New York Times: David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don’t Want to Hear

What do you think?

Is David Shor right that these out of touch, college-educated, woke Millennials and Zoomers with Ivy League degrees from back East are ruining the public image and messaging of the Democratic Party? Do they have cultural views which are politically toxic? Are they repulsing the multiracial working class voters – the DILE vs. DLWC conflict – that Democrats need to assemble a stable governing majority?

New York Times:

“Put it all together, and the problem Democrats face is this: Educational polarization has made the Senate even more biased against Democrats than it was, and the decline in ticket splitting has made it harder for individual Democratic candidates to run ahead of their party.

Atop this analysis, Shor has built an increasingly influential theory of what the Democrats must do to avoid congressional calamity. The chain of logic is this: Democrats are on the edge of an electoral abyss. To avoid it, they need to win states that lean Republican. To do that, they need to internalize that they are not like and do not understand the voters they need to win over. Swing voters in these states are not liberals, are not woke and do not see the world in the way that the people who staff and donate to Democratic campaigns do.

All this comes down to a simple prescription: Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff. “Traditional diversity and inclusion is super important, but polling is one of the only tools we have to step outside of ourselves and see what the median voter actually thinks,” Shor said. This theory is often short-handed as “popularism.” It doesn’t sound as if it would be particularly controversial.

It is. …”

Politico:

“To anyone who’s spent time in Democratic politics in the past decade, a certain type of young person will immediately be familiar: bright-eyed, old enough to drive a car but not old enough to rent one without insurance fees, maybe taking a gap year before starting college or else filling a period of post-graduation, pre-employment idleness.

They probably majored, or are majoring, in political science or public policy or whatever the equivalent area of study offered by their school is. Raised on a steady diet of West Wing optimism cut with a healthy dose of Veep pessimism, they’ve likely spent a summer or two sweating it out in Washington, D.C., cranking out esoteric policy memos for a junior member’s assistant deputy legislative director, or else doing research for a grizzled senior fellow at an upper-Massachusetts Avenue think tank. They might have a faded campaign button from some bygone presidential race dangling from their Fjällräven backpack — maybe for Bernie, or more likely for Pete. …

At its most basic, Shor’s theory goes something like this: Although young people as a whole turn out to vote at a lower rate than the general population, the aforementioned type of young person is actually overrepresented within the core of the Democratic Party’s infrastructure. According to Shor, the problem with this permanent class of young staffers is that they tend to hold views that are both more liberal and more ideologically motivated than the views of the coveted median voter, and yet they yield a significant amount of influence over the party’s messaging and policy decisions. As a result, Democrats end up spending a lot of time talking about issues that matter to college-educated liberals but not to the multiracial bloc of moderate voters that the party needs to win over to secure governing majorities in Washington. …”

I would say there is definitely something to this.

Occidental Dissent has been labeled a “hate group” by the SPLC and ADL, but I actually don’t spend that much time on race. Instead, I have been writing more about class and culture lately because it seems like the biggest divide in this country is between two hostile groups of White voters. There really is a group of younger urban progressive White voters who live in places like Portland and who support Antifa and “Defund the Police” who are much further to the Left on cultural issues than non-Whites.

How should it put this? Everything we believe about race is true. Race isn’t the only source of identity though. There are other things which are real too like culture, class, ethnicity, religion, values and so on. Whites can have a positive sense of identity like we do or a negative one like these people. The vast majority of Whites are mildly ethnocentric and somewhere in the middle. In my experience, the people who are overwhelmingly more likely to come out and cause us harm are these people who are ideologically motivated. It was a bunch of spoiled brats who rioted last summer.

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12 Comments

  1. There’s always a problem when the ruling elite (or, in this case, up and coming young adults entering the ruling elite class) believe their own propaganda.

    “All this comes down to a simple prescription: Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.”

    That’s the Republican prescription – talk a “conservative” message to the voters and then do the opposite once in office.

  2. I thought you were done with the outmoded US political system, HW? You might as well write about what you want from Santa this year as write about trying to find a glimmer of hope in the D or R parties.

    • I continue to follow politics.

      I have no intention of voting in the midterms though. The voters are mostly good people, but the politicians are bought, sold and traded by the donors and lobbyists.

      • Well that’s a cop out. Yes I know how pathetic the republicans can be but still I’d rather have friggin’ Lindsey Graham or Mitt Romney as president now than this disaster. Those guys on northern Oahu knew they couldn’t do much against the whole jap air force at Pearl Harbor, but they still did their duty and took off and attacked them. As weak as it is I am still going to the polls to vote against the democrats while I still can because they are devils. Relying on “worse is better” really isn’t a good strategy, you know who were ecstatic about “worse is better?” The German Communist Party in 1933, they thought Hitler would fall right away, they all wound up in camps for 12 years.

  3. I think a lot of low information whites over 30 didn’t really understand how radical the democratic party is and were still voting against the policies of W and Mitt Romney. Big wig rich capitalists who tell the working poor they need to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt attending school again at age 40 to train for some “career” that with mediocre pay that will probably only exist for maybe 8 years before it goes away and they have to repeat the entire process. Not to mention how are they supposed to pay the bills if they stop working and become a “student.” As if these new overhyped jobs as nursing home ass wipers will even pay enough to get out of the student debt? It’s the fact that in post Nafta America jobs aren’t lifelong anymore and nobody likes this. Only people with psychopathic personality disorder like to endlessly change jobs and move around, and these rich psychopaths are at the top of the corporate culture and think the whole world wants to live like them. Dumb older white people thought Biden would be Bill Clinton 2.0 and give them a raise and health care. Instead we get woke shit like CRT, transgendered bathrooms, and vaccine mania from the senile old coot’s handlers.

  4. People are forgetting the election was stolen, whether by judicial fiat–such as the illegal ruling allowing mail in voting in the Great Lake states, the refusal to have mail deadlines or mail verification, or the rampant voter harvesting, followed by a judicial system that refused to hear any case, even when 15 state attorney generals launched a unified case.

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