James Carville: Wokeness is a Problem and We All Know It →
James Carville is the political strategist who propelled a lot of Bill Clinton’s success in presidential politics. The title above is a link to a fascinating interview with him about how the Democratic Party is messing up its political strategy.
Let me give you some teasers from the interview, to encourage you to read the whole thing. All are quotations from the interview the title above links to. (I separate passages by added bullets and bleep out some profanity.) I follow with some comments of my own.
… 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.
… take someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new Republican congresswoman from Georgia. She’s absolutely loonier than a tune. We all know it. And yet, for some reason, the Democrats pay a bigger political price for AOC than Republicans pay for Greene. That’s the problem in a nutshell. And it’s ridiculous because AOC and Greene are not comparable in any way.
No matter how you look at the map, the only way Democrats can hold power is to build on their coalition, and that will have to include more rural white voters from across the country. Democrats are never going to win a majority of these voters. That’s the reality. But the difference between getting beat 80 to 20 and 72 to 28 is all the difference in the world.
How is it we have all this talk about Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and we don’t talk about Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House in Congress? If Hastert was a Democrat who we knew had a history of molesting kids and was actually sent to prison in 2016, he’d still be on Fox News every &%#@^# ing night. The Republicans would never shut the hell up about it.
You now have Democrats saying Florida is a lost cause. Really? In 2018 in Florida, giving felons the right to vote got 64 percent. In 2020, a $15 minimum wage, which we have no chance of passing [federally], got 67 percent.
We won the White House against a world-historical buffoon. And we came within 42,000 votes of losing. We lost congressional seats. We didn’t pick up state legislatures. So let’s not have an argument about whether or not we’re off-key in our messaging. We are. And we’re off because there’s too much jargon and there’s too much esoterica and it turns people off.
Do you realize that climate is the only major social or political movement that I can think of that refuses to use emotion? Where’s the identifiable song? Where’s the bumper sticker? Where’s the slogan? Where’s the flag? Where’s the logo?
They have to make the Republicans own that insurrection every day. They have to pound it. They have to call bookers on cable news shows. They have to get people to write op-eds. There will be all kinds of investigations and stories dripping out for god knows how long, and the Democrats should spend every day tying all of it to the Republican Party. They can’t sit back and wait for it to happen.
Hell, just imagine if it was a bunch of nonwhite people who stormed the Capitol. Imagine how Republicans would exploit that and make every news cycle about how the Dems are responsible for it. Every political debate would be about that. The Republicans would bludgeon the Democrats with it forever.
Of all the things that James Carville says, the one that points to the biggest social-science mystery is this: Why don’t the Democrats attack the Republicans more vigorously? They often talk as if it were obvious that there are bad things in the Republican Party, when it is clear that it is not obvious to much of the electorate. Repeating over and over again the worst things in the Republican party is necessary. Even for an independent like me, I would wish for them to do that because I want the worst things purged from both parties. Absolutely relentless attacks on the worst things in the other party is important for the health of our republic because it might reduce the influence of unhinged fringes.
I find what James Carville says about Florida intriguing because the Democratic Party’s troubles in Florida might provide a good measure of the electoral cost of excessive wokeness.
On the climate issue, I want to propose a particular challenge for economists. Most economists favor a carbon tax. How do you make the genuine virtues of a carbon tax into a catchy slogan, song, bumper sticker, flag, logo, or the like? The same question applies to more solar power research to make solar power become cheaper even faster. Bonus points for making the newer, much safer types of nuclear power that we could have in the future sound good in a a catchy slogan, song, bumper sticker, flag, logo, or the like. Because it isn’t just political action pretending to address global warming that we need. It is the right actions.