He's a liberal, but he’s not insane. He’s colorful as hell—yes—but he isn’t ‘woke.’ In fact, that’s the slice of the party he knows is a problem and admits a lot of Democrats agree with that diagnosis. James Carville is a former Clinton operative behind the 42nd president of the United States’ 1992 shellacking of George H.W. Bush.
“It’s the economy, stupid.” You all know the slogans, but Carville also has been adamant that his party has well gone off the hinges. During the 2020 election, he noted that the party was peddling just asinine ideas like free college tuition and debt forgiveness. He might not be against the idea, but he knows it’s not a winning message—at all. He sat down with Vox last February to air his grievances with the party.
“Democrats talking about free college tuition or debt forgiveness. I’m not here to debate the idea. What I can tell you is that people all over this country worked their way through school, sent their kids to school, paid off student loans. They don’t want to hear this shit,” he said.
“We can’t win the Senate by looking down at people. The Democratic Party has to drive a narrative that doesn’t give off vapors that we’re smarter than everyone or culturally arrogant,” he later added.
Well, part of that is true. I don’t think Democrats barely won the Senate back based on ideas. It was more with messaging failures and bad campaigning on behalf of Republicans. Oh, and some funny 2020 election business—but I digress.
And now, Carville is back to rip into the ‘woke’ Left, who do think they’re smarter than everyone and ooze cultural arrogance (via Vox):
CARVILLE: You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not.
[…]
Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.
When asked why not, the answer was simple: mob rule.
Because they’ll get clobbered or canceled. And look, part of the problem is that lots of Democrats will say that we have to listen to everybody and we have to include every perspective, or that we don’t have to run a ruthless messaging campaign. Well, you kinda do. It really matters.
I always tell people that we’ve got to stop speaking Hebrew and start speaking Yiddish. We have to speak the way regular people speak, the way voters speak. It ain’t complicated. That’s how you connect and persuade. And we have to stop allowing ourselves to be defined from the outside.
I mean, that’s certainly going to infuriate some progressives for sure, but he’s right. Only white liberals use the terms “latinx” and “communities of color.” Yet, the problem is that the ‘woke’ are the ones who are surging in the ranks of the Democratic Party. White college-educated liberals are one of the only demographics, if not the only voter subset, where Democrats made huge gains over the past ten years. These people are insufferably ideological in…everything. They’re liberal when most of the core Democratic voter groups, believe it or not, do not describe themselves as such. Black and Hispanic voters do not consider themselves as liberal, which explains why both groups, Hispanics especially, bolted from Democrats in 2020 from across the country over white liberals’ insane policy pushes, like defunding the police. Hispanics are not overwhelmingly for a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens. David Shor, a former 2012 Obama campaign operative and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, has also analyzed the data on these voter groups and trends. White liberals have a view on racial resentment that is far off from that of the groups that would be most impacted by it. The Democrats are trending towards a narrative that’s dictated by white liberals in which the data simply does not exist to back it up. Also, they’re the ones who will be in the driver’s seat on messaging as they will also be the group to fill the campaign coffers. Nonwhite voters, who have voted Democratic for years, will be put in the backseat. The woke college-educated lefty is the one driving. I can see how that’s going to be a…problematic development.
H/T Hot Air