Indifference to Woke Isn't Enough

Why no one trusts Democrats on identity issues

In Quillette, I write about how Democrats being indifferent to woke isn’t enough. They must go out of their way to pick fights with activists if they ever want to be trusted on these issues.

Election pundits like to argue that the issues they care about most are also at the front of voters’ minds. However, it is difficult to dispute that wokeness harms the Democratic Party in national elections. Polls show overwhelming opposition to letting transwomen participate in women’s sports. In 2020, California voted by over fourteen points to continue the prohibition of affirmative action. At a more superficial but still politically meaningful level, Hispanics are more likely to say that they find the term “Latinx” offensive than they are to use it.

Some commentators on the Left maintain that opponents of wokeness largely got what they wanted from Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Don Moynihan, for example, argues that Harris kept talk about identity to a minimum. She also endorsed a tough border bill, and walked back her previous support for government providing gender-confirmation surgery to imprisoned illegal immigrants.

This is all true, and when the Harris campaign published its policy proposals, I noted how remarkably free of identity issues they were. Nevertheless, voters are not wrong to connect Democratic governance with radical views on issues related to race and sex. Each political faction is considered responsible for what members of its coalition do. This is rational because governing is not only about the policies leaders implement, it is also about sins of omission that allow policy to move in undesirable directions. 

Read the whole thing here. The article was inspired in part by Congressman Seth Moulton, who has said that he doesn’t believe in transwomen in girls’ sports and has been as a result mobbed by some of his former interns and staffers.

As a general matter, it does feel like the Democratic Party is having healthy discussions about where they have gone wrong and what they can do better.

The idea that parties are coalitions is something that I’ve gone back to often. It’s why Trump being as bad as his critics say isn’t as important as most people think, and Democrats seeming like nice and reasonable people doesn’t mean they won’t give us awful policies. The causes holding together each party are more important than individuals, and while new politicians can change the image of one side very quickly, the coalitions change much more slowly, if at all. This is, for example, why people expecting a restrained foreign policy from Trump are being foolish.