The Harris team has gotten off to a strong start in the messaging wars. The vibes, for the first time in a long time, are great. But Republicans live to kill Democratic vibes, and they have a tested strategy for doing it — which, in this case, means turning Ms. Harris into a San Francisco liberal who will open the border, defund the police, cackle while prices go through the roof and only got the job because of … well, you know.
If Ms. Harris wants to persuade skeptical voters that she will turn the page, she needs to prove it with policies that address the problems they care about most. And if Democrats want to convince Americans that Republicans are weird, they can’t just count on Tim Walz being adorable on TikTok. They need to show they’re the normal ones — a party for working families that’s filled with people who love this country so much that they know it can be even better.
“We have a solemn responsibility to honor the values and promote the interests of the people who elected us,” Mr. Clinton said in his first weeks as a presidential candidate. He didn’t hold up his side of the bargain, and Democrats are still living with the consequences. But these goals — honoring values and promoting interests — should be watchwords for Democrats trying to win back lost ground with the working class.
This guy gets it about how the Dems can move toward a stable winning majority for decades to come. Key is to move to the Left on economic issues and toward the center on cultural issues. When people say a candidate is too far left usually that means on cultural issues. Abortion, regardless of how I feel about it personally,1 is a centrist issue because of the fanatic way the religious right has framed it.
Most Americans support Bernie Sanders pro-family, pro-worker policies. And Sanders has been assiduous throughout his career about avoiding appearing too Left on cultural issues. When BLM attacked him in ’16, it was because he didn’t have the Woke vibe regardless of the substance of his stellar record on civil rights.
That’s the reality of being a successful politician in a rural state like Vermont. Same with Tim Walz. You stress the benefits of the policies you espouse and do everything you can to avoid appearing ideological. The problem with Woke is not that there is no basis for the causes it espouses, but because it comes across as too aggressively ideological, which in turn provokes ideological backlash. You don't force changes in cultural attitudes, you inspire them.
Note 1: I see abortion as a symptom of late modern alienation from the body and its constraints that is one of many symptoms that are directly connected to the dehumanizing impacts of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. Changes in attitudes toward abortion in the post WWII period cannot be understood without seeing them as related to a huge shift in the culture that has normalized a transhumanist ethos in which there's a mechanical or technological solution for every deeply human problem--even death.
I reject that ethos completely. That doesn't make me a Luddite, but I do insist that technological advances serve human needs, and the problem lies in that we are too passively allowing technology to define what it means to be human and what those human needs are. In doing so we are becoming slave of technology and technological solutions when we should be searching out more deeply liberating human ones. But we have no idea what it means to be human, and so no way of resisting the way the TCM, with each passing decade, has come to define us more and more as machines for whom mechanical solutions have come to seem "natural".
I don't think that abortion should be made illegal, but ours would be a healthier society if we looked at abortion as a sometimes necessary last resort when other possibilities have been eliminated for good reasons. Defining what 'good reasons' are is tricky in a materialistic, technology-obsessed society like ours, and so until the culture changes, the rule of thumb, within the basic constraints defined by Roe, that the decision should be left to the conscience of a woman in consultation with her doctor seems the only feasible governing principle in the political/legal sphere. Maybe someday abortion, rather than being the ideological shibboleth issue it is now, will be instead an issue around which morally serious people can have a morally serious conversation.