That was overdue and absent Trump (who tends to trump other considerations on both sides of the aisle) probably would have left Rs in office.
I consider myself a lib, but mainly a social lib, that straddles the line on some issues. On the virus I'm vaccinated, but only mask up when required by businesses. I worked in the office apart from one week during the pandemic. We socially distanced, but went back to restaurants when they opened. I don't think people should be forced to be vaccinated.
I'm pro-choice, but I'm fine with the line for abortion being drawn closer to inception. I don't have strong feelings about gun control, bathroom bills, gender pronouns, etc. Some of that is just because I'm now closer to old now than young, and the latter are the young's social fights. I think the CRT lines as currently drawn (and explained to me on F 16) are a loser for the party, but I didn't have a problem with Kap et al. kneeling.
I'm agnostic with a penchant for tweaking strong religious takes on F 16, but my kids are in a private christian school.
Freedom of speech is dead on campus from the students to the professors. Cancel culture is out of control.
The current party platform is practically unrecognizable to me, or at least one I'd identify with. I imagine many other social libs of my ilk are probably likewise turned off (possibly just in time before a couple of elements here were able to fully dehumanize us in their slapstick campaign).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/democrats-election-results.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/opinion/virginia-democrats-republicans.html
Lest anyone get the wrong idea, there are plenty of pieces on the NYT that fall back on the usual tropes which are completely absent here, but you get the idea that they're starting to get the picture which is turning off the middle as well as some let's call them comfortable libs.
I consider myself a lib, but mainly a social lib, that straddles the line on some issues. On the virus I'm vaccinated, but only mask up when required by businesses. I worked in the office apart from one week during the pandemic. We socially distanced, but went back to restaurants when they opened. I don't think people should be forced to be vaccinated.
I'm pro-choice, but I'm fine with the line for abortion being drawn closer to inception. I don't have strong feelings about gun control, bathroom bills, gender pronouns, etc. Some of that is just because I'm now closer to old now than young, and the latter are the young's social fights. I think the CRT lines as currently drawn (and explained to me on F 16) are a loser for the party, but I didn't have a problem with Kap et al. kneeling.
I'm agnostic with a penchant for tweaking strong religious takes on F 16, but my kids are in a private christian school.
Freedom of speech is dead on campus from the students to the professors. Cancel culture is out of control.
The current party platform is practically unrecognizable to me, or at least one I'd identify with. I imagine many other social libs of my ilk are probably likewise turned off (possibly just in time before a couple of elements here were able to fully dehumanize us in their slapstick campaign).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/democrats-election-results.html
Quote:
Democrats Deny Political Reality at Their Own Peril
Tuesday's election result trend lines were a political nightmare for the Democratic Party, and no Democrat who cares about winning elections in 2022 and the presidential race in 2024 should see them as anything less.
Familiar takeaways like "wake-up call" and "warning shot" don't do justice here because the danger of ignoring those trends is too great. What would do justice, and what is badly needed, is an honest conversation in the Democratic Party about how to return to the moderate policies and values that fueled the blue-wave victories in 2018 and won Joe Biden the presidency in 2020.
Given the stakes for the country, from urgent climate and social spending needs to the future of democracy, Americans badly need a rolling conversation today and in the coming weeks and months about how moderate voters of all affiliations can coalesce behind and guide the only party right now that shows an interest in governing and preserving democratic norms.
The results in Virginia are a grave marker of political peril. Virginia is a blue state; it hasn't been a battleground in years. Mr. Biden won there in 2020 by 10 points; a year later, the Democratic nominee for governor just lost by 2.5 percentage points, and Republicans flipped two other statewide offices lieutenant governor and attorney general that they have not won in 12 years.
Virginia is a cross-section of suburbs, education levels and racial diversity that is a mirror of what a winning, coalition-driven Democratic Party should be. Democrats lost there even with a longtime moderate as their candidate for governor because the party has become distracted from crucial issues like the economy, inflation, ending the coronavirus pandemic and restoring normalcy in schools and isn't offering moderate, unifying solutions to them.
. . .
Bill Clinton's mantra from 1992 of "it's the economy, stupid" is rarely out of vogue, and it certainly isn't now. But Democrats, looking left on so many priorities and so much messaging, have lost sight of what can unite the largest number of Americans. A national Democratic Party that talks up progressive policies at the expense of bipartisan ideas, and that dwells on Donald Trump at the expense of forward-looking ideas, is at risk of becoming a marginal Democratic Party appealing only to the left.
Broader trends were also working against the Democrats. Perhaps chief among these: When voters are feeling surly and unhappy about the direction of the country as polls show that a majority of them are they tend to blame the party in power. President Biden's poll numbers have been on the slide for months, for a blend of reasons ranging from the ugly withdrawal from Afghanistan to the seemingly endless burdens of the pandemic. In an era of nationalized elections, that exerts a drag on his entire party.
. . .
Tuesday was not just about Republicans reclaiming electoral ground from Democrats. Even in many blue enclaves, voters showed an interest in moving toward the center. In Buffalo, N.Y., the democratic socialist who bested the current mayor, Byron Brown, in the Democratic primary appears to be losing to Mr. Brown's write-in campaign. In Minneapolis, a referendum to replace the police department with a Department of Public Safety went down in flames. In the New York mayoral race, voters went with Eric Adams, a moderate Democrat who ran with a focus on law and order. "Progressives on the ropes?" asked The Seattle Times, in a postelection piece noting that "the more moderate, business-backed candidates in the city's three most watched races surged to huge and likely insurmountable leads."
For many voters especially those who don't vote regularly the 2020 election was about removing Mr. Trump from the White House. It was less about policy or ideology. Mr. Biden did not win the Democratic primary because he promised a progressive revolution. There were plenty of other candidates doing that. He captured the nomination and the presidency because he promised an exhausted nation a return to sanity, decency and competence. "Nobody elected him to be F.D.R.," Representative Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from Virginia, told The Times after Tuesday's drubbing. "They elected him to be normal and stop the chaos."
Democrats should work to implement policies to help the American people. Congress should focus on what is possible, not what would be possible if Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and frankly a host of lesser-known Democratic moderates who haven't had to vote on policies they might oppose were not in office.
. . .
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/opinion/virginia-democrats-republicans.html
Quote:
. . .
After Terry McAuliffe stumbled to defeat in a state that Joe Biden won by 10 points exactly one year ago tonight, a mild suggestion seems in order: Democrats probably need a new way to talk about progressive ideology and education.
In the Virginia race, the script for both candidates was straightforward and consistent: Glenn Youngkin attacked critical race theory, combining it with a larger attack on how the education bureaucracy has handled the Covid pandemic, while McAuliffe denied that anything like C.R.T. was being taught in Virginia schools and also insisted that the whole controversy was a racist dog whistle.
The problem with the McAuliffe strategy is that it fell back on technicalities as in, yes, fourth graders in the Commonwealth of Virginia are presumably not being assigned the academic works of Derrick Bell while evading the context that has made this issue part of a polarizing national debate.
That context, obvious to any sentient person who lived through the past few years, is an ideological revolution in elite spaces in American culture, in which concepts heretofore associated with academic progressivism have permeated the language of many important institutions, from professional guilds and major foundations to elite private schools and corporate H.R. departments.
Critical race theory is an imperfect term for this movement, too narrow and specialized to capture its full complexity. But a new form of racecraft clearly lies close to the heart of the new progressivism, with the somewhat different, somewhat overlapping ideas of figures like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo enjoying particular influence. And that influence extends into schools and public-education bureaucracies, where Kendi and DiAngelo and their epigones often show up on resources recommended to educators like the racial-equity reading list sent around in 2019 by one state educational superintendent, for instance, which recommended both DiAngelo's "White Fragility" and an academic treatise titled "Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education."
That superintendent was responsible for Virginia's public schools.
Now progressives will counter that the backlash that may have helped carry Youngkin to victory (and it's certainly only one factor among many) isn't just about these texts and ideologies but about a broader discomfort with any tough truth-telling about America's racist past, whether it takes the form of Toni Morrison novels or Norman Rockwell paintings. And they're right that the anti-C.R.T. movement has combined a set of moderate and even liberal objections to the new progressivism objections that show up in superliberal New York as well as suburban Loudoun County, Virginia with an older style of objections to talking about slavery and segregation at all.
But progressives can't isolate and attack the second kind of objection unless they find a way to address the first kind as well, especially when it comes from voters (including minority voters) who may have supported Hillary Clinton or Biden but feel unsettled by the ideas filtering down into their kids' classrooms in the past few years. And the McAuliffe approach isn't going to cut it: You can tell people that C.R.T. is a right-wing fantasy all you want, but this debate was actually instigated not by right-wing parents but by an ideological transformation on the left.
So Democratic politicians may need to decide what they actually think about the ideas that have swept elite cultural institutions in the past few years. Maybe those ideas are worth defending. Maybe Kendi and DiAngelo are worth celebrating. Maybe school superintendents who recommend their work should be praised for doing so.
If so, Democrats should say so, and fight boldly on that line. But if not, then Democratic politicians in contested states, facing Republican attacks on education policy and looking at the unhappy example of Virginia, should strongly consider acknowledging what I suspect a lot of them (and a lot of liberal pundits) really think: That the immediate future of the Democratic Party depends on its leaders separating themselves, to some extent, from academic jargon and progressive zeal.
. . .
Lest anyone get the wrong idea, there are plenty of pieces on the NYT that fall back on the usual tropes which are completely absent here, but you get the idea that they're starting to get the picture which is turning off the middle as well as some let's call them comfortable libs.
