As the infrastructure vote shows and the latest jobs number is that the Biden Admin and Democrats (along with some Republicans) can get things done that actually help the American people. They need to put aside the noise on cultural issues like CRT. Unfortunately those are fights that the Democrats aren't going to be able to win as the very nebulous nature of the outrage over them makes it hard to actually counter.
Democrats Thought They Bottomed Out in Rural, White America. It Wasn’t the Bottom. Republicans ran up the margins in rural Virginia counties, the latest sign that Democrats, as one lawmaker put it, “continue to tank in small-town America.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/06/us/rural-vote-democrats-virginia.html excerpt: “It’s not sustainable for our party to continue to tank in small-town America,” said Representative Cheri Bustos, the Illinois congresswoman who led the House Democratic campaign arm in 2020. “We’ve got a branding problem as Democrats in way too many parts of our country,” said Ms. Bustos, who is retiring from a downstate and heavily rural Illinois seat that Mr. Trump carried twice. She called it “political malpractice” and “disrespectful to think it’s OK to run up the score in big cities and just neglect the smaller towns.” There is no easy solution.
“But while some Democratic politicians now recognize the scope of their rural problem, the words of voters in Bath County expose the difficulty in finding solutions. In interviews with a dozen white, rural voters who backed Mr. Youngkin, policy was less important than grievance and their own identity politics.”
Grievance and identity problems is more about being forgotten as "flyover country" than about white rights/oppression. I mean yes, there is a visceral dislike for poor whites to stand in breadlines with other poor minorities (the indignity! I worked hard up until now before my wave of bad luck. Give me a good job and I'll show you!!!), but this goes back to wealth gaps in location between urban areas vs rural, coastal vs midland...North vs. South? Cities are more able to integrate money and resources per person than large low density countryland. It is far more efficient because there are more specialists and a large pool of people to share talent and resources. Its also from these efficiencies that recoveries hit them first and lifts cities higher than rural areas. We've collectively been in a period of economic stagnation since the 08 collapse and those forgotten areas have been hit the hardest (you could argue the Rust Belt is still ravaging middle america) Despite that, the news cheer stock prices and "historic (ly pathetic) growth as recoveries. That frustration is the root cause, with their 'grievance' as the uglier symptoms. That root cause is also how both parties house Populist wings that can shift into a California wildfire at a moment's notice. The more people like Trump who see that opportunity to morph that energy of fear/frustration/desperation into political power, the more stress society will have to overcome. I mean, it's damn foolish right now to expect politicians to raise the country's interest over their self interests... It's not about standing up to people the Trumps of their own party (they mostly didn't) but more admitting past failures and committing future experimental failures to work our way out of our current unpredictable mess,
Democrats again lament their weakness in rural areas, but they don’t have an answer to the problem https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...316194-3f0d-11ec-bfad-8283439871ec_story.html excerpt: Democrats have seen this movie before. An election takes place, they examine the results and suddenly lament their poor showing with rural voters. It has happened time and again and yet the party has neither a solution to the problem nor, it seems, a commitment to solving it. The concerns have arisen again after Tuesday’s elections in Virginia. Democrat Terry McAuliffe got wiped out in rural areas of the state, as Republican Glenn Youngkin rolled up margins and turnout in the gubernatorial race that approached or eclipsed those of President Donald Trump in 2020. Rural Virginia was not the only reason McAuliffe lost, but his performance in those counties highlighted the party’s continuing weakness. The urban-rural divide is real and has gotten wider. Democrats have seen their future as one that runs through urban and suburban America, with a coalition that is increasingly diverse, younger and more liberal. What appeals to that rising Democratic Party, however, doesn’t necessarily resonate with rural voters and sometimes drives them away. That’s the conundrum for the party as it considers how to mend its rural deficiencies. “We go through this every time after an election, and we just never learned the lessons,” said former Democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), who has been preaching about the party’s lack of support in rural areas for years. The problem, she added, did not start with Trump. “If you make it all about Donald Trump,” she said, “then it’s transactional, as opposed to an institutional failure that the Democratic Party has had in the last how many years of not paying attention to rural America.”
Yep I read that article and that stood out to me. This is why I've been feeling that there might not be much Democrats can do regarding issues of perception and grievance like CRT and "white replacement" The most that Democrats can do is to not make statements that can be easily misconstrued. At the same time people in rural areas suffer from poor infrastructure and health outcomes. With things like the infrastructure bill there is a lot that will help rural America and there is a lot in the Build Back Better bill that can. The message and strategy needs to be that Democrats are making tangible changes to help rural America. Just to add another thing among many in Democrats circles there is an attitude of dismissiveness regard rural areas. While there might never be full agreement on issues of culture between deep urban and rural voters there can be recognition and acceptance. I've suggested that here that Ilhan Omar should have a townhall in a rural area. At the same time a Representative like Pete Stauber should have a townhall in Minneapolis. While these aren't their own districts it would help them understand both how divided Minnesota is but also how similar many issues are. It would also help people there to actually see the actual person than the caricature that political rhetoric leads them to believe.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/democr...inia-11636669165?mod=hp_trending_now_opn_pos1 Democrats Need to Face Down the Woke Identity politics has become dangerous to their cause. Even the socialists at Jacobin magazine see it. By Peggy Noonan Nov. 11, 2021 6:09 pm ET I want to look at the woke education agenda and the Democrats. They can still push away from the woke regime and improve their prospects for survival in the next election, but they must move quickly and be clear. Our bias in this column is that it’s good for America if there are two strong parties duking it out—they may not mean to but they function as a unifying, stabilizing force in this broken-up country—and it would be a great national good if the woke regime were disrupted. Nobody likes it but the extreme cultural left, including the teachers unions. It did famous harm to the Democrats in the latest election. The debate over nomenclature—why, critical race theory isn’t even taught in third grade!—is mischievous and meant to obscure. The woke regime rests primarily on a charge that racial evil was systemically and deliberately embedded long ago, by the white patriarchy, in the heart of all American life, and that this ugliness thrives undiminished, which justifies all present attempts at eradication. We are not individual persons with souls; we are part of identity groups marked by specific traits. We hate each other and must fight each other. This regime is variously compared to China’s Cultural Revolution, the French Revolution’s Terror and Puritanism. It is an ideology. A philosophy bubbles up from lived experience and emerges in time; an ideology is forced down into people’s heads from above, and its demands are always urgent An important piece appeared in the Washington Post this week by Virginia public school mothers Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich. They wrote that the antiwoke movement among parents is driven by many things—mask mandates, reading materials, critical race theory—but is about something “more profound.” When parents “were suddenly within earshot” of online classes, they became alarmed that children were “being fed lessons on highly divisive topics of questionable academic benefit.” But when parents began to push back, they discovered who really runs the schools: unions, school boards whose members are often handpicked by unions, and businesses that sell curriculums and textbooks. “None of them put students’ interests first.” The public-education system is a cartel. It’s a big thing when people discover this, and the movement against it will continue, powered by two other dynamics. One is that when parents heard indoctrination during the kids’ Zoom classes, they’d heard it before. They knew it from work, from endless human-resources antiracism and gender-bias sessions. They didn’t know the kids were getting it too, and didn’t like it. Second, when parents were home they had time to master the arduous process by which government documents are requested. That’s how a parent in Loudoun County, Va., found out the system was paying consultants to instruct teachers, among many other things, in the difference between “white individualism” and “color group collectivism.” I’ve been meaning for a long time to mention the seminal piece on this subject, the one that pierced through and made liberal parents in my liberal town sit up and take notice: “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids,” by George Packer, published in October 2019 in the Atlantic. “The organized pathologies of adults—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children,” he begins. “Around 2014, a new mood germinated in America,” then rapidly spread. “This new mood was progressive but not hopeful.” It came to take on “the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology.” In New York City’s public schools, which Mr. Packer’s children attended, the battleground was “identity.” Grade-school “affinity” groups were formed “to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality, disability.” The city was spending millions in “antibias” training for school employees. One slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture” and included such traits as “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word.” It’s a brilliant, early piece, full of arguments on why one should have reservations about the new regime. It didn’t start during the pandemic; it continued during the pandemic and accelerated after the murder of George Floyd. Almost as if ideological opportunists coolly observed an opening—a nation in paroxysms of grief and shock—and exploited it. Back to the Democrats. This ideology is of the left. You are the party of the left, not the right. If you do not kick away from the woke educational agenda you will own it. Republican operatives who don’t have a clue about the implications of woke ideology, or why it is so damaging, or how to answer it in the schools, will deftly hang it around your neck. Parents will demand you take a stand, for or against, and if against what will you do about it—tell the unions that fund and support you to knock it off? Do that. You’ll look like you have some seriousness, some guts. You’ll look like you care about parents. And it would actually be sincere: I’ve never, ever met a moderate Democrat who personally approved of the woke education regime. Moderate Democratic officeholders fear party progressives, who might challenge them in a primary. But the fight between the party’s energetic extreme and the majority of moderate Democrats can’t be managed or dodged anymore. The election of Joe Biden papered it over. Three months ago the battle was engaged in Washington, over economic issues. It will spread back home. It won’t work to deny there is a problem in the schools. That is what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did this week, denying there was any “woke problem.” It’s all made up, she insisted: “ ‘Woke’ is a term pundits are now using as a derogatory euphemism for civil rights & justice.” It was classic AOC. Deny a thing exists, accuse those who say it does of using racial coding, then come up with new ways to define the thing. Some progressives are trying: We’re just trying to make sure the reality of slavery is taught in the schools! It worked for Terry McAuliffe! She’s foundering on this issue. She is not a stupid woman; she does not, as they say on social media, think Daylight Saving is a bank. She is cunning, with a naturally political spirit. A former Democratic lawmaker said dismissively of her that she’s not a congresswoman, she’s a social influencer. True enough, but in the current moment that’s a powerful thing to be. Yet she and other progressive politicians are out of touch. One indicator: Jacobin, the American socialist magazine, this week issued a study done with YouGov saying the socialist project needs the working class and can get those voters by focusing “on bread-and-butter economic issues.” Then, carefully: “Certain identity-focused rhetoric is a liability.” In the study, “candidates who framed [opposition to racism] in highly specialized, identity-focused language fared significantly worse than candidates who embraced either populist or mainstream language.” They shade the problem as a rhetorical one as opposed to what it is, a substantive one. But they admit there’s a problem. Even socialists are telling progressives to knock it off. If they can, a moderate Democrat can. Appeared in the November 13, 2021, print edition.
Exhibit A. of the right trying like hell to define the opposition and tripling down on “culture wars” as the only thing they have to offer America. The Democratic Party’s legislative agenda right now is an infrastructure bill (one that more than a dozen republicans voted for) and getting a voting rights bill passed. Please explain how that equals “woke” politics? You can’t though. Because you know that the goal is to define the Democrats how you want people on the center right to see Democrats. Not as they actually are. But yes.. the Democrats will lose if they allow people like you and your right wing propaganda outlets to define them how you want them to be seen. They DO need to be better about not letting propagandists define them inaccurately yes.
Also the Right are playing as much if not more identity politics than the Left. Consider how many cries are made about "erasing OUR history" over things like taking down Civil War statues.
Bread and butter issues are the trillions of dollars the government is printing for aid and infrastructure. Dems don't know how to market their victories when they frame things in all or nothing outcomes. They didn't get their 2nd reconciliation bill of the year, so everything else is a failure and the electorate is wallowing with a big Fat Fail. Dummies being led by the nose with their lofty promises
Exactly.. The Bipartisan infrastructure bill is a big win, the COVID-19 relief bill was a big win, the bipartisan US competiveness bill was a big win. Even a $1.7 Build Back Better Bill will be a huge win. In 10 months the Biden Administration and Democratic Congress has done far more on Infrastructure than not just the last 4 years of "Infrastructure Weeks" but in decades. Democrats need to push those relentlessly rather than bemoaning that they can't get a $3.5 Trillion Build Back Better Bill.
Democratic Socialists Need to Take a Hard Look in the Mirror https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/opinion/democratic-socialists-india-walton.html
