I haven’t actually read either article, but just from the headlines they appear to be talking about two different things. One is about positions on social issues, which says the Democrats have moved dramatically left, and the other is about support for democratic norms which says the Republicans have abandoned them.
You’re right about the rebranding effort being pointless, as it’s the politics and attitude that turns people off, whatever you call it. But I don’t think it’s completely true that it keeps people away from the Democratic party. Biden, a moderate candidate, was able to win the Presidency. And Eric Adams won the Democratic nomination for NY mayor by explicitly rejecting ‘woke’ ideas like defund the police, while still promising reform.
Actually, you show a bit of ignorance there on the origin, it was black people who started using the term decades ago to warn themselves and other minorities about the systematic efforts to keep them down. It became a trending term around the early 2000s with the 2020 protests making it more so; and then misguided corporations and white supporters of change made it more famous and the right wing media applied the old smear of “virtue signaling” and turned woke into a smear too.
“Like many terms that have become popular and have broad purchase in African American communities, it has been appropriated by people who consider themselves allies,” said miles-hercules. “Conservatives then took it and weaponized it as a way to demonize people who were interested in social justice, equity and freedom.”
In this case, the left also did listen to misguided centrists that acted like scared rabbits to the right wing efforts to make the word a smear, so the usage of the word is becoming limited thanks to that smearing effort and corporate misguided efforts.
But as noted already, nowadays, there is the weapon’s grade ignorance and flawed leadership demonstrated by the conservative politicians in congress that rely too on the advice of the right wing media and the Republican voters ignorance. (That we already do now that the majority still believe the lie that Trump won)
But we are aware over here of that ignorance, isn’t it neat that every day you see a conservative politician ranting about “woke” things that we know that they did not get the memo and are double ignorant when using the word as a smear still?
I think that’s an acceptance of the candidate and not the party. However, I can’t quickly think of a good metric for distinguishing between the two. Is there a way to measure core party support besides political elections? I know you can look at party registration and do exit polling, but a lot of people register for a party so they can vote in the primaries, or have a preferred party but only a weak affiliation to that party. I’m aware you can look at donations to parties, but I’m not sure if the political parties release enough detail to enable meaningful conclusions. For example, if someone researched large city mayoral races nationwide, and found that first-time political donors over 30 years old were much more frequent for hard-left mayoral candidates, than moderate mayoral candidates, I’d concede that left-wing candidates were helping the Democratic Party. Absent that kind of statistic, I look at the big news races, like the two you brought up, and read what political commentators have to say. And the basic message I’m getting is that left-wing politicians are popular with left-wing voters and almost nobody else. Sure there’s a popularity/charisma factor that makes a difference, as exemplified by Barack Obama. But that seems to be more about personality than politics.
That message you get is still based more on anecdotes.
While recently the concern of police violence was close to 80% nowadays 69% of U.S. adults still say police violence is a serious problem. Sure, “defund the police” is not popular, but as noted before, that was not the position of the vast majority of democrats. It was mostly the right and some media outlets that gave a lot of play to what some radical activists that were not politicians were proposing.
But Overall More People Support the Public Option, Including a Significant Share of Republicans
Democrats did lose some House seats, but made gains in the Senate.
I looked at the article. There’s two ways to interpret that. One can say that Democrats have moved far to the left, or one can say that Democrats dragged the center with them and pushed Republicans to the right. Take the second, bell curve type graph labeled Asunder, with data from 1994, 2004, and 2017. The tallest peak from all three is around 1.9 in 2017. In other words, the implication of saying that “liberals” have dragged the country far to the left, to my ear at least, would imply a curve with a long tail at the left with the “normal” folk still clumped at the center. Instead what has happened is that the middle disappeared, and people are either on the left or the right. Just by eyeballing it, however, the area to the left of 5 is larger than that to the right of 5 for the 2017 curve.
ETA: The middle didn’t disappear, that’s a bit hyperbolic, but it has shrunk.
ETA2: I would also consider that maybe the curve needs recalibrating. At some point something like being in favor of same sex marriage should land one in the middle. If the curves were recalibrated in that manner, I suspect that what we would see is a huge hump around 3-6 (mainstream Democrats), a small tail between 1-3 (leftists), a very empty area from 6-8 (the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys of the world), and then another huge hump from 8-10 (Trump supporters).
I’m aware of the origins of the term “woke”. I’d never heard it before the Black Lives Matter movement, and probably became aware of it during the 2016 US election campaigns. I do recall reading this linked article from early 2017, by which point it had become mainstream and the eye-rolling had already begun.
If it had stayed a niche term in the Marcus Garvey sense among black activist and supporters of black activism, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. (Although I believe the term was actually coined by Barry Beckham in a play where Garvey’s activism was the subject.)
The issue is that the term “woke” was appropriated by white middle-class liberals who used it to self-identify as left-wing virtuists with a smug better-than-thou attitude. In that context, the term was a bit ridiculous, and when applied to people who were quite ridiculous, it was easy to turn it into a term of satire, and ultimately derision.
Right. People who were self-identifying as woke realised they were being made fun of for labelling themselves as woke, and stopped the self-labelling. They didn’t have any pride in the term, or any backbone to stand up against the people who were making fun of them, so they dropped it and stopped being “woke”. As far as I’m aware they haven’t found a new self-label yet. But now they’re saying the right shouldn’t call them woke because they’re no longer self-labelling as “woke”. The idea is that the right is out of touch because they’ve stopped using the term themselves. However, as a term of mockery, the “woke” label very much exists. And it’s obviously effective mockery, because the left is objecting to being made fun of using the term. What’s really out of touch are those objections, considering they’re the ones who mainstreamed “woke” and through their pretentiousness enabled the right to turn it into a term of ridicule. The message is “Stop calling me that name I used to call myself because now it’s an insult and you’re upsetting me.” It’d be a lot more effective if they just stopped whining about it.
And yet the VAST majority of “whining” about the term “woke” is by the right. By several orders of magnitude.
Which reminds me of another way in which the right wins: by projecting its worst behaviors onto its opponents.
I had a look at the article; it’s interesting, although I’d seen some of the comments before since I follow David Shor on Twitter. If you go to the site below there’s an interactive chart, switch to ‘Overall’ and you can see that there is still a middle but it’s all smeared out due to increasing polarisation. It also looks like there has been a general movement to the left over that time.
Right. That’s the overall sense I get about things. IMHO the overarching narrative is that the conservative right wing has lost ground over time. Things reached a breaking point with Trump losing last year, so now they’ve decided to go for broke. The Republicans are going to attempt to win by any means necessary, including and up to Republican state officials refusing to certify legitimate wins by a Democrat at the ballot box. The sense that the conservative right is winning (at least my personal sense about it) comes from these attempts, such as what is happening with the Arizona recount and the various election laws being passed. Whether the Republicans succeed or fail remains to be seen, but I see only one other way out, which is for the Republican Party as it currently exists to reform itself to appeal to a broader electorate. For whatever reason the powers that be within the party decided on the do anything possible to win including cheating rather than the let’s reform the party strategy to remain competitive. The outcome of the 2022 and 2024 races should reveal the answer as to whether the strategy will be successful or not.
It is easier to continue to gull the rubes that voted for Trump (and would do so again), than try to go back to the drawing board and try to appeal to Conservative values. We keep seeing polls that suggest the overwhelming majority of Americans support some sort of gun control, believe in climate change, support gay marriage and LGBT rights. Republicans certainly have no leg left to stand on with respect to fiscal responsibility. If Republicans try to appeal to those values which have now become mainstream in society, what would distinguish such a Republican platform from a Democratic Party platform? It would be a tough sell. No, to continue to game the system and rabble rouse is the only play they have left if they want to avoid short term irrelevance with little prospect for the future of the GOP as it currently exists.
That works out great for them if they pull it off. If they fail, I suspect the loss would be devastating. A loss in 2022 and 2024 would likely mean at leas an 8 + year period of trying to reform the party. It would probably take until 2032 at the earliest before the GOP would be relevant again. Of course that’s assuming the shenanigans that they’re going to pull in 2022 and 2024 fail. Which is a big assumption, and one I’m not willing to make at this point.
How about abolishing ICE?
Universal Basic Income?
Student Loan Forgiveness?
And while Americans are happy with Joe Biden’s spending at the moment, 75% have concerns about the US national debt and its effect on future generations.
Three in four Americans feel that people should worry about the national debt
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/crfb-federalbudget-nationaldebt-051321
Mainstream Democrats are not strongly in support of abolishing ICE, UBI, or major student loan forgiveness. Those are things supported by the Bernie Sanders / Elizabeth Warren / AOC wing of the party. Assuming Democrats maintain power, the mainstream will of course make some compromises with the far left. That’s a far different proposition than having those things all pass on the strength of The Squad in the House and Bernie and Warren in the Senate.
As far as balancing the budget and the national debt goes, I call BS on (some of) the people who responded to that poll. Democrats (at leas this one) want to balance the budget. Republicans refuse to allow it because they refuse to raise taxes, which is what it would take to balance the budget. Republicans are all about a balanced budget (by spending cuts only, no tax increases!) when the president is a Democrat. They don’t give a crap about balancing the budget when the president is a Republican.
The right isn’t whining about the term “woke”. They’ve turned it into an insult and they’re using it as stick to poke the left in uncomfortable places by identifying their shallow spineless pretentiousness. The left is whining that the right should get over it proving that they themselves aren’t over it. Meanwhile, the non-left just laughs at the formerly “woke”.
The right are constantly whining about “woke” people and how they’re being persecuted by them. Laurence Fox started a UK political party based pretty much entirely on that premise.
But thank you for reinforcing my point about how the right are deliberately engaged in a campaign of insults against the concept of “wokeness”. I am aware that the right are doggedly working to redefine it to refer to "“shallow spineless pretentiousness” while in practice applying it to anyone who dares suggest that racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of discrimination and bigotry are bad, but I did already mention how “false characterization” was a key tactic of this effort.
But that’s the question: Is the Democratic Party essentially a centrist party with a noisy but meaningless left-wing, or is it a split party pandering to numerous factions and trying to please them all, including a left-wing with an agenda that has many aspects that are unappealing to the majority of Americans, and that taken as a whole, Americans don’t want to pay for? The Republican Party is always going to appeal to the hard right. If it only appeals to the hard right, it will lose the centre-right. A centrist Democratic Party will be able to pick those voters up. And really, the centre-right in the US has been shifting left. Look at stances on climate change, gay marriage or racial equality. Even so, my belief is that there is still distrust among the centre-right of the hard-left. And they don’t trust the Democratic Party not to be hijacked by that hard-left faction, which is why they still favour the Republican Party.
Yeah, I don’t understand that. Right-wing parties in Europe are making hay; the Republicans gained Hispanic and black voters in the previous election and could attract more if they specifically tried to appeal to them. They easily could be winning, but they’re not. Instead they’d just sticking with their most committed base and trying to use dirty tactics to win.
That seems unfair. They didn’t ask them whether they thought either party actually would balance the budget, only whether they thought it was an issue.