
Yes, Democrats have a problem with their brand. But it is *not* because they lack empathy.
"Rife with poorly-informed opinions and misconceptions"? -- like those who claim that males can get pregnant (or that females are born with penises) -- or that (as with border-crashers), shoplifting is merely "undocumented" shopping?
With regard to Covid: Under Trump, we had Operation Warp Speed; Democrats were the cheerleaders for mandates and lockdowns. (And, especially in light of Operation Warp Speed and his own treatment when he had Covid, one would need be truly stupid to think Trump was serious about injecting bleach -- as many Democrats evidently take most Americans to be.)
If Democrats don't want to be equated with the "insufferably woke," they need to repudiate such views, in no uncertain terms. This isn't about "hate"; it's about making it clear that Democrats will no longer expect us to kowtow to a cadre of holier-than-thou "experts" and ideological bullies.
FULL DISCLOSURE: In 2016, I voted for Bernie (as a California write-in) over Nurse Ratched, in 2020 for Biden, and in 2024 for Harris (for the reasons you mention, among others). But (especially for Obama/Trump voters and their ilk) Kamala needed more than a slick pivot in order to be believable; she needed a resonant and unmistakable Sista Souljah moment. It never happened; thus, she was unable to close the deal.
You see, this is exactly what I'm talking about. You take the opinions of certain people on the left and claim that somehow the Democratic Party is shoving them down your throat. Find me a Democrat who ran on a message of forcing people to accept transgender ideology, or somehow not taking crime or immigration seriously, or anything close to the caricature you've presented here.
The Democrats have spent the last four years pushing back against the "defund the police" movement, the "decenter whiteness" crowd, and even getting tougher on immigration—all while Trump strongarmed Republicans to literally sustain the problem so he'd have something to run on. So of course we'll never be able to compete with the Republicans on the issue, since they blame all of our problems on it, lie their asses off promoting viral anti-immigrant hoaxes, and them make it clear that it's all just political theater to them. We'll always seem weak on immigration to them.
As for transgendered people, you seriously want Democrats to treat them the way Republicans do? To show no tolerance or empathy whatsoever? Why is this always the first thing out of every heterodox critic's mouth when they want to tell Democrats what's wrong with them? Are we really expected to believe that this issue, regarding such a tiny minority of the population, is really why the working class think the Democrats don't care about them?
The Democratic coalition is a diverse one with a wide range of cultural opinions. Most Democrats and Democratic leaning people, including me, support transgendered people's rights to some extent. I don't think that in general transgendered or intersex women should be ranked in women's sports, and I have my misgivings about the issue of transgendered teens, but I absolutely do not want Democrats approaching the issue with Ron DeSantis-level cruelty.
Yes, I would like the party to try to frame things mostly in terms of tolerance for people's differences and having lawmakers stay out of people's health decisions, and that sort of thing. But that doesn't mean that Democrats should be forcefully repudiating anyone's cultural values. I'm an atheist and I don't expect them to repudiate the existence of God.
Seriously, just how much more of the Democratic coalition would you like them to alienate in order to please people who will probably still tar them with the most extreme opinions of the left, because the right wing propaganda mills they get their information from will never relent on that matter? The real war is against the oligarchs who fund this rabble-rousing agitprop to keep their taxes low. You honestly think we can outrun their cultural demagoguery by changing up messaging a bit? We are still supposed to be the liberals, right?
There is always going to be a far left, and there is always going to be a range of sympathy with their opinions. The distance from the left to the right flank of the Democratic Party is going to be a wide one. The Democrats have to somehow mamage all of that, and are in no greater position to forcefully repudiate the left than they are to repudiate the slightly right leaning centrists they have so clearly focused on bringing into the fold.
You see what happened when the ignorant rich college brats that we can normally presume will vote for us decide they want to teach the party a lesson because they're unhappy about a complicated foreign policy issue they fail to completely grasp? There's a range of sympathy with them across the Democrat body politic, but the party itself, as well as Kamala Harris, more or less told them to go f--- themselves. She shut them up when they heckled her at the DNC, and the party didn't allow any Pro-Palestinian speakers.
And look where that got us. Now you seem to want them to do the same with transgendered people. Try to imagine how well that one would go over with the Zoomers based on what you saw with the "Genocide Joe" movement.
As I pointed out above, the Democrats are forced to try to placate the far left to some degree, because the people who should support them based on the "kitchen table" issues we're always told really matter, apparently don't, because working class white people increasingly vote against the party that actually delivers on that front for them. Why? Because it's far easier to form opinions based on cultural biases than the actual details of what the government is doing to better people's lives.
And yet when we try to point this out, along comes the culture war brigade making false equivalences. You're seriously going to credit Trump with the accomplishments of the American biomedical reaearch community? Trump hired the right guy to head the thing, I'll give him that. And again, the biggest lockdowns came under Trump.
And yes, Democrats favored lockdowns in their communities out of an abundance of caution, and they made some mistakes, particularly with school closings. And you want to somehow tar all Democrats with decisions made at the local level.
In which case, do you know what Republicans got behind when it came to COVID? Not taking the goddamn vaccine! And because of that, and Trump's abysmal leadership on the matter, we had some of the worst per-capita death rates in the developed world.
I think I'll cast my lot with Democrats on that one.
But this is a distraction from the real issue, which is that it takes a stunning amount of ignorance and disinformation to think that somehow the last four years, whatever people may not have liked, warrant putting back into office the most destructive President in American history, who literally engaged in a conspiracy to steal the last presidential election, for which some people have already gone to jail (with more to come), who stole secret sensitive documents and then tried to hide them, and who is a dupe to the world's most repugnant autocrats, and an instrument of American decline on their behalf.
All while Joe Biden restored pensions, supported worker strikes, wrestled with the inflation that bedeviled the entire world and brought it to heel, and brought significant economic development to places that badly needed it yet have zero chance of giving him a single Electoral vote. And Trump's probably going to take credit for the latter.
But sure. Tell us how the problem is the Democratic Party's lack of empathy.
Huh? Who ya preachin' to? As I've already noted, "In 2016, I voted for Bernie (as a California write-in) over Nurse Ratched, in 2020 for Biden, and in 2024 for Harris (for the reasons you mention, among others)."
THAT said -- "Find me a Democrat..."? Here in Oakland, the Democratic Party officially opposed the recall of the "woke" Mayor and DA, and in California statewide, all of our (Democratic) state officials -- from the Governor on down -- opposed Prop 36 (rolling back criminal justice "reforms") - all of which (against the Party's wishes) voters overwhelmingly approved. This has also repeatedly been true for "affirmative action" -- which (again, against the Party's wishes) voters have rejected numerous times.
As for "trans"? In CA, if a student goes by a different name or gender at school, the school district can be (and has been) sued by the state for refusing to CONCEAL this from the kid's parents. This is a mirror-image of DeSantis using the State to interfere in family matters. I understand the rationale, but here, the notion is that (by default) parents are likely to be abusive -- and that therefore, the State is entitled to raise their kids and to inculcate its purported values (which can change with the political winds!) -- and to hide from parents some of the most crucial and intimate details of their own kids' lives. To most parents, that (rightfully) is simply anathema....
As a gay male, I also have a dog in this fight (or, as one might say, skin in the game).
I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing “Queer" about same-sex attraction. I’m attracted to guys; I’ve never hidden that fact, and (as my parents raised me) I’m proud simply to be myself. I never signed up to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World.
Yes, "trans" people exist. They're just not what they crack themselves up to be.
I myself experience some stereotypically "feminine" emotions, but I have nothing in common with anyone who -- for the sake of "gender identity" -- would cut off their dick to spite their crotch. Recognizing that such ostensibly "feminine' feelings are perfectly consistent with my (male) body has been absolutely crucial to my self-acceptance as a gay male.
“Gender" (as distinct from biological sex) is a social fiction. Indeed, among gay males, drag is about repudiating and ridiculing the very concept of "gender identity" -- not "affirming" it.
Gay people repudiate "gender identity." "Trans" people repudiate biological sex.
A person genuinely suffering from a brain-body mismatch (due to a neurological or hormonal anomaly) deserves the same decency, compassion and access to medical treatment (if need be) as anyone with a disability.
All the rest is cosplay.
As with patronizing notions like "people of color" (or "AAPI," or "Latinx"), the arbitrary category of “LGBTQIA+” (as imposed by The Groups [funded by the same sorts of oligarchic foundations whose names you'll hear as sponsors on NPR]) suggests that being gay is tantamount to self-castration. Meanwhile, the implicitly adversarial notion of "Queer" jeopardizes the hard-won, widespread integration and acceptance that gay people have otherwise already gained.
(And, no, you don't get to raise the specter of 'anti-woke" homophobia as a foil. In the very same election where Californians voted for the "crackdown-on-crime" Prop 36, we [also overwhelmingly] voted to guarantee the right to same-sex marriage in our State Constitution.)
So yes, I'll pull up the ladder behind me if someone (running a protection racket) is clutching at my heels -- misrepresenting what I'm about, and trying to drag me down.
And the same goes for my Asian neighbors, who (along with myself) witnessed the sacking of Oakland's Chinatown (and the destruction of innumerable mom-and-pop businesses) during the Summer of Floyd.
In fact, I think I can confidently identify at least one Trump voter ("of color," at that): That South Asian convenience-store clerk in Ferguson who got slugged by Mike Brown! That's also the point in the Obama era when things started to turn. Many (like myself) who'd voted enthusiastically for Obama's "No Black America, No White America" witnessed the pivot to "Black Lives," and recognized it as a bait-and-switch.
For all that, I nonetheless voted for Harris (not for the despicably corrupt Trump). But I still contend that Kamala needed a resonant and unmistakable Sista Souljah moment -- and since that never happened (with the clarity and intensity it required), she was unable to close the deal.
If you have an issue with any of this, I suggest that you take it up with James Carville -- a fervent (and politically astute) Democrat if ever there was one. Or is he, too, just the sort of misguided soul you're talking about?
I will concede that Democrat candidates likely shot off their feet in many cases with poor messaging, but we also know that most voters don't bother to get too involved in political issues until the election is near. The extent of their comprehension of what is at stake, what is true, and what is achievable is limited by the sources of information that they follow. I can appreciate Henry's quite legitimate concerns, but his assessment of Trump as a competent CEO leaves me shaking my head. He is clueless on that point and no amount of empathy on my part will change that fact. Those of us who saw this election as having a significant moral dimension in deciding what kind of country we wish to be are obviously disappointed. The Cabinet picks so far do nothing to assuage my concerns. I agree with James Quinn's comments and I am somewhat younger than he is. That so many could overlook Trump's lack of moral character, his own lack of empathy, lack of care for the Constitution itself (an ongoing activity) and documented failings is not just sad, it is having concrete consequences. Apparently some folks are now finding out that they should have taken Trump literally, not just seriously. There is a lot of reforming that needs doing, but the reforms currently on the horizon will not benefit the country so much as they will benefit Trump and those in his orbit. The folks who voted for him, and those who stayed home, are responsible for this outcome and will share in whatever pain is inflicted on the country. That is not condescension, that is a fact.
I just started reading the 3rd volume of The Last Lion, a pretty definitive biography of Winston Churchill. I think a pretty good case could be made for him that he was a raging narcissist, nor was he kind or thoughtful most of the time, he said pretty mean things about people all the time and treated them pretty badly often, assigned denigrating nicknames to those he didn't like, was a bully, domineering, privileged, and self confident to a fault. I could go on about his negative qualities. He was persistent, willful, stubborn, determined, resolute and loved speechifying in front of an audience. And yet, most people loved him. At bottom, he loved his country and he loved his countrymen and despite his qualities, they loved him back. Also, he won WWII. OK, not all by himself, but still. I couldn't help but think of Trump as Churchill's description sounds alot like what people despise about him. I get it, he's a little too used car salesman for me, but I'm just saying he wasn't the first to have a whole slew of negative qualities and win against all odds.
“Democrats now need to heed this advice. They must take the party in a pragmatic direction that strips away the condescension and self-righteousness while staying true to their values. They can prove to voters that strength is not bullying; that pride in America can expand who we are, rather than shrink it; and that American greatness is not a slogan, but an unyielding commitment to empowering average folks to achieve their American Dream. “
TRUMP ALREADY BEAT YOU (DEMOCRATS) TO IT! 🤣
Traditional Democrats (like me) that the stink-ass, condescending, elitist “Democratic Party” alienated with their leftist extremist “woke” culture warriors will support Trump, Vance and their ilk until American institutions are at least equalized with VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY.
Agreed. Nonetheless, where are the admonitions to Republicans to ask themselves how it is that half the country doesn't support them? Social cohesion shouldn't be one-sided nor a zero-sum game.
Both correct and pragmatic. I hope the Democratic leadership will hear this. I personally am planning to get more involved in the party on a local level so I can have a voice. In Washington State, though, not sure that voice will be heard.
yes, joining the parties whichever one you want to reform is really important. I’m in the 36th. I’m a moderate Democrat and I am just shamed for being that literally called names at the meetings at times and completely dismissed and discounted has nothing in the 36th, it’s all Progressive all day every day and they consider that to be the party rather than having a pluralistic view of the tent and the the members.
Republicans give WAY more to charities per capita. I live in high wealth upper class liberal territory and my extended family lives in low wealth working class MAGA territory, and although I care for many people that I call friends where I live, in my assessment of the people in both of these tribes, what I see is a general trait of great selfishness in the high wealth upper class liberal territory.
While the people in MAGA territory will give in ways that actually hurts them in order to help others, the people in liberal territory only virtue signal charity that does not result in any material adverse impacts to their own lifestyle.
There is probably something economic-class related to this... people that have less are less clutching to what they have, and people that have more have been determined to be more likely to crave retention of what they have, and to have a greater desire to get more.
However, the problem isn't this... it is the inauthenticity of Democrat virtue. I will give you just one example of many. Where I live, a university town where 80% voted for Kamala Harris, the population passed an ordinance that the majority had to approve any peripheral development project that would be annexed to the city. Since that ordinance was passed, in addition to the environmental impact lawsuits this wealthy NIMBY group throws out to kill every project, even infill, the voters have rejected every peripheral development project for the last 30 years. The result has been sky high housing costs as the supply does not keep up with demand, and the demographic problem of fewer young professionals and families living here. Homelessness has exploded, too low tax revenue leading to roads and parks not being maintained, programs cut... but the wealthy liberal property owners have managed to secure their own wealth in real estate values... while claiming they are affordable housing advocates donating their time to non-profits that advocate tax increases to "help" the homeless.
Well Frank, you might be surprised to learn that people in lower income tiers still overwhelmingly lean Democrat. People still get more Republican the more money they earn, until you get to around three times the median income, and then it starts to lean Democrat again.
And while we all probably agree that rich people have their hypocrisies and annoyances, it would hardly be fair to differentiate that by political party. After all, at least Democrats vote for policies that benefit the poor and working class.
In fact, aside from the fact that you're exaggerating the difference between charitable giving levels, the fact that Democrats vote for higher taxes—including their own—is one of the complications which render these statistics misleading. Those higher taxes generally do more good than private charitable action. According to one study on the charitable giving gap:
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"Those in favor of lower taxes have argued that individuals are more capable than the government of allocating money to important causes, including people in need of assistance. But the study found that was not true. Donations do not match government assistance, and without tax money, social services are not funded as robustly.
“The evidence shows that private philanthropy can’t compensate for the loss of government provision,” Dr. Nesbit said. “It’s not equal. What government can put into these things is so much more than what we see through private philanthropy.”
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That study emphasized that while they could measure the giving levels, they couldn't make any determinations about where the money went or how it was used. Another study, though, concluded that the distinction was almost entirely accounted for by a rather unsurprising factor—church donations:
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"Republicans are not only more likely to attend church than Democrats, but church attendance – among Democrats and Republicans alike – is strongly associated with charitable giving. Gaps in giving, therefore, are linked to differences in the social composition of the parties, in which the average Republican is more religious than the average Democrat. Moreover, the overall giving gap emerges because Republicans donate more to their own religious congregations, rather than nationally active religious charities. Republicans and Democrats give roughly equal amounts to religious organisations aside from their own congregations, and we also find some evidence that Democrats donate more to non-religious organisations than Republicans. In other words, the baseline difference in charitable giving emerges because Republicans are more religious than Democrats, and religious people donate generously to their religious congregations."
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You see, anything that you give to a tax-exempt charity organization can be classified as "charitable giving". When I was a young Catholic school boy, my parents dropped an envelope into the collection plate each week, part of which went to reductions in my tuition.
Evangelicals, in particular, engage in a practice known to the Biblically familiar as tithing—giving a certain percentage of your income automatically to the church. And if you've ever seen any of these modern-day mega-churches run by celebrity-seeking, wealth-worshipping Evangelical pastors (in addition to the ones we witnessed on TV growing up in the golden age of televangelism), well, let's just say I don't think you need to be incredibly cynical to feel dubious about where all of that money ends up going, and whom it ends up helping.
Oh, my. Are you an undergraduate or graduate student? This is an excerpt from which “paper” you are writing, hoping to get high marks in which subject?
Sorry if you think I sound too academic, but I was done with grad school over half my life ago. These are my spontaneous thoughts plus a few minutes of research.
I could be more colorful, but I have a history with Frank so I'm trying to be nicer. But this is generally representative of my writing style.
🤯 No, I don’t think you “sound too academic.” And I don’t care about your “writing style.” Your response seems very self-concerned/self-conscious. Introspection can gift you with self-awareness: try it some time.
"After all, at least Democrats vote for policies that benefit the poor and working class."
There is no evidence that Democrats vote for policies that benefit the poor and working class. There is more recent evidence that Democrat vote for policies that harm the poor and working class. Climate crisis policies for example.
"In fact, aside from the fact that you're exaggerating the difference between charitable giving levels, the fact that Democrats vote for higher taxes—including their own"
Advocating higher taxes, or in any case when spending other people's money, is not charitable. This is especially true given the case that Democrats tend to be higher income and wealth and their tax increase policies have an adverse impact on families at the lower income and wealth levels as per Laffer Curve realities.
The ideological weaponization of empathy is one of the most dangerous developments on the radical left. Empathy is an emotion, which some people are neurologically incapable of. But ethics is not based on emotions. Ethics can be based on a system of rules (deontological ethics) or on the consequences of one's actions (utilitarianism). But when you divide people into those who are empathetic and those who are not, you dehumanize your political enemies. The same people who are vehemently opposed to the biological determinism of race embrace their own biological determinism: "us", the kind people, versus "them", the cruel ones. It becomes a secular version of Calvinism, with the elect and the damned. This article correctly points out that many Trump voters, denigrated by the left, adhere to their own ethical system, which in fact may be more rational than DEI. Until this is recognized, the left will lose.
Elana. Your first line was enough said.
But your closer line was pertinent, too.
Everything in between…
Well, OK.
You’re a grad student working on “a paper”—and this is an excerpt?
I think what Elana wrote was very useful, all of it.
Most Americans are small-L liberal. We support civil liberties, equal opportunity, and equality before the law. We are also small-C conservative. We prefer incremental changes. We are reluctant to throw the baby out with the bath water.
The Left is anything _but_ liberal. The Democratic Party cannot win with its shrill, censorious factions in the ascendant.
I find this so shocking that it’s honestly hard to believe:
“The local Democratic organization sent out an email that framed the election as a choice between ‘two very different futures: one that embraces justice, diversity, equity and inclusion vs one that stands for fear, discrimination, othering, and law driven by extremist right-wing ideology.’”
Talk about blind spots! One great irony here is that this local Dem party message employs ideological extremism in order to accuse Republicans of “extremist right-wing ideology .”
Another irony is that this Dem message embraces the left wing version of “anti-racist” racism (racial discrimination against whites, Asians, and Jews) in order to condemn discrimination!
Rarely do pots meet kettles on such explicit terms.
And I’m well aware, of course, that jargon like “equity” and “othering” are employed to a woeful extent at left leaning institutions of higher Ed, but I’m astounded any political party would be dumb enough to associate itself with a fringe movement of radical identitarians.
So I say this as a Dem voter: if I had received a message like that from my local Dem party, I probably wouldn’t have voted. I certainly wouldn’t have voted for any political organization putting out that message. And I have never voted for a Republican in my life. Maybe if there was a compelling independent candidate, I would’ve gone in that direction, but that would’ve been the only possibility.
One has to be extensively cocooned in an ideological echo chamber to communicate with voters as poorly as that message does. How hard is it to simply state that you’ll fight to give everyone a fair shot to get ahead (thereby promoting the very popular concept of equality of opportunity)?
To their credit, the Harris campaign avoided any of those absurd references to identity. But a 90 day campaign cannot in and of itself fundamentally alter the negative and censorious branding that the Dems have now spent years developing. Dems may ultimately need their own kind of Trump to do an end-run around the fully indoctrinated party establishment.
“othering…”
Like you, I recoil when I read language like that.
In the summer of 2020, someone across the street from me put a sign in their window: “Protect black bodies. Serve black bodies.” It got me wondering what a black bus driver or sanitation worker or delivery driver might make of such alienated language if they happened to glance at it in the middle of the night as they were doing their job. Bemusement? Indifference? Both more likely than a recognition of solidarity, I think.
Jargon is a real horror, because it’s instantly divisive. And putting it into political campaign literature seems suicidal.
"How hard is it to simply state that you’ll fight to give everyone a fair shot to get ahead (thereby promoting the very popular concept of equality of opportunity)?"
Apparently pretty hard since we are unable to eliminate race and sex quotas that discriminate against white men.
Believing what they do about Trump's supposed "threat to Democracy", I cannot take them seriously when they don't try to field a candidate at least as stimulating as Trump. Bernie Sanders came the closest in 2016, but he has been bought by the establishment.
I’m sorry, but I’m tired of hearing about how democrats need to have more empathy for the people who voted for Donald Trump. I have long been opposed to and concerned about far left elitism and wokism. I think that is has been the major factor doing harm to the democratic party’s ability to win elections. I can understand how people are frustrated with having to worry about how they use pronouns when talking about people, and with the lack of effort by Biden and other democrats to take concerns about border security serious.
However, those reasons do not excuse voting for someone who, leaving aside his policy positions if you can call them that, has demonstrated to be corrupt, incompetent and an ego maniac, such that he truly poses a danger to our country. Whatever you think about Harris or Biden, these were not far left liberals. Harris clearly tried to make that clear. Let me ask you this question, was your sister a far left woke liberal elitist who looked down upon people and ignored their concerns? It doesn’t sound like she was. So why should we feel empathy for the people who just ignored the person she actually was and instead bought into the Fox News and on line lies about Trump, or just knew about them and chose to ignore them (putting the country in jeopardy). Why is that OK or understandable? I don’t think it is.
Trump is much worse that just a person who says disgusting things. Again, he is corrupt (cheats and breaks the law for his own personal benefit), incompetent (completely mismanaged the COVID crisis leading to ten or thousands of unnecessary deaths), narcissistic ego maniac (who, talk about no empathy) only cares about himself and has delusional views about himself). He is genuinely dangerous, as his first terms demonstrated, and we are very likely to see much worse in a second terms. I do emphasize to some degree about the frustrations about the far left that some people feel, but please, unless they are truly in a media bubble that shields them from the truth (which is likely in some cases), nothing excuses them from putting our country in such danger.
Trump may be all those things, but he also speaks to their priorities. They know all those things about him. But they chose him anyway. You can either conclude the did it because they are morally bankrupt, or you can acknowledge that not everyone values the things we value to the same extent that we value them. To them, the choice made sense. If you cannot understand *why* they made that choice, you will never be able to sell them *your* values as a Democrat.
And while I think it's a good idea to listen to Trump voters in general, I think the ones of most interest are the swing voters and the formerly-Democrat voters. The MAGA faithful are not going to be persuaded by a Democrat message in the foreseeable future. The voters who are, by definition, persuadable (because they have just been persuaded) are where we should focus our efforts.
It's a combination of policy and sales pitch and simple character -- Democrats lost those voters' trust and need to earn it back.
I agree with your point about focusing on the swing voters. I also understand that a lot of people were extremely frustrated that dems were’nt listening to them and hearing their concerns. I also think that divided information ecosystems and the level of misinformation is a huge part of the problem. We need to find a way to get back to defending truth and finding ways for truth to be shared.
As an independent who did not vote for Trump (and agrees with your assessment of him) but also could not bring myself to vote for Harris, I think more traditional Dems (not partisan in an insulting way, but people who are technically Democratic and get most of the information from traditional media), don't realize how ubiquitous misinformation is on both sides. Perhaps even more importantly, they miss how people who vote for Trump view his disinformation when compared to the Democratic Party.
The biggest example of this disinformation miscalibration is how non-dems view Joe Biden's cognitive state. For many Americans, hiding that was the most significant act of disinformation in recent memory (perhaps since Watergate) and they believe the media assist in this (which reinforces their belief that places like Fox News actually report the truth).
Trump will come out and say some bald-faced lies but be called on them repeatedly, while the fact that the president of the US could, at least at times, hardly construct a coherent sentence, and no one mentions it until it becomes a political liability. Before then, all the videos, etc., were "cheap fakes." People see this as disinformation that the media was broadly complicit in. In this I would agree with more Trump supporters...this was disinformation and it hurt America (not least of all by depriving the Dem party of an opportunity to select a more viable candidate).
Another less high-profile but equally damaging shift is Harris' attempt to shift to the middle. From speaking with family who voted for Trump, they generally viewed him as being more honest than Harris. Why? You know who Donald Trump is and what he is about. Most Americans do not like it, but the actual person is a pretty easy read. Harris, on the other hand, was a prosecutor who turned anti-law enforcement when convenient and turned back to an even harder-core prosecutor when convenient.
I say this as someone who supported Harris in her initial run back in 2019/2020. She was briefly my preferred candidate as someone who could inject some reason into issues related to criminal justice. Boy, was I let down. I think persuadable voters see this as duplicitous, in a way that contrasts very strongly with Trump pretty consistently being an ass and a blowhard. I think many people viewed his consistency in this area as genuine. The devil they know being less problematic than a candidate who has been all over the board and gone along with some pretty crazy ideas during 2020.
I want to emphasize that this post is in no way and attack on you. I think your post is broadly correct in most areas. I wanted to post this because I am hearing a lot from Dems about "disinformation" and that what they need to do is a better job of informing the public.
I don't think this is the case. What the Dems need to do is to stop trying to deceive the public (and themselves). This would begin with things like not trying to convince people that defunding the police does not mean defunding the police, not hiding a president's mental decline until it is unequivocally revealed on national television, not using word games to try and hide Harri's responsibility for immigration, etc.
I have said this in other posts, but my sense is that the Trump voters who could have been convinced to vote for Harris feel that Trump lies in the particular but that the Democrats deceived them more broadly. And people would rather be lied to than fooled.
"Another less high-profile but equally damaging shift is Harris' attempt to shift to the middle. From speaking with family who voted for Trump, they generally viewed him as being more honest than Harris. Why? You know who Donald Trump is and what he is about. Most Americans do not like it, but the actual person is a pretty easy read. Harris, on the other hand, was a prosecutor who turned anti-law enforcement when convenient and turned back to an even harder-core prosecutor when convenient."
This is really important: I think what you're getting at here is that Trump, while an inveterate liar, seems more authentic than Harris. Trump doesn't generally try to pretend he's someone he's not. He's totally inconsistent in terms of policies and promises and plans, but you never feel like the guy talking is afraid to speak his mind. Harris, on the other hand, didn't seem to want to speak at all, seemed afraid of it. And when we saw what she had to say, it really didn't feel like the "real Harris" was the one speaking (though it was hard to tell because no one really seemed to know who the "real Harris" was at all).
Very valid point on Biden. No question that he should have been a one term president and announced early that he wasn’t seeking a second term. I believed it then and of course now as well. I’m not convinced that he lacked the ability to govern, but he clearly lacked the ability to be an effective candidate, as we finally saw clearly at the debate. He also stayed in two long after the debate and then forced the decision to Harris by quickly endorsing her once she exited. All this definitely contributed to the fundamental problem that Dems face today, which is a lack of trust from the electorate. All of this still isn’t reason enough to put the who country in jeopardy, as Trump’s early appoinment choices seem to indicate. I just hope that our institutions hold up long enough for us to get to he midterms. In the meantime, Dems need to clearly meet people where they are, which is in the center — not the far left.
Thanks for your post. I think you’ve made come valid points. Harris was not my first choice and I was very concerned when Biden essentially ensured that she was the only option. I don’t think that she is actually a very ideological person. In 2019, I think she was told by many from the left that she needed to be acceptable to the progressives and she adopted several of those positions. This time, the opposite was the case, and she needed to move toward the center, but also was told that she could risk reducing the progressive turnout (which turned out to be a big mistake). If she would have won, I think that she could have been more of a centrist leader who could have brought different sides, including reasonable republicans together (given support from all the never Trumpers). Alas, we’ll never know. So I understand the distrust that many people had about her and the fear that she could be too heavily influenced by the far left. Why she didn’t separate herself from Biden, take a stronger stand on border security, respond to the negative trans ads, I don’t know, but I think it cost her the election. My concern about Trump, is that he is something more than one of two evils. I think that he could seriously do damage to our country and his proposed appointments seems to validate that concern. I also think that being corrupt, incompetent and narcissistic, present threats that go beyond any policy positions on immigration or other woke issues. But I do understand that far left progressives have caused many people to lose trust in democrats and that is the key issue that democrats need to address if they hope to win elections going forward.
Thank you. Your comments are very useful to me as someone trying to understand how anyone could vote for Trump.
My take: repair and reinforce our institutions that find and report facts. They are pretty obviously run by some of the more ideologically-driven elements of the liberal-progressive cohort. Not hard to see science journals which have editorials that argue for very unscientific ideas, which seem allergic to empirical observation, and which exercise pretty significant isolated demands for rigor. Combine that with things like scientists who refuse to release their data and then get "found out" in a big email dump that they have been talking about how they don't want to release certain things because it will be be misunderstood by conservatives (or worse) and it doesn't take long for anyone who's not already in the tank to become suspicious of the whole enterprise. And that's merely the science. The journalism is poor as well.
Want someone else to share the same truth you do? Convince them that truth is what motivates you and share how you got there.
By the way, I strongly recommend listening to John Heilman’s podcast “Impolitic” where he interview to democratic members of Congress, Seth Gouldin and Ritchie Torres. I think their views about the election and what democrats need to do are spot on.
Sorry about all the typos. Wish there was a way to correct after posting.
There is. The little three dots at the bottom-right contain an "edit" option.
When I hit the three dots, I don’t see an option to edit.
Are you using the app or the web site? I don’t think it works in the app
I haven’t been able to do that recently so maybe that’s been eliminated. I’ve tried to click the dots and edit a post that I made but to no avail.
It's not about just listening to voters it's about changing policy. Democrats can't just put lipstick on the pig.
I think it would be fair to argue that if we want to know what policies to change, we need to understand why voters don't like the existing policies.
This is the best post-election thought piece I’ve read on why the election turned out as it did. Thanks Ed.
The element that is missing from so much of this acrimonious debate is the one essential element.
I’m an old white guy who’s been an American for nearly 80 years. I’ve been a soldier, a construction worker, a merchant seaman, a camp counselor and director (and yes, even a paper boy on a bicycle), and for just over 40 years I taught American history at the elementary level.
America has always been split into at least two warring camps, if not more. Americans have always had differing visions of what America is or isn’t, should or shouldn’t be, has or has not done right and/or wrong, even what it really means to be an American.
I am and always have been willing to listen to anyone who honestly wonders about these varying visions, as I have often done myself along my way. I’m a plank owner in the first generation in human history to grow up knowing we have the power to utterly destroy ourselves. I served in the army during the most misbegotten and misunderstood war we’ve ever been involved in, all the while watching that army and my country tearing themselves apart over that war and the racial issues we’ve been unable to resolve since our founding. I watched the assassinations and the riots and American soldiers shooting American kids on college campuses. I lived, terrified, through those awful thirteen days in October of 1962 while the world waited with bated breath for resolution or Armageddon because we’d been too damn stupid to realize what four thousand years of warfare hadn’t seemed to teach us about our vast capacity for stupidity. But I was also there when after years of concerted effort we sent three human beings to another celestial body, a feat only imagined as science fiction for millennia. I was there for Martin Luther King’s dream. I was born exactly nine months to the day after the greatest armada of human justice ever assembled landed to begin the final defeat of the most hideous political regime ever to blacken our history. I’ve been able to read the thoughts of the most enlightened men and women who ever lived, and to marvel at the heights to which the human mind can reach, even if I was sure I only partially understood just how high. I’ve gloried in music created by men and women that sang with the voice of angels. I’ve seen humanly created pictures of stars and galaxies so distant in space and time that no human mind can fully comprehend either such distance or such time. I’ve read (and a couple of times participated in) our long and often difficult search for our origins as a species, and at the same time listened to the lunatic controversies surrounding that long, unfinished search.
There are times now when I think that this nation founded with so much hope in a land of such surpassing beauty and bounty is inhabited by a race of idiots. We had it all laid out for us. We were founded as the first nation on earth to define itself at its inception as that nation in which 'We the People’ might together find enough of the courage, the honesty, the understanding, the tolerance, the compassion, the humility, the wisdom, the humor, the hope, and the sheer and simple common sense to rule ourselves from the bottom up. Yet how often in our history has our political, social, or religous conversation contained even a modicum of all those characteristics long enough to make a permanent impression.
Tomorrow is the anniversary of a speech made by a tall, famously ugly ex-lawyer, wrestler, and rail-splitter to honor the Americans who died in the worst battle ever fought on this continent. In two brief moments which went almost unnoticed by many who were there, he encapsulated the promise we’d been given and the task which that promise laid on us.
As I think on his words I know that the election of Donald Trump for second term is the absolute antithesis of Abraham Lincoln and the American he believed was possible, fought for, and in the end gave his life to. I’m not insensitive to the motivations of those who either for him or against Ms Harris, but I’m sorry, I cannot either sympathize or understand how any of whatever grievances they may have felt were sufficient to entrust the nation so many have lived, worked, fought, and all too often died for to a man who has absolutely no concept of what that nation was founded to be, nor any respect for the electoral process, the Constitution, or the rule of law which underpin it.
Whatever potentially repairable flaws one may feel exist in the house, the answer is not to bring in a mendacious, malevolent, amoral, vengeful, self-absorbed huckster, con man, and liar with a wrecking ball.
James, in your last paragraph you have neatly encapsulated exactly what the author of this article has pointed out is the rot at the root of the thinking of present day Democrats. Name calling, demonising, and dehumanisation of the elected President of America, shows us all exactly why the Democrats lost the election. The trouble is that as pointed out in another readers comment "The ideological weaponization of empathy is one of the most dangerous developments on the radical left" with which your utterances seem to suggest that your opinions are "not for the turning" and never will be.
You’ve rather missed the point. The Democrats didn’t lose this election - the nation did. And my last paragraph wasn’t an exercise in weaponization of anything. It was a thumbnail description of Donald Trump, entirely verified not by me or the Democrats (I’m actually an Independent) but by and through his own words and actions. When the character of the man or woman occupying the Oval Office ceases to be a matter of grave importance or needs to be sugar-coated in the name of empathy, then we have failed as a nation.
DEI is racism. Woke is hate. On November 6th racism and hate lost.
Do you ever actually listen to Donald Trump? Racism and hatred won on November 6th. America lost.
"Racism and hatred won on November 6th"
Trump got record Latino and Black votes.
The notion that 'racism' won on November 6th is delusional. However, please keep it up. Vance in 2028 needs your help.
I repeat, do you ever actually listen to Trump? This is not a matter of who did or who didn’t vote for him. It’s a matter of listening to what he’s been doing and saying for his entire life - going right back to the Central Park Five and his days with his father and their racist housing policies. Do a little history.
But Trump is all of those things. Are we to ignore that?
DEI is racism. Woke is hate. On November 6th racism and hate lost.
I'm sorry; I know you're coming from a sincere place, but I just can't buy this argument anymore. We're doing nothing but rewinding the tape to 2017 as if we've learned nothing.
The Democrats, *as a party*, don't have an empathy problem. They have an appreciation problem.
Sure, you can say that many of the rank and file have a not so great opinion of their Republican counterparts, but so what? The feeling is clearly mutual; the Republicans demonstrate no shortage of animosity for their fellow Americans across the aisle.
But I honestly don't understand what people who level this criticism expect from the Democrats anymore. You all want to hyper-focus on making sure the working class feels "heard". Well we *do* hear them—for christ's sake I don't know how many times we've been over this exact same ground. The problem is that what they're saying is rife with poorly-informed opinions and misconceptions. What should Democrats do—cop to them? Tell them they're right that they suck, and will try to do better?
Don't misunderstand—I'm not saying Democrats should be telling people whether or not they're experiencing financial hardship. While there was some solid evidence that many people were judging the economy based on assumptions about other people's finances rather than their own, I argued they should avoid that question entirely. They just needed to impress on people that they're dealing with a global problem and that even though there's been a lot of progress, there's more work to be done. And of course, to make that case, they should point out how well the U.S. has done compared to other countries.
But what happens when the Democrats try to do something like this? They get told that they're condescending, and out of touch, and telling the working class that they don't care about the things they care about. All of a sudden the working class needs to be catered to, in just the way that we all criticize obnoxiously woke people for catering to favored minorities. Apparently, "standpoint epistemology" is just fine for some people, and grown adults can't be made to understand that their own personal situation isn't necessarily going to improve if they act on a misdiagnosis of a problem.
We keep hearing from people who want the Democrats to focus more strictly on economics, but they keep speaking as if Democrats haven't easily been the better party on economics overall, and especially for the working class. As if it's even close. The Democrats gave people healthcare, while many Republican governors sabotaged it for their own people, and Republicans throttled it even worse when Trump got into office. Democrats give tax breaks to the middle and working class, while Republicans give them primarily to the rich. Democrats extended the child tax credit, momentarily almost eliminating child poverty, while Republicans refused to vote to extend it.
And what's more, Biden was the most pro-union, and in many ways the most pro-working class President any of us have ever seen. He got pensions restored for a million union workers. One of the first things he did was clear out Trump's NLRB full of anti-union stooges and replace them with people who would actually serve labor interests. He brought jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into mostly red states that badly needed it, and for which Republican politicians tried to take credit, despite voting against it! He brought down inflation, wages have risen, and yes—he had to raise interest rates to do it, but now they're coming down again that inflation is under control.
And how much credit did he get for all of this?
Zero. Zilch. Nada.
And why? Because people don't understand that prices don't come back down, and that their employers didn't tell them that the wage increases they received were largely cost-of-living increases and not rewards for good work. Because people don't understand that Presidents don't control the economy, and that they are mostly just responding to macro factors, so it makes no sense to compare the economy today to the one we had before a world-changing pandemic. Because people like this nice fellow you've interviewed don't understand that the government is nothing like a business, because its job is to serve its people, not turn a profit, and thus credit Donald Trump for having a "CEO mentality".
This is not even to mention that Trump has actually proven to be a terrible businessman with a lousy grasp of economics. I guarantee you there isn't a single board of investors in America that would appoint Donald Trump as their company's CEO. And he doesn't have a CEO mentality—he's only ever been the head of his own, private, family-owned businesses, and thus has never had to disclose his income or personal finances. Most CEOs at least understand accountability to people who can fire them—not Trump.
Yet somehow, Trump gets a complete mulligan on his COVID mismanagement—this gentleman even blames the lockdowns which happened primarily under Trump, on Democrats—whereas Biden gets no slack for the fact he inherited a horrible economy and guided it back to health.
And yet our problem is that we don't listen to what's important to normal, working class Americans, and have no empathy.
I believe it was Noah Smith who pointed out recently that the old political order, where people could be relied on to mostly vote in their own financial interests—the affluent and wealthy voting Republican, and the working class and poor voting Democratic—has been replaced by something else. On one side, as Democrats have become better educated and wealthier, they've still chosen to back policies that redistribute wealth downward. And as Republicans have gotten poorer and less educated, they still support regressive economic policies that hurt the poor and working class and benefit the wealthy.
Needless to say, this does not demonstrate a lack of empathy on the part of the Democratic party, no matter how much insufferable wokeness people encounter on social media and in elite colleges—people whom Democrats unfortunately need to rely on to get voted into office because the people who should support them don't. And whom right wing media will never allow you to believe represent a small minority of the party.
As for what it says about working class Republicans, either it means they often don't realize what it is they're voting for—the argument I'm making here—or they consider cultural issues far more important. Which, let's be honest with ourselves, often includes the fact that Democrats try to show empathy to a wide swath of people, not just give voice to one particular group's grievances. Which, to be charitable, are typically nurtured by right-wing propaganda outlets, most of which are owned by Republican oligarchs who want people backing an ideology which keeps their taxes low.
And if people can afford to care that little about their real economic interests in favor of culture wars and lib-owning, it can hardly be said that they need our empathy. When polls show that people overwhelmingly support Democratic policies until they're told whose policies they are, that tells you something.
Yes, Democrats have a problem with their brand. But it is *not* because they lack empathy.
"Rife with poorly-informed opinions and misconceptions"? -- like those who claim that males can get pregnant (or that females are born with penises) -- or that (as with border-crashers), shoplifting is merely "undocumented" shopping?
With regard to Covid: Under Trump, we had Operation Warp Speed; Democrats were the cheerleaders for mandates and lockdowns. (And, especially in light of Operation Warp Speed and his own treatment when he had Covid, one would need be truly stupid to think Trump was serious about injecting bleach -- as many Democrats evidently take most Americans to be.)
If Democrats don't want to be equated with the "insufferably woke," they need to repudiate such views, in no uncertain terms. This isn't about "hate"; it's about making it clear that Democrats will no longer expect us to kowtow to a cadre of holier-than-thou "experts" and ideological bullies.
FULL DISCLOSURE: In 2016, I voted for Bernie (as a California write-in) over Nurse Ratched, in 2020 for Biden, and in 2024 for Harris (for the reasons you mention, among others). But (especially for Obama/Trump voters and their ilk) Kamala needed more than a slick pivot in order to be believable; she needed a resonant and unmistakable Sista Souljah moment. It never happened; thus, she was unable to close the deal.
You see, this is exactly what I'm talking about. You take the opinions of certain people on the left and claim that somehow the Democratic Party is shoving them down your throat. Find me a Democrat who ran on a message of forcing people to accept transgender ideology, or somehow not taking crime or immigration seriously, or anything close to the caricature you've presented here.
The Democrats have spent the last four years pushing back against the "defund the police" movement, the "decenter whiteness" crowd, and even getting tougher on immigration—all while Trump strongarmed Republicans to literally sustain the problem so he'd have something to run on. So of course we'll never be able to compete with the Republicans on the issue, since they blame all of our problems on it, lie their asses off promoting viral anti-immigrant hoaxes, and them make it clear that it's all just political theater to them. We'll always seem weak on immigration to them.
As for transgendered people, you seriously want Democrats to treat them the way Republicans do? To show no tolerance or empathy whatsoever? Why is this always the first thing out of every heterodox critic's mouth when they want to tell Democrats what's wrong with them? Are we really expected to believe that this issue, regarding such a tiny minority of the population, is really why the working class think the Democrats don't care about them?
The Democratic coalition is a diverse one with a wide range of cultural opinions. Most Democrats and Democratic leaning people, including me, support transgendered people's rights to some extent. I don't think that in general transgendered or intersex women should be ranked in women's sports, and I have my misgivings about the issue of transgendered teens, but I absolutely do not want Democrats approaching the issue with Ron DeSantis-level cruelty.
Yes, I would like the party to try to frame things mostly in terms of tolerance for people's differences and having lawmakers stay out of people's health decisions, and that sort of thing. But that doesn't mean that Democrats should be forcefully repudiating anyone's cultural values. I'm an atheist and I don't expect them to repudiate the existence of God.
Seriously, just how much more of the Democratic coalition would you like them to alienate in order to please people who will probably still tar them with the most extreme opinions of the left, because the right wing propaganda mills they get their information from will never relent on that matter? The real war is against the oligarchs who fund this rabble-rousing agitprop to keep their taxes low. You honestly think we can outrun their cultural demagoguery by changing up messaging a bit? We are still supposed to be the liberals, right?
There is always going to be a far left, and there is always going to be a range of sympathy with their opinions. The distance from the left to the right flank of the Democratic Party is going to be a wide one. The Democrats have to somehow mamage all of that, and are in no greater position to forcefully repudiate the left than they are to repudiate the slightly right leaning centrists they have so clearly focused on bringing into the fold.
You see what happened when the ignorant rich college brats that we can normally presume will vote for us decide they want to teach the party a lesson because they're unhappy about a complicated foreign policy issue they fail to completely grasp? There's a range of sympathy with them across the Democrat body politic, but the party itself, as well as Kamala Harris, more or less told them to go f--- themselves. She shut them up when they heckled her at the DNC, and the party didn't allow any Pro-Palestinian speakers.
And look where that got us. Now you seem to want them to do the same with transgendered people. Try to imagine how well that one would go over with the Zoomers based on what you saw with the "Genocide Joe" movement.
As I pointed out above, the Democrats are forced to try to placate the far left to some degree, because the people who should support them based on the "kitchen table" issues we're always told really matter, apparently don't, because working class white people increasingly vote against the party that actually delivers on that front for them. Why? Because it's far easier to form opinions based on cultural biases than the actual details of what the government is doing to better people's lives.
And yet when we try to point this out, along comes the culture war brigade making false equivalences. You're seriously going to credit Trump with the accomplishments of the American biomedical reaearch community? Trump hired the right guy to head the thing, I'll give him that. And again, the biggest lockdowns came under Trump.
And yes, Democrats favored lockdowns in their communities out of an abundance of caution, and they made some mistakes, particularly with school closings. And you want to somehow tar all Democrats with decisions made at the local level.
In which case, do you know what Republicans got behind when it came to COVID? Not taking the goddamn vaccine! And because of that, and Trump's abysmal leadership on the matter, we had some of the worst per-capita death rates in the developed world.
I think I'll cast my lot with Democrats on that one.
But this is a distraction from the real issue, which is that it takes a stunning amount of ignorance and disinformation to think that somehow the last four years, whatever people may not have liked, warrant putting back into office the most destructive President in American history, who literally engaged in a conspiracy to steal the last presidential election, for which some people have already gone to jail (with more to come), who stole secret sensitive documents and then tried to hide them, and who is a dupe to the world's most repugnant autocrats, and an instrument of American decline on their behalf.
All while Joe Biden restored pensions, supported worker strikes, wrestled with the inflation that bedeviled the entire world and brought it to heel, and brought significant economic development to places that badly needed it yet have zero chance of giving him a single Electoral vote. And Trump's probably going to take credit for the latter.
But sure. Tell us how the problem is the Democratic Party's lack of empathy.
Huh? Who ya preachin' to? As I've already noted, "In 2016, I voted for Bernie (as a California write-in) over Nurse Ratched, in 2020 for Biden, and in 2024 for Harris (for the reasons you mention, among others)."
THAT said -- "Find me a Democrat..."? Here in Oakland, the Democratic Party officially opposed the recall of the "woke" Mayor and DA, and in California statewide, all of our (Democratic) state officials -- from the Governor on down -- opposed Prop 36 (rolling back criminal justice "reforms") - all of which (against the Party's wishes) voters overwhelmingly approved. This has also repeatedly been true for "affirmative action" -- which (again, against the Party's wishes) voters have rejected numerous times.
As for "trans"? In CA, if a student goes by a different name or gender at school, the school district can be (and has been) sued by the state for refusing to CONCEAL this from the kid's parents. This is a mirror-image of DeSantis using the State to interfere in family matters. I understand the rationale, but here, the notion is that (by default) parents are likely to be abusive -- and that therefore, the State is entitled to raise their kids and to inculcate its purported values (which can change with the political winds!) -- and to hide from parents some of the most crucial and intimate details of their own kids' lives. To most parents, that (rightfully) is simply anathema....
As a gay male, I also have a dog in this fight (or, as one might say, skin in the game).
I’ve fought all my adult life to advance a recognition that there's nothing “Queer" about same-sex attraction. I’m attracted to guys; I’ve never hidden that fact, and (as my parents raised me) I’m proud simply to be myself. I never signed up to "smash cisheteropatriarchy" in the name of some Brave New World.
Yes, "trans" people exist. They're just not what they crack themselves up to be.
I myself experience some stereotypically "feminine" emotions, but I have nothing in common with anyone who -- for the sake of "gender identity" -- would cut off their dick to spite their crotch. Recognizing that such ostensibly "feminine' feelings are perfectly consistent with my (male) body has been absolutely crucial to my self-acceptance as a gay male.
“Gender" (as distinct from biological sex) is a social fiction. Indeed, among gay males, drag is about repudiating and ridiculing the very concept of "gender identity" -- not "affirming" it.
Gay people repudiate "gender identity." "Trans" people repudiate biological sex.
A person genuinely suffering from a brain-body mismatch (due to a neurological or hormonal anomaly) deserves the same decency, compassion and access to medical treatment (if need be) as anyone with a disability.
All the rest is cosplay.
As with patronizing notions like "people of color" (or "AAPI," or "Latinx"), the arbitrary category of “LGBTQIA+” (as imposed by The Groups [funded by the same sorts of oligarchic foundations whose names you'll hear as sponsors on NPR]) suggests that being gay is tantamount to self-castration. Meanwhile, the implicitly adversarial notion of "Queer" jeopardizes the hard-won, widespread integration and acceptance that gay people have otherwise already gained.
(And, no, you don't get to raise the specter of 'anti-woke" homophobia as a foil. In the very same election where Californians voted for the "crackdown-on-crime" Prop 36, we [also overwhelmingly] voted to guarantee the right to same-sex marriage in our State Constitution.)
So yes, I'll pull up the ladder behind me if someone (running a protection racket) is clutching at my heels -- misrepresenting what I'm about, and trying to drag me down.
And the same goes for my Asian neighbors, who (along with myself) witnessed the sacking of Oakland's Chinatown (and the destruction of innumerable mom-and-pop businesses) during the Summer of Floyd.
In fact, I think I can confidently identify at least one Trump voter ("of color," at that): That South Asian convenience-store clerk in Ferguson who got slugged by Mike Brown! That's also the point in the Obama era when things started to turn. Many (like myself) who'd voted enthusiastically for Obama's "No Black America, No White America" witnessed the pivot to "Black Lives," and recognized it as a bait-and-switch.
For all that, I nonetheless voted for Harris (not for the despicably corrupt Trump). But I still contend that Kamala needed a resonant and unmistakable Sista Souljah moment -- and since that never happened (with the clarity and intensity it required), she was unable to close the deal.
If you have an issue with any of this, I suggest that you take it up with James Carville -- a fervent (and politically astute) Democrat if ever there was one. Or is he, too, just the sort of misguided soul you're talking about?
I will concede that Democrat candidates likely shot off their feet in many cases with poor messaging, but we also know that most voters don't bother to get too involved in political issues until the election is near. The extent of their comprehension of what is at stake, what is true, and what is achievable is limited by the sources of information that they follow. I can appreciate Henry's quite legitimate concerns, but his assessment of Trump as a competent CEO leaves me shaking my head. He is clueless on that point and no amount of empathy on my part will change that fact. Those of us who saw this election as having a significant moral dimension in deciding what kind of country we wish to be are obviously disappointed. The Cabinet picks so far do nothing to assuage my concerns. I agree with James Quinn's comments and I am somewhat younger than he is. That so many could overlook Trump's lack of moral character, his own lack of empathy, lack of care for the Constitution itself (an ongoing activity) and documented failings is not just sad, it is having concrete consequences. Apparently some folks are now finding out that they should have taken Trump literally, not just seriously. There is a lot of reforming that needs doing, but the reforms currently on the horizon will not benefit the country so much as they will benefit Trump and those in his orbit. The folks who voted for him, and those who stayed home, are responsible for this outcome and will share in whatever pain is inflicted on the country. That is not condescension, that is a fact.
I just started reading the 3rd volume of The Last Lion, a pretty definitive biography of Winston Churchill. I think a pretty good case could be made for him that he was a raging narcissist, nor was he kind or thoughtful most of the time, he said pretty mean things about people all the time and treated them pretty badly often, assigned denigrating nicknames to those he didn't like, was a bully, domineering, privileged, and self confident to a fault. I could go on about his negative qualities. He was persistent, willful, stubborn, determined, resolute and loved speechifying in front of an audience. And yet, most people loved him. At bottom, he loved his country and he loved his countrymen and despite his qualities, they loved him back. Also, he won WWII. OK, not all by himself, but still. I couldn't help but think of Trump as Churchill's description sounds alot like what people despise about him. I get it, he's a little too used car salesman for me, but I'm just saying he wasn't the first to have a whole slew of negative qualities and win against all odds.
I'm no expert on UK history, but I'm pretty sure Churchill never tried to overturn an election.
Quite from the post:
“Democrats now need to heed this advice. They must take the party in a pragmatic direction that strips away the condescension and self-righteousness while staying true to their values. They can prove to voters that strength is not bullying; that pride in America can expand who we are, rather than shrink it; and that American greatness is not a slogan, but an unyielding commitment to empowering average folks to achieve their American Dream. “
TRUMP ALREADY BEAT YOU (DEMOCRATS) TO IT! 🤣
Traditional Democrats (like me) that the stink-ass, condescending, elitist “Democratic Party” alienated with their leftist extremist “woke” culture warriors will support Trump, Vance and their ilk until American institutions are at least equalized with VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY.
DEI is racism. Woke is hate. On November 6th racism and hate lost.
Agreed. Nonetheless, where are the admonitions to Republicans to ask themselves how it is that half the country doesn't support them? Social cohesion shouldn't be one-sided nor a zero-sum game.
Couldn’t agree more! Excellent read!!! This seems like an important inflection point.
Both correct and pragmatic. I hope the Democratic leadership will hear this. I personally am planning to get more involved in the party on a local level so I can have a voice. In Washington State, though, not sure that voice will be heard.
yes, joining the parties whichever one you want to reform is really important. I’m in the 36th. I’m a moderate Democrat and I am just shamed for being that literally called names at the meetings at times and completely dismissed and discounted has nothing in the 36th, it’s all Progressive all day every day and they consider that to be the party rather than having a pluralistic view of the tent and the the members.