Kerby Anderson

Sometimes a political party can get way out front of the voting public and then pay a price at the ballot box. Matt Vespa reminds his readers that this happened to Republicans in a past election. But he focuses most of his commentary on what is happening in the Democratic party due to its “woke wing.” We have been through years of political correctness, speech codes, pronoun criticism, and critical race theory. Some leaders in the Democratic party are starting to fret that “this lurch to the Left on anything cultural will cost them a ton of votes.” This could be significant in the elections next year. He quotes from one article that observed that “a growing number of Democrats are ringing the alarm that their party sounds — and acts — too judgmental, too sensitive, too ‘woke’ to large swaths of America.” They go on to warn “that by jamming politically correct terms or new norms down the throats of voters, they risk exacerbating the cultural wars” and could then lose many seats in the next election. In an earlier commentary, I quoted Democratic strategic James Carville, who was quoted in this article. He lamented, “people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people” and then added, “This is not how voters talk.” You won’t gain the trust and support of the American people by being self-righteous and condescending. And they certainly won’t follow you if you use language found only at a few elite universities. Yet that seems to be the direction being forged by the “woke wing” of the party. There is a vicarious lesson to be learned from this. Be gracious and humble. Make rational arguments. Understand the mindset of the average American and appeal to them with facts and language they understand.