Maureen Dowd is a long-time (almost 30 years), Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist for the New York Times .
I don’t always agree with what Ms. Dowd writes. But her latest (Sunday) column, titled “Democrats and the case of mistaken identity politics” is excellent.
Here, from the wral.com website (thus avoiding the Times’s pay wall) is how it begins – with what I consider the most salient paragraph in bold print:
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.
The article goes on to make a good many other important points and observations It is well worth your while to use the link I’ve provided and read every word.
That said, I now have a question for Ms. Dowd: why did you write this only as a retrospective, after voters took her party of choice apart in last week’s election? Why did you wait until now to say what, had it been said months ago, might – might – have had a significant effect on what happened November 5th?
The Democrats’ lurch to the far left has been evident for a long time. Personally, I have written, literally, dozens of blogs alluding to it over the past year. And no one is offering me a Pulitzer Prize. So if it was clear to a lesser literary being like me all this time, it had to be clear to a major-league accomplished commentator like Maureen Dowd.
I have to wonder whether the reason is that her own political preferences got in the way. That she feared alienating leaders of the party she has supported all this time.
Was Maureen Dowd so worried about angering her Democrat pals that she decided to forego providing this kind of common sense to them – and us – until after the votes were counted? Was she afraid that, instead of thanking her, they’d reject her? Distance themselves from her?
Well, whatever the reasons, it’s all over now. Donald Trump is our incoming President. And it is a virtual certainty he will have majorities in both houses of congress.
Will the currently-powerful Democrats she cites as “avatars of elitism” (with the remarkable exception of Nancy Pelosi, who would probably have been #1 on my list) learn from this? Adjust accordingly?
Will they start listening to the disaffected Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin (who left the party due to its leftward lurch), Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Rep. Richie Torres?
Or will they stick with people like (among others) Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamie Raskin, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Pramila Jayapal…all hard-leftists from safe Democrat districts, therefore personally unaffected by the disaster these “ideas” have wreaked on their party?
The future of this party is truly in jeopardy. It can come back from outer space and appeal to more than dyed-in-the-wool leftward ideologues and the SIP* crowd, or they can stay there and achieve permanent minority status.
Now there’s a subject I’d love to see Maureen Dowd write about. Maybe she’ll follow up on the one mentioned in this blog and do so. Let’s hope.
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*A SIP is someone who is either too Stupid, and/or too Ignorant, and/or too Partisan to reconsider their political choices.
