Outgoing DNC Chair Claims Democrats Weren’t Woke Enough

By Noah Rothman

Friday, December 06, 2024

 

Among Democratic political professionals, a consensus has formed around the notion that the Biden/Harris campaign lost the 2024 presidential election because they lost the center of the electorate.

 

In “every battleground state,” Democratic strategist David Plouffe observed, “there’s more conservatives than liberals.” Getting the progressive base to vote to turn out — which Kamala Harris’s campaign absolutely did — is not enough. “We have to dominate the moderate vote,” Plouffe declared. His comments are reflective of an emerging understanding that ascribes the party’s shortcomings to voters’ dissatisfaction with pocketbook issues and the perception among the electorate that Democratic priorities were misplaced.

 

The reaction to this outlook from progressive quarters, in which progressives only ever fail because they were not progressive enough, has been predictable.

 

Progressive lawmakers, from Bernie Sanders to Pramila Jayapal, contend that Democrats became the party of “elites,” by which they mean — but will not say — a well-heeled cadre of activists and academicians whose boutique fixations were shared only by their colleagues. But there’s another prognosis evinced by those on the left who eschew Marxian paradigms and analyze the election through identitarian frameworks.

 

“There is often a tension between winning elections and taking morally correct stances,” the Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr. wrote. “The party shouldn’t shun its principles and values to win elections, as centrists are calling for, but instead find the right candidates and tactics so it can win elections while also defending transgender rights, racial justice and other liberal values.”

 

It’s a keen illustration of the conundrum in which Democrats find themselves that the outgoing chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison, has bitterly endorsed Bacon’s prognosis.

 

As the Associated Press reported late Thursday, Harrison “delivered a steadfast defense” of his party’s “commitment to racial equality,” pushing back “forcefully against critics who say Democrats need to abandon ‘identity politics’”:

 

“When I wake up in the morning, when I look in the mirror, when I step out the door, I can’t rub this off,” he said, waving his hand in front of his face. “This is who I am. This is how the world perceives me.”

 

“That is my identity,” he continued. “And it is not politics. It is my life. And the people that I need in the party, that I need to stand up for me, have to recognize that. You cannot run away from that.”

 

If Harrison sounds disgruntled, that’s because he is. The outgoing DNC chairman “twice suggested he has more grievances he’s itching to get off his chest, saying ‘the muzzle comes off’ the day after his replacement is elected on Feb. 1.” He added that he will be “naming names” in a forthcoming book about his four-year tenure. Surely, American political observers await Harrison’s tell-all with bated breath.

 

It’s unremarkable that a failed DNC chairman would like to argue that he and his party did everything right, although Harrison’s promulgation of fictions about Joe Biden’s unrivaled mental acuity and the softness of the GOP’s position in places like Florida are unlikely to age well. And yet, if Democrats cannot blame their exile into the wilderness on identity politics and its affected practitioners alone, “wokeness” certainly didn’t advance Democratic prospects.

 

It didn’t benefit Democrats that so many of the party’s prominent elected officials believed they would cause offense if they didn’t substitute euphemisms like “birthing people,” “pregnant people,” and “people who menstruate” in place of the more succinct synonym, “women.” The fact that West Point cadets were subjected to lectures on “understanding whiteness and white rage” and “white power at West Point” — Pentagon-led social engineering initiatives that puts downward pressure on recruiting goals — didn’t win Democrats any votes. The party’s dalliance with racially prioritized Covid vaccine distribution schedules and Joe Biden’s attempt to abrogate the 14th Amendment to provide taxpayer relief to Americans based on their race might not have cost Democrats the presidency. But they didn’t help.

 

Throughout the Biden years and earlier, Democrats took advantage of every opportunity to convince Americans that they did not believe a durable racial rapprochement could be achieved through race neutrality in law. Rather, the only remedy to negative discrimination in the past is positive discrimination today.

 

This “anti-racist” construction convinced party members to mourn the demise of (deeply unpopular) racial quotas in university admissions and to put barriers up before Americans who Democrats thought shouldn’t be allowed to achieve their maximum potential (even if they were minorities themselves). So besotted is the Democratic activist class with the aesthetic trappings of revolutionary roleplay that the party that class controls couldn’t even effectively distance itself from the antisemitic mobs that sprouted up like mushrooms after the October 7 massacre. After all, they “have a point.”

 

This identitarian fashion compelled Democrats to endorse nothing less than un-American notions. Among them, the idea that accusers have a “right to be believed,” subverting the presumption of innocence, and the idea that the precepts of English common law that form the foundation of American jurisprudence are the products of “a white man’s culture” and are, therefore, inherently suspect. Even arithmetic and English grammar were branded the tools of racial repression at the height of a moral panic that was exclusive only to one political faction in the United States.

 

This fad has been a wildly profitable enterprise for many in positions of prominence within the Democratic establishment (pace, Perry Bacon). It is the animating ideology of the party’s most important constituent groups: university administrators, lawyers, and soap-box agitators. There will be resistance to the notion that Democrats are better served by letting it all go. And in the end, Democrats may be incapable of summoning the courage necessary to jettison this ideological drag on their party’s prospects. But there can be no doubt that they should.