Getting worse by the day are the Democratic wokes, who are alienating so many Americans that the party is in danger of complete meltdown this November. Even as stalwart a Democrat as James Carville said to the wokes the other day, “People don’t like you.”
He was quoted in Maureen Dowd’s four-alarm, hair-on-fire column in the Sunday Times, which I urge you to read. Dowd writes: “’They’re not popular,’ Carville said of such far-lefties, adding, in a line spoken directly to them: ‘People don’t like you.’”
Carville was speaking specifically of (or to) the three San Francisco School Board members who were recalled last week, but he could have been addressing any number of Democratic elected and appointed political figures, including some here in Oakland. “The [Democratic] party’s brand is so toxic” in rural America “that some liberals have removed bumper stickers and yard signs and refuse to acknowledge publicly their party affiliation,” says this Associated Press report from Feb. 17. Dowd reported that the liberal journalist Stanley B. Greenberg told her “he’s tired of trying to warn Democrats that they’re driving people away. ‘If they don’t listen this time,’ he said, ‘we’re going to end up with fascism, dammit.’”
But are Democrats listening? The evidence is mixed. President Biden is certainly not “woke,” and has spoken often about supporting the police. Most Democratic Senators are moderate. But theirs are voices that are seldom heard by the American people. Instead, the news coverage tends to be about people like Allison Collins, the disgraced S.F. School Board member (one of the three recalled), whose anti-Asian tweets, attack on Lowell High School, and attempts to rename public schools named after George Washington and Abraham Lincoln have made her the latest poster child for ridiculous, vain woke politicians. When Carville said, “People don’t like you,” he might have been speaking to Collins.
I’ve been around long enough to know that what Henry Adams called “the pendulum of American history” is an accurate description of the way political power shifts in this country between Republicans and Democrats. This in itself isn’t unusual. Some years, Republicans are the outcasts, such as 2008, when Democrats swept into control of both Houses of Congress and the Presidency. Some years, Democrats are on the outs, such as 2000, when Republicans took over the Presidency and the Congress. This is just the way things work.
But something feels different going into the 2022 elections. There is a hostility toward Democrats that you can sense, like the smell of an oily vapor in the air. To blame it simply on “defund the police” is too simple. True, the apostles of abolishing the police (such as Cat Brooks and Carroll Fife) have been instrumental in helping to destroy the Democratic brand, but they’re merely local figures in the East Bay. Just as toxic, perhaps, have been national figures, like The Squad, including Ilhan Omar, Pramila Jayapal and Rashida Tlaib. That all these woke individuals are women may be coincidence; or it may be that some latent misogyny is at work among the American populace, even among women. I can’t account for it. But partisan politics is not completely rational; what behavioral scientists call “the Q Score” is as important in determining one’s political devotions as are a candidate’s positions on the issues—maybe even more important. The truth is that many Americans may not fully understand why they don’t like these woke politicians, but the fact is, they don’t.
The New York Times columnist, David Brooks, last Spring wrote an op-ed that impressed me at the time with its acuity, and seems to have only become more prescient since. Brooks’ charged wokeness with “demonstrating one’s enlightenment by using language — ‘problematize,’ ‘heteronormativity,’ ‘cisgender,’ ‘intersectionality’-- inculcated in elite schools or with difficult texts.” This dismissive talking-down to Americans is accompanied by woke “canceling and shaming,” which become “a way of establishing [woke] status and power as an enlightened person.” This is exactly the message that woke politicians send all the time, although they may be unaware of it: “We know what’s best for you. You’re too dumb to make good decisions. Shut up and take it.”
Well, here we are. It’s too bad that all this is happening as Trumpism—one of the most appalling trends in American history—sweeps the country. It would be nice to have this conversation—which is an implicit indictment of Democrats—with a sane, rational Republican Party waiting in the wings. Sadly, there is no sane Republican Party, only fascism on the right that’s as stupid and dangerous as the woke fascism on the Left. Maybe what America needs, starting next November, is a good, cold splash of reality: Give Trump and his minions unalloyed power. Eventually, I believe, the American people would realize what a dreadful mistake they made. But by then, it will have been too late.
Steve Heimoff