William Galston and Elaine Kamarck are, or should be, legendary within the Democratic Party for having analyzed the Democratic failures of the 1970s and 1980s and producing a set of recommendations that soon-to-be President Bill Clinton used in refashioning the Democratic message – and winning the Presidency.
Now they’re back, and when it comes to race, they sound remarkably like Andrew Sullivan:
MYTH 1: PEOPLE OF COLOR THINK AND ACT ALIKE
Early in the 21st century, many Democrats came to believe that long-term demographic trends would move the electorate inexorably toward a Democratic majority. The expectation was that decades of robust immigration from previously under-represented countries in the Western Hemisphere and the Asia-Pacific region would steadily increase the diversity of the U.S. population. As they entered the electorate, they would join forces with other people “of color” — especially African Americans and Native Americans — to strengthen support for the Democratic Party, especially its progressive wing. Underlying this projection was the assumption that these new groups would experience various forms of discrimination that would define their political identity and unite them with African Americans and Native Americans in demands for justice and equality.
For a while there was evidence that what some called the “Rising American Electorate” would indeed transform our politics. The coalition that gave Barack Obama a strong majority in 2008 was diverse in all the expected ways, and younger voters brought new and often progressive perspectives into the political arena. Black turnout has remained high, Hispanics continue to stream into the electorate, and turnout among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders rose by 39% from 2016 to 2020.[5]
But more recently, developments among the largest segment of this coalition, Hispanic Americans, have called into question the belief in the basic similarity among people of color. It was widely recognized that the term “Hispanic” — a census category — covered an internally diverse community from dozens of different countries. It turned out that differences of national origin shaped political outlooks: It was one thing to flee countries dominated by brutal right-wing dictatorships, quite another to hail from socialist societies like Cuba and Venezuela. [Progressive Policy Institute]
This statement, particularly concerning People of Color, rings true in the wake of a 2020 election in which a substantial minority of the Hispanic vote went Republican; in the wake of reports that the Cuban-derived minority in Florida are strongly against the legalization of illegal immigrants, when they themselves went the entire route as prescribed by law; that the term Latinx has no popularity with the general Hispanic population, suggesting those pushing it are not listening to the feedback from their audience.
That, in turn, is in congruence with the analysis, thus far, of election results, most recently the Virginia elections, which the Democrats, under standard analysis, should have won, and instead more or less were run out of town. Their reaction to post-voting polls? That the voters are a bunch of bigots.
That’s called CYA, not honest analysis.
In fact, and with the admission I haven’t had time to read the entire report, this strikes me as a not-so-veiled shot at Ibrahim X. Kendi and the American far left who’ve settled into the position that If you’re White, you’re evil. The subsumation of non-White into a single group, the POC, is reflective of the ideology, the propaganda, spread by the far left, of White evil and everyone else victims – as well as their dictates that only racial power politics, an unstable and violent pattern as we see in the historical record, can restore justice.
It has never brought justice, in reality.
And how strong are these dictates? Just sitting here writing, I finally realize why I found Kendi’s book, How To Be An Antiracist, to be so grating: it’s not a book built on the liberal democratic support of intellectual persuasion, of buttressing arguments with evidence to make a point. Oh, he has some evidence, but I felt some of it was doubtful or inaccurate, but it’s mostly irrelevant. It’s a book of dictates mixed with some interesting anecdotes from his and other’s lives.
But it wasn’t persuasive. It was all about orders.
And most folks don’t want to follow orders in order to win a political contest and reap the prizes – which will be handed out as the leaders see fit. Too much brown-nosing. Rather, people want the chance to succeed through their own labor.
And if the left is going to demonstrate a system that undermines such an ambition, they and their allies won’t get the votes they think they deserve.
The Democrats had better start learning fast, or November 2022 could be a horrendous shock. I look forward to finding time to read further in Galston and Kamarck’s analysis. I want to see if they continue to dig at the foundations of intellectual bullying.
You should go read it, too.
