Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics

Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke.

Donald Trump won a majority of white women and remarkable numbers of Black and Latino voters and young men.

Democratic insiders thought people would vote for Kamala Harris, even if they didn’t like her, to get rid of Trump. But more people ended up voting for Trump, even though many didn’t like him, because they liked the Democratic Party less.

I have often talked about how my dad stayed up all night on the night Harry Truman was elected because he was so excited. And my brother stayed up all night the first time Trump was elected because he was so excited. And I felt that Democrats would never recover that kind of excitement until they could figure out why they had turned off so many working-class voters over the decades, and why they had developed such disdain toward their once loyal base.

Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).

This alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help.

“When the woke police come at you,” Rahm Emanuel told me, “you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”