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Democrats And Cultural Shifts
00:15:11
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unidentified
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Else accountable. | |
| We called it virtue signaling. | ||
| Let me show you how woke I am, and I'm going to put this other person down for not being as woke. | ||
| Loretta Ross with her book, Calling In. | ||
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| We're joined now by David Weigel, who's a politics reporter for Semaphore. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Good to be back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
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unidentified
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So you have a recent piece for Semaphore, In with the Old, The Anti-Trump Resistance Comes of Age. | |
| And in it, you write, the Democratic Party's reckoning over age and gerontocracy appears to be on hold. | ||
| The key figures in the anti-Trump resistance right now were born in the 1940s. | ||
| Can you talk about the generational divide in the Democratic Party right now? | ||
| Yeah, so I wrote that piece right after Al Green, the congressman from Texas, protested was taken out of the State of the Union, and as Bernie Sanders was starting a campaign, which he continued, which I joined over this last week, a campaign of rallies, not for any election, rallies to organize people. | ||
| And both of them generated a lot of organic excitement among people who voted for Democrats in 2024, people who were really disappointed with the direction the party's taken. | ||
| So there is and has been a discussion, really spurred by Joe Biden, about why the leaders of the party refuse to give up power. | ||
| Even Nancy Pelosi, whose left leadership is still leader, Seeker Emeritus takes a lot of big role in the party in shaping their messaging. | ||
| And this frustration that the leadership of the party is too committed to norms, too committed to finding some way, some legal way that's going to win back power for them or stop Trump from acting instead of, and the base doesn't know what it wants here, instead of being more fiery and protesting and scaring them out even out of what they're doing. | ||
| So Democrats are harking back to the civil rights movement. | ||
| They're even looking back to the Tea Party in the 2010s and the idea that that was good at opposing what Democrats wanted to get done. | ||
| The coherence here is that they're not looking at anything the party leadership is doing now and saying that's going well. | ||
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unidentified
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Now then, you just mentioned Bernie Sanders as sort of one of the members of the vanguard of what resistance there is within the Democratic Party. | |
| You spent some time with Sanders as well as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over the weekend. | ||
| Can you talk about that? | ||
| Yes, so this is the third round of Sanders stops where he has organized a big rally either in a swing district held by Republican, like Western Wisconsin or in Omaha, or in a major city where they can get a big crowd. | ||
| He did that in Denver on Friday, the day I spent and talked to Sanders. | ||
| He was in Greeley, Colorado, which is part of a swing seat. | ||
| And he was in Denver for what was the biggest rally Sanders has ever managed to hold, period. | ||
| And he ran for president twice. | ||
| And the point, he said, was just generating a lot of organizing capacity and also finding people who can run for office, whether they run as Democrats or whether they run as independents. | ||
| And he clarified for me that's probably more in the mode of what he does, which is running as an independent without the Democratic Party's brand, but without a Democratic Party candidate splitting the vote when he runs. | ||
| But some of the premise is that there needs to be a organization outside the Democratic Party, not one group, but full-time rallying organizing that is not part of the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party's brand in much of the country is terrible. | ||
| And it has been going underwater since 22008, since Barack Obama was the last peak performer able to compete in very rural places. | ||
| Rather than saying, here's how we fix that party, Sanders, an independent who is at the end of his career, he's in his 80s and his final term, saying, what can we build that resists what he calls fascism and authoritarianism but isn't hidebound by the people's frustrations with one of the two parties. | ||
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unidentified
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You mentioned the decline in popularity of the Democratic Party, even within their own base. | |
| CNN has a poll finding that among the American public overall, the Democratic Party's favorability rating stands at just 29%, a record low in CNN's polling dating back to 1992. | ||
| Just 63% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents report a favorable view of their own party, a dip from 72% in January and 81% at the start of President Joe Biden's administration. | ||
| What's behind that? | ||
| Well, you pointed to the right numbers, which a lot of this is Democrats, people who will vote for Democrats in November next year. | ||
| They'll vote for Democrats in special elections where Democrats are doing pretty well, just saying that they don't think the party is doing the right thing at all. | ||
| The party has not been able to resist Donald Trump to the extent they wanted. | ||
| There is this paradox where lawyers, law firms, progressive groups have been suing and stopping or slowing some of what Trump is doing. | ||
| But politically, they're not seeing any effective counter messaging from the party they all elected. | ||
| And the frustrations, we'll get into them, but they build on each other. | ||
| They're everything from Democrats who have kind of lame messaging on TikTok that's repetitive or jokey, but doesn't say anything, to Democrats saying we need to organize now and then win in the midterm with no particular plan to stop this or that Trump item agenda. | ||
| Or Democrats saying we need to continue funding the government because Trump can take advantage of a shutdown without fully explaining to the base, okay, what does that mean? | ||
| What is the alternative? | ||
| So it's not that these voters have said, I don't like the Democratic Party and now I'm going to vote Republican. | ||
| It's that I don't like the party and I'm tuned out and I'll chump check back in November next year when I need an alternative. | ||
| You've seen this in voter registration too, which is a little bit harder to track because not every state has registration by party. | ||
| But where it does, even when Democrats have been doing pretty well, it gains House seats in California last year, for example. | ||
| But the independent registration has been going up, Republican registration has been going up, and Democratic registration has been flat or down in much of the state. | ||
| And that's across the country. | ||
| These are things the Democrats used to be good at. | ||
| They had this normal amount of support, generational support. | ||
| They had some churns from people coming into the system. | ||
| And they're finding younger people who might even be aligned with the party on nine of 10 things don't look at them and say yes I want to join that I want to organize with that I want to register as a Democrat and support that party they're becoming independents instead because they don't think the party is effective and stands for many things Whereas a younger conservative person looks at the GOP under Donald Trump and says, that party is very clear, it's direct, and it wins. | ||
| If it's when Donald Trump says something, he's usually going to try to get it done. | ||
| I don't hear that from Democrats. | ||
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unidentified
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More on sort of where the Democrats sit. | |
| Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, says, I think the Democrats' brand is really bad. | ||
| And I think this 2024 election was based on culture. | ||
| And the Democrats' failure to connect on a cultural basis with a wide swath of Americans is hugely problematic. | ||
| I think the majority of the party realizes that the ideological purity of some of the groups is a recipe for disaster. | ||
| That, candidly, the attack on over-the-top wokeism was a valid attack. | ||
| And that was in politico. | ||
| You know, much of the discussion was on whether cultural issues have undermined the Democratic Party. | ||
| Do you think that that's really the case? | ||
| It has, but even look at what he said and how specific he was. | ||
| It wasn't very specific. | ||
| So when Democrats talk about problems they have with appearing too woke, what does that mean? | ||
| If I pay attention or you pay attention to conservative commentary, they'll explain. | ||
| It's everything from the party has signed on to this sort of 1990s gender theory redefinition of sex and gender. | ||
| And it has. | ||
| The party legally and politically is committed to a different view of gender than the one that was in the code before Bostick, the Supreme Court decision. | ||
| Does it mean the affirmative action, which the Supreme Court struck down a few years ago? | ||
| Does it mean just we would like it if the new Snow White Disney movie had a different actress in the lead? | ||
| It runs through everything. | ||
| And a goal of conservative activism for decades has been winning the culture because politics will run downstream from culture. | ||
| One crisis liberals are confronting, Democrats are confronting, is that they do. | ||
| Hollywood, a lot of pop culture is oriented towards Democrats. | ||
| It's a place where the Trump agenda, especially when it comes to immigration or women's rights, is seen as aberrant. | ||
| But people signing up and becoming, you know, growing up in this country, becoming new voters at age 18 or getting involved in politics after they graduate from high school are really unhappy with what the party stands for culturally. | ||
| How do they change that? | ||
| There's not much of a discussion yet. | ||
| To the extent there is one, it is we need an open tent and a bigger tent, I should say, and we need to be more tolerant of people who disagree with us, let's say, on gender and trans rights or disagree with us on immigration. | ||
| For example, you saw Democrats help pass the Lake and Riley Act before Trump took office and he signed it. | ||
| And there hasn't been an effort to say we're going to primary and get rid of everybody who voted against the Lake and Riley Act. | ||
| But there's not a Democratic meeting or press conference that says, new plan. | ||
| We're not going to be as tight on enforcing discipline on some of these issues. | ||
| We're going to have a bigger tent. | ||
| The last time they had the ability to pass policies with a supermajority in D.C. was when they did, was when they had pro-life members, when they had more socially conservative members, even Joe Manchin, who only left at the beginning, at the end of last year, culturally was not aligned with the party on guns and a couple other things. | ||
| And that's a discussion they're having, but again, it's not very specific. | ||
| There's not a Democrat running, going to a group of progressives on one issue or another issue and saying, you're all wrong, we need to break away from this. | ||
| They're just sort of hemming and hawing about how this constellation of groups that they represent might be hurting them with some voters, usually younger white male voters. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, I mean, you're seeing, you mentioned gender issues, and the Senate Democrats blocked a GOP-led bill to ban transgender athletes from women's sports. | |
| And then you also saw in Kentucky, I believe, that Andy Bashir, the Democratic governor there, vetoed HB4, which banned DEI initiatives at public universities. | ||
| So there are these issues where Democrats are still weighing in on these cultural moments. | ||
| Is that a risk to them kind of trying to redefine themselves here? | ||
| Well, yeah, but all of politics is a risk. | ||
| And this is another thing that Republicans have been willing to take risks to do fairly unpopular things. | ||
| Even if you look at polling on DEI, people's understanding of DEI, if it's just that corporations, the federal government, whoever, are going to take racial diversity into account when they're hiring or signing applications, depending on the poll, that's not terribly unpopular. | ||
| It's unpopular to say we're getting rid of, for example, all these pages in the federal government's websites that refer to Jackie Robinson or refer to civil rights heroes. | ||
| That's terribly unpopular, but Republicans will take that risk. | ||
| With Democrats, yes, all of this poses a risk because let's say even 10 years ago, the theory of how Democrats would keep winning was that demographic change was happening in the country. | ||
| While white voters became a smaller proportion of the electorate and Hispanic voters, black voters, Asian voters became larger, that was naturally going to help the Democratic Party. | ||
| And not to say they were taking it for granted. | ||
| They thought our policies of supporting more immigration, more legal immigration, our policies of racial diversity, affirmative action, they're going to benefit us as the country becomes more diverse. | ||
| And really, that's why 2024 was so traumatic to them, is because if the electorate had stayed in place from 2020, the racial preferences of the electorate, Harris would have won. | ||
| She lost because non-white voters moved towards Donald Trump despite everything, despite what he's doing right now. | ||
| And they're not sure where the political backlash is going to come or even what their political response should be. | ||
| For example, they are criticizing the government for taking down these pages about civil rights heroes from government websites. | ||
| They're not saying, if we get elected, we're going to restore affirmative action at colleges. | ||
| Their hopes are really on Republican overreach, which they've been getting. | ||
| And they have been getting the administration going, let's say, going after college endowment, sorry, going after research funds for colleges, $400 million for Columbia, for example, demanding that they enforce new laws protecting Jewish students. | ||
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unidentified
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Successfully demanding. | |
| Very successfully demanding that. | ||
| And Democrats are also divided on how to respond to that. | ||
| But their political hope is that the backlash is so overzealous that people get sick of it and say, well, I'm ready for the party that doesn't talk about these things or it doesn't obsess about them the way that Republicans do. | ||
| But you can hear what I'm saying. | ||
| That's not a plan. | ||
| There is not a coherent, we have figured out how the country should, what direction the country should be going in, legally or culturally. | ||
| They felt like they were riding the wave that was going in one direction, and they don't feel that way anymore. | ||
| They really are at the fate of Republicans screwing up and causing a backlash. | ||
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unidentified
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Does that tie back to the gerontocracy issue that you mentioned earlier because the leadership was sort of moving away from the average age of even Americans? | |
| Well, a little bit, but they found some of the older leaders of the party, again, think of what the politics they got through. | ||
| Bernie Sanders was a civil rights protester, protested for housing access in Chicago in the 1960s. | ||
| And there are not young Democrats who have any personal memory of that. | ||
| So one appeal of the older members of the party, one appeal of them, is that they live through civil rights struggles and they can say, yes, what we're going through right now is similar. | ||
| You're going to resist. | ||
| And Sanders closes his rallies with a version of this, that everybody said the labor movement was crazy. | ||
| Everyone said the women's rights movement was crazy. | ||
| The appeal to how other people have been in this position, been losing, and had to organize and win, is very strong. | ||
| That part of it appeals. | ||
| That the party is too old and doesn't get it, that's the flip side of this. | ||
| They're using tactics that worked for a different country, a different conservative party that was not trying to undermine this, a different legal regime. | ||
| All the kind of civil rights laws we're talking about are from the 19 are younger than Bernie Sanders. | ||
| And Republicans are very bold about wanting to dismantle some of them. | ||
| Trump's first day in office dismantling LBJ's affirmative action order, which no president had touched. | ||
| Ronald Reagan thought about it and pulled away from it. | ||
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Frustration With Leadership
00:08:39
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| And so that's part of the frustration: hey, you have old leaders who have survived situations like this, but what do we do if Republicans take the tools that they won in those fights away, starting with the Dobbs decision in Rowe? | ||
| What if those victories are reversed? | ||
| What's their plan now? | ||
| That's where people start to run out of patience with this leadership and say, what do you have except for an appeal to tradition and previous victories? | ||
| What's the new victory you're going to give us? | ||
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unidentified
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Speaking of running out of patience with leadership, what are your thoughts on the anger that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has elicited for supporting the continuing resolution? | |
| Well, everywhere, too, every branch of the party. | ||
| Schumer, had he had his way, was going to be on a book tour this week with public events, list of public events. | ||
| Here's the address, here are the tickets. | ||
| And they canceled those. | ||
| He kept an interview tour where he was in TV studios where people might not show up and protest and heckle him. | ||
| There was going to be protesting of what he did at the end of the CR process, and he explained it. | ||
| If we had not funded as Democrats the continuing resolution, Republicans would have used the shutdown to focus on defunding things they don't want that we need to resist Donald Trump. | ||
| And he tried to make this point, which is accurate. | ||
| They could say that federal courts are shut down, and that means that the only place Democrats are winning, the federal courts where they're filing restraining orders and getting injunctions on Trump policies, they wouldn't be working. | ||
| But the CBP would be deporting people. | ||
| The flights would keep going to El Salvador. | ||
| He explained that, and that's pretty true. | ||
| That's not very compelling to Democrats because they have a very recent memory of Republicans forcing a shutdown, everyone saying in the media, this is a disaster, polling saying it's a disaster, and Republicans winning. | ||
| Donald Trump presiding over shutdowns, Tea Party Republicans forcing shutdowns. | ||
| That's a frustration in the base. | ||
| Again, yes, you leaders have told us something has worked in the past, or here's how the system works, but we want to try something new because we're living under Donald Trump getting his way every single day. | ||
| How come you can't stop that? | ||
| And that was the problem for Schumer. | ||
| What does he say to those voters? | ||
| Go through all his interviews. | ||
| He doesn't have a good answer. | ||
| The answer is wait for Republicans' polling to go down and then win the next election. | ||
| And you saw it at some of these town hall meetings from members of Congress. | ||
| If they said literally that, they were getting heckled by Democrats. | ||
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unidentified
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We're going to be taking your calls with questions for David Weigel. | |
| Our number for Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| For Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And for Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Before we get to the questions, earlier this month, Michigan Democratic Senator Alyssa Slotkin delivered the party's state response to President Trump's joint address to Congress. | ||
| And in it, she called on Americans to embrace civic engagement and demand principled leadership. | ||
| Let's listen to a bit of that. | ||
| So as much as we need to make our government more responsive to our lives today, don't for one moment fool yourself that democracy isn't precious and worth saving. | ||
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unidentified
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But how do we actually do that? | |
| I know a lot of you have been asking that question. | ||
| First, don't tune out. | ||
| It's easy to be exhausted, but America needs you now more than ever. | ||
| If previous generations had not fought for this democracy, where would we be today? | ||
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unidentified
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Second, hold your elected officials, including me, accountable. | |
| Watch how they're voting. | ||
| Go to town halls and demand they take action. | ||
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unidentified
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That's as American as apple pie. | |
| Third, organize. | ||
| Pick just one issue you're passionate about and engage. | ||
| And doom scrolling doesn't count. | ||
| Join a group that cares about your issue and act. | ||
| And if you can't find one, start one. | ||
| Some of the most important movements in our history have come from the bottle up. | ||
| In closing, we all know that our country is going through something right now. | ||
| We're not sure what the next day is going to hold, let alone the next decade. | ||
| But this isn't the first time we've experienced significant and tumultuous change as a country. | ||
| I'm a student of history, and we've gone through periods of political instability before. | ||
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unidentified
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And ultimately, we've chosen to keep changing this country for the better. | |
| But every single time, we've only gotten through those moments because of two things. | ||
| Engaged citizens and principled leaders. | ||
| Engaged citizens who do a little bit more than they're used to doing to fight for the things that they care about. | ||
| and principled leaders who are ready to receive the ball and do something about it. | ||
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unidentified
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So thank you tonight for caring about your country just by watching you qualify as engaged citizens. | |
| And I promise that I and my fellow Democrats will do everything in our power to be the principled leaders that you deserve. | ||
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unidentified
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What about that? | |
| Is that enough of a message or a coherent strategy for Democrats? | ||
| Well, starting to get there, and again, the assumption is that it's going to take a while. | ||
| Democrats are going to not be very satisfied with what's happening until date TBD. | ||
| And so what Democrats are describing is something that has worked for them, but I would say in other media environments. | ||
| This is, not to get too meta about this conversation, but everything Democrats tried in the past was in a media environment that was much less fragmented, where they were taken more seriously, and traditional media was taken more seriously. | ||
| And they've been slow to adjust to the world we live in right now. | ||
| And I'd bring up the Lake and Riley bill as an example again. | ||
| That has from a combination of outside pressure and internal electoral pressure. | ||
| Elected Republicans wanted to make it easier to deport migrants accused of a crime, not convicted yet, indicted. | ||
| And they had from the outside activists and this woman's family, et cetera, campaigning for this, holding their photos up, having rallies, talking to politicians, and they had in Donald Trump a president elevating that. | ||
| That's the sort of story, if you look at a story of blaming the immigration system for crime. | ||
| If a single crime is committed by illegal immigrant, they shouldn't have been here in the first place. | ||
| The old media environment that Democrats liked and were used to saw some stories as that as a little bit too extreme, a little bit too emotionally fraught, a little bit too simplistic, and might not cover them the same way. | ||
| And that's the problem Democrats are having. | ||
| How do we elevate the stories we think that would change this conversation in this media environment? | ||
| How do we talk, for example, about fired federal workers and get them in front of people and make it sympathetic? | ||
| And they have been struggling, even though those workers have been fired, have been laid off not for cause, but because Republicans wanted to get rid of their organizations. | ||
| And you've seen this, she sees slaughtins of a foreign policy Democrat. | ||
| You've seen people coming out of the civil service who worked in foreign aid for years have very sympathetic stories to Democrats. | ||
| But if you're a Republican getting your news from Fox or watching TikTok or what have you, you don't particularly care that somebody who lived in D.C. for 15 years and was giving aid to a foreign country was doing it. | ||
| You watch TV and they say, well, that aid was going to some crazy program that you don't need to care about. | ||
| You've seen Democrats focus more on veterans who work for the federal government. | ||
| And this is, I think, part of their strategy. | ||
| There's a pipeline of people who are veterans and have access to federal jobs after they leave the service. | ||
| There are tens of thousands of veterans losing their jobs. | ||
| They're veterans in the VA and that health care who are being downsized. | ||
| There's efforts to shrink that and do more automated help for people calling for safety services. | ||
| And talking to Sanders, but talking to every Democrat, they think that's where they can go is, look, Republicans are doing stuff that you might think is popular, but is it going to make the government work better for you? | ||
| And is it going to help or hurt people who just did nothing wrong but lived good American lives and wanted to help their fellow citizens? | ||
| That's where they're getting. | ||
| They're not yet there. | ||
| And they are thinking maybe in a couple months, when people see more of these effects and the government's working less efficiently, they can come back and say, here is the story of somebody who was trying to do that job and they were fired. | ||
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unidentified
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