Excellent points, but voters didn't just imagine Harris supported tax payer funded transition surgeries, allowing children to transition without parental notification, decriminalization of border crossings, abortion until delivery and defunding the police. Kamala held those beliefs, until the day she became a Presidential candidate. Harris rarely bothered to say she changed her mind, on any of the above issues. If Kamala did claim her thoughts had evolved, she never explained the evolution.
Nearly all of the aforementioned issues are law in CA, where Harris helped run the government for nearly 20 years. CA does pay for transition surgeries. School employees are, legally, forbidden from informing parents, their kids have different gender identities in school. CA law does not allow abortion until delivery, but 9 states do. Harris has stated, women should enjoy unrestricted access to abortion.
Moreover, Harris long refused to enforce immigration law as SF DA, and then as CA AG. In SF, Harris rarely charged migrant drug dealers with felonies, so they could not be deported, after a conviction. CA is today, marred in lawsuits by female prisoners, raped by intact transgender "women" housed in female prisons. Harris bragged, she championed this right for CA prisoners to transition, at tax payer expense. Then she insisted they serve their sentences in female prisons.
Reps actually did a lousy job of explaining just how Progressive Harris polices, have always been. Kamala helped name and write the CA law, that removed incarceration as a possible punishment for thefts up to $950, per instance. Kamala's most enduring legacy, will be tooth paste locked up like gold in Ft. Knox, thanks to the mass shoplifting, she spurred.
Dems are in denial, but Reps did not magically invent Kamala's positions. She held them for decades, as does a large chunk of DC Dems.
This is where I think, thankfully, Democrats are missing it and will continue to miss it. Do "trans" policies raise prices? Not in a direct sense, but they do. DEI and other woke nonsense are killing competitiveness, destroying masculinity, causing an entire generation of boys to drop out, and indirectly bloat corporations with HR and DEI departments, reduce productivity and profits, and most of all ensure that the immigration H1B visa debates will be highlighted. Because it all comes back to basic fairness, which most Americans see as lacking---not because of greedy corporations (and to an extent I can be with you on that)---but because of all the surrounding policies that destroy "normal" life. Economics and culture DO mix. Ask Hollywood. My guess is we'll see a merger of Disney---which was temporarily saved by the non-woke "Moana2" and the anti-woke "Deadpool & Wolverine"---and Warners, which still can't get out of its own way. Only Costco is sticking to DEI (at least in public) meaning that it, soon, will begin to trail others. Ramaswamy and Musk are leading a major "identity charge" for American lean productivity that has no place for crazy environmental or sexual policies, and the ChiComs are reinforcing their ideas every month. So I agree that the Democrats are engaged in culture denialism, but your solution is to act like those cultural and environmental positions are reasonable and that they just need to be hidden from voters. My position is they are poison and will destroy any party cleaving to them. As a Republican, fine by me.
Another great insightful article published by the liberal patriot. Thank you guys for helping me making me smarter. I missed this article over at the free press where Im also a subscriber.
As a lifelong moderate Republican, I have been saying that if the Democratic party reflected the views of The Liberal Patriot, not only would I be a Democratic voter, I would be a loud advocate.
I suggested a while ago that Seth Moulton was the canary in the coal mine for the effort to reorient the Democratic Party. It doesn't sound like it is going well. Beyond The Groups, there are vast numbers of virtue signaling fellow travelers. Put together, they are probably a majority of the base of the party or at least what is left of it.
To be fair, establishment Republicans are in denial about their base just as much. Their version is to be conservative in an election year and then revert when they are in office. Rinse and repeat. After many years, the base is starting to catch on. Hence Trump.
The Supreme Court's decision later this year in the case United States v. Skrmetti, which is challenging Tennessee's statutory ban on pediatric gender medicine, could have a tremendous impact on efforts to break the Democratic Party's embrace of gender identity ideology.
If the Court upholds the ban, not only will it encourage other states controlled by Republicans to follow suit, it may also spell the extinction of the "trans kid" at the hands of the judiciary. While this would be the correct outcome because, with the possible exception of precocious autogynephilic boys, there is no such thing as a trans child, it would provoke a backlash from trans rights activists and their fervent cishet trans allies. But for once they would be on the defensive.
Should the Court find that trans kids are a protected class entitled to heightened scrutiny of laws that treat them differently than other similarly situated individuals, Katie bar the door. It would be a terrible setback for the sex realist movement. Worse, it would condemn gender-confused minors who lack the capacity to give informed consent to treatment with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to a transition process that has yet to be proven safe, effective and necessary.
Adding insult to injury, the majority of those minors who would otherwise get over their gender troubles and find they were attracted to the same sex would suffer catastrophic setbacks in their ability to grow up to be the gays and lesbians they were meant to be.
I fear that SCOTUS is going to be nice to "trans kids" in Skrmetti in an effort to stanch the dramatic loss of of the Court's political capital brought about by Dobbs and Chief Justice Roberts' (politely) belligerent stance towards adopting an enforceable code of ethics at the high court.
The Democrats are lost in the cultural woods. Somehow they want to deny that America is sick and tired of their garbage cultural wars and positions. What was the most memorable advertisement of the 2024 election - “Harris is for they them. Trump is for you”. Apparently they want to keep on this line of thinking and lose elections.
I’m personally involved in a “culture war” issue that I believe will garner increasing attention in coming years: the issue of “road diets”, where cities choose to reduce traffic lanes available to motor vehicles and give the two outer lanes of four-lane streets over to exclusive bicycle use. The structure is: the two usual N/S or E/W traffic lanes for motor vehicles; “parallel” parking for cars to the right of each traffic lane; an “isolated” bike lane anywhere from four to eight feet wide; and then the curb and sidewalk. They are immensely unpopular with drivers and merchants in such areas, and despite claims of proponents that they will encourage bicycle commuting, the “bicycle lanes” sit largely unused while motorists are fuming in “traffic jams”.
We recently experienced this controversy in Glendale, California, where I reside. “SAFE streets” (Streets Are For Everyone) advocates, juiced by “mandates” and funding from D.C. and Sacramento, spent $1.5 million last May to create a half-mile such segment in the North Brand Boulevard business and residential district. (Similar such projects have been instituted in many other areas of L.A. County, most notoriously in the final eastern two miles of Hollywood Boulevard, which they wish to extend all the way west a further three miles through the heart of Hollywood.) Drivers hated them; merchants and area residents hated them; the Fire Station on Brand Boulevard hated them; and they were largely unused (my recent survey: one user over the course of an hour’s observation).
Finally, we had a City Council meeting on December 10 where maintenance and extension of the project was up for vote. Surveys showed that people were in favor of abolishing the project by about a 7-1 margin. Thankfully, the City Council listened to all the 50+ people who testified and voted 4-1 to spend $500,000 to return North Brand to its prior state.
Now here’s a weird angle to the story. I’m an avid biker, and I *hate* such “confining” bike lanes, and I never use them whenever possible. (I was one of the 50 testifying for removal of the project.) They are unpleasantly “confining” and actually feel much less safe than riding in traffic, which virtually every biker learns to do by, oh, about age 12. I frequently pass by the North Brand project on my bike and regard this setup as nothing but a nuisance, especially when making right turns off Brand.
My impression is that these projects are basically stealth efforts on the part of “Climate Crisis” people to choke off motor vehicle traffic in urban areas to “encourage” bike commuting. They claim they’re for bicyclist (and pedestrian!) safety, when, for example, that entire five-mile length of Hollywood Boulevard experiences all of *one* fatal or serious injury auto-bicyclist accident over the course of an entire year (and for all we know, that could typically be some drunk or drug-addled homeless person riding in dark clothing at night, or an inexperienced E-biker speeding along at 35 or 40). The Hollywood City Council spokesman was completely indifferent to my concerns and objections which I expressed in an email.
I could go on and on, but you get the picture….. (They’re really big in places like Berkeley, Portland and Santa Monica.)
Portlander here. What Mr. McKay says is true. There are motor vehicle eliminationists in the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT).
I won't cover the points Mr. McKay made so eloquently. I'll just add that in Portland the movement to put people on bicycles has taken on elements of a culture war. The college educated, bike riding elite of the city's Portlandia-perfect inner neighborhoods are deeply at odds with the residents of the working class districts of outer east Portland that are too uncool to have been shown on Portlandia. For now, a backlash against forced road diets is yielding some results. It has the local bike activists questioning just how much input neighborhoods should have on bicycle infrastructure projects. Scratch deeply enough and you'll find that inside most progressives there's an authoritarian waiting to spring into action.
I've been reading "Liberal Bullies" by social psychologist Luke Conway. He reports from his line of research that leftists harbor extremely authoritarian views on dissent from their party line, including "crushing" and "destroying" those people. He found that conservatives who scored high on his tests would admit they were authoritarian whereas leftists who scored as high would deny it. And, the more authoritarian the leftists were, the more strongly they denied it!
Leftist authoritarianism is the main reason why I hate them, and I suspect the same is true for a lot of other people who are defecting from the Dem Party.
Read James Carville's article in today's NYT. He is rich into denial about how it was cultural issues that lost the election.
.....but he was also in denial about the election. He thought Harris was going to win.
My wife and I, two voters for Democrats for 50 years, could see two years ago that Democrats were in la-la land about the country and were going to lose, so switched to being Independents.
It's like Democrats don't know any voters outside their bubbles, so think everyone is like them. It's so elitist.
Adding to RT's comments, there is also clock ticking for Dem leaders. DJT has been the Dem's most effective "get out the vote" tool. DJT is term-limited and pretty old. What happens when the successor Republicans don't have even a fraction of his baggage, but continue to embrace his cultural populist message? If Dems are still thinking someone like KH is the future, the party will soon be on life support.
Mr. Teixeira, you call it culture denialism - I call it the fundamental beliefs of many of the people you call Democrats. They will tell you sincerely: America really is a “white supremacist” society. “Structural racism” is how America was founded and built, and it explains all the socioeconomic problems of nonwhites. Anyone who raises questions about immigration levels is a racist. Personal pronouns are fundamental to our existence in a just society and something that must enforced. Transwomen are exactly the same as biological women (just as transmen are exactly the same as biological men) and those who question such a claim are simply “haters” who at the very least should be expunged from polite society and preferably should be subjected to reeducation to be stripped of their atavistic bigotry.
When you say that these people do not view culture issues as real issues, you mean that they think they are not issues that drive voter choices. The trouble is that they view these issues as the only real issues, already decided as matters of fundamental and unalienable human rights and not up for political debate, much less open to revision by vote of the people. You say they think "no one would normally object to Democratic policies around trans issues or immigration issues," but what they really think is that no one can rationally, logically, or morally object to these policies.
You puzzle over their tendencies to change the subject from or outright ignore culture issues rather than consider changing their own positions. Not only do they not feel the need to change their positions, but they also think calls to do so are a betrayal of basic human decency. The ones who deflect or ignore culture issues fully agree on those issues with the ones who defiantly champion them; they just want to give the Great Unwashed time to achieve culture consciousness while they ply them with economic policy.
Of course, the economic policy they want to ply the working and middle classes with is eat-the-rich Socialism, when those classes stubbornly cling to their belief in the power of free enterprise and capitalism to power their economic mobility far better than State planning can. But just as they believe that of course everyone will evolve to their cultural view and norms, they assume that of course everyone agrees with them that Capitalism Is Bad and only the State can provide subsistence.
The Democratic Party you advocate for still has a number of adherents, but (with some exceptions, like yourself) they aren't as vocal and articulate as the Progressives. The Progressives will not stop until the term "Democratic Party" becomes synonymous in voters' minds with all of the culture issues you decry as out of sync with voters' values. It's not likely you will be able to stop them; perhaps you can take a measure of cold comfort in knowing that the Trump takeover of the Republican Party has moved the GOP much closer to your vision of a liberal, pro-capitalist, pro-defense party that the Progressives are.
Expecting "progressive" Democrats to stop advocating their extremist views is like the adage of expecting a leopard to change its spots. They are genuinely concerned about issues like discrimination, economic inequality, environmental degradation, and so am I. It's just that I have my own ideas about (a) how severe and pervasive these problems are, and (b) what MORE should be done through government policies to address them without killing free market incentives to invest and produce efficiently.
The only hope that I see of achieving multiple goals is by a moderate approach between the government command and control approach favored by "progressives," and the indifference to my concerns displayed by MAGA types. And the only way that I see that happening is through the development of a credible centrist third party, encouraged by changes to the electoral process such as ranked choice voting and/or approval voting.
A centrist party is unneeded as it already exists. It is otherwise known as the Uniparty-a fusion of the establishment parts of Republicans and Democrats. What is needed is a populist fusion party consisting of MAGA and the non-establishment portions of the Democratic Party.
The “UniParty” is a term fabricated by RHINOS (Rational Humans In Name Only) to disrespect Members of Congress who have the audacity to work together to achieve rational compromise solutions.
Ranked choice voting is a scam. Exhausted ballots do not count. Ballots are thrown out because the instructions are so convoluted. Voters have to vote for all candidates on the ballot, even if they don't support them. But I'm sure Lisa Murkowski would disagree.
I loved the first version of this article, and I love this version even more. The next time some Democrat demands to know why independent voters like me did not vote Democratic for the past four years (or longer), I will refer them to this essay. Thank you!
Much as I value Texeira’s insight, I think he misses a deeper problem: the Democratic Party doesn’t respect the voters and therefore has engaged in little serious self-criticism despite losing twice to Donald Trump in eight years.
Overwhelmingly, the Democratic response to the political earthquake of 2016 has been to blame the voters. Almost every “explanation” I know of Trump’s enduring popularity written from the Democratic side has been little more than a gussied up version of Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remarks.
While the social science jargon may vary, the conclusions do not: Trump voters are lazy, stupid, ignorant, vicious or irresponsible.
Do Republican politicians and other elites have any greater respect for the voters? I doubt it, but at least they recognize their own arrogance clearly enough to conceal it.
The educated professionals and liberal intelligentsia who ran the Democratic Party into the ground are so convinced of their own superiority that they can’t see their own elitism. In their understanding of “democracy” the voters’ role is to shut up and vote Democratic. Then all the smart people will gather behind closed doors to figure out how to make our lives wonderful.
This belief that the voters are children helps explain how the Party could ignore its own democratic principles and ram the Biden-Harris ticket down the throats of Democratic voters, 2/3 of whom said they did NOT want Biden to run again. It explains why Democrats in government and the media felt entitled to conceal Biden’s evident decline, and then gaslight us when the problem could no longer be hidden.
In sum, the Democratic Party, like the GOP, has a democracy problem: they have forgotten what it is, namely government by the people. Even worse, they and GOP establishment candidates like Haley and DeSantis are ambivalent about government by the people. In their view, the people have discredited themselves by electing Donald Trump.
If you truly embrace the democratic form of government, when you lose an election you don’t blame the voters. You blame yourself. Yet blaming the voters is exactly what Democrats and the old GOP establishment have done.
How did we get here? How did the birthplace of democracy end up with a political class that no longer believes in the superiority of the democratic form of government (although they surely believe that they are champions of “democracy”.)?
Money is how, campaign finance. Yes, our discontents have other sources, but at the end of the day, if you don’t raise ungodly sums long before the voting begins, your campaign is judged “not viable” and the voters won’t even hear your name.
Long ago the donors became the true constituents of our elected representatives. We the people are a nuisance, a necessary evil, instead of the source of legitimate authority. That’s how both parties ceased to respect the people, and that’s why so many Americans feel the only way to fight back is by electing Mr. Trump.
The phrase “massive narrative and branding project” for me, says a lot of it. My three stepchildren, fifty and older, all accused me of being racist. Me, who dated a black woman in college, employed black tradesmen in the south and illegal aliens in Vegas, all the best at their jobs, and several who I considered friends ate at my home. I now hardly communicate with the steps anymore. The ignorance of the narrative is not palatable.
See if you can catch Jen Psaki, Obama's former White House press secretary, in the act of committing Democratic cultural denialism. This transcript is an excerpt of her interview with Tim Miller on Miller's Bulwark podcast of November 19, 2024. It takes a moment for Psaki to warm up, but then she really gets going:
Psaki: Look, let me just talk about the cultural issues, though, because you mentioned 2004. And like one of the lessons from 2004 that I think was an overwrought wrong one from Democrats was we can't talk about gay marriage ever and nobody can be for it because that's how Bush won the election. Right.
Miller: Yeah.
Psaki: That was the lesson. And right now you have people coming out and saying we can never speak of trans kids in any positive fashion. And you're like, wait a second. First of all, there was an ad that was run that was effective about Kamala Harris's answer to an
ACLU questionnaire and her answer when she for like a couple of months in 2019 about supporting the funding paying for gender affirming care for undocumented immigrants in prison.
Miller: Right. Yes. Yeah.
Psaki: First of all, I don't I don't know who supports that. Why would most people support that? So let's just be clear about that. That doesn't mean that you can't say, you know what? There are kids out there who are struggling through mental health issues, who were born in a body they don't feel like is their own.
And we can be humane and support that as a society. I've also seen and because I went after him the other bit, I can just say this. Seth Moulton, who I know, and he is a good member in many ways, but he has been pulled into the right-wingosphere theory that every community
across the country has trans girls who are beating up girls who were born girls and, like... All of these things.
This is not an issue across the country of all of these states. So many states have passed these laws that like ban trans youth and sports. You know what? And a lot of these states, they don't have a single example. They have zero. They have one. They have two.
So the other risk here is being so pulled into trying to be contrarian that you're not looking at the facts of the issue. And if it's an actual issue. I agree with all that.
Miller: On the other hand, though, like if the view is just like if there's a Democrat that says, I don't think that biological males who have transitioned should be playing in girls sports. I think it's a complicated issue. I agree with you. It's not that like there are very few examples of it.
And it's way over indexed in the culture. Like if a Democrat has that view, like shouldn't you just let them have it? Like, do they really need to be protested?
Psaki: No, I don't think people should be protesting people. But I also think people who get they get pulled into it like I'm going to real talk you. This is something we should say that, like, we are just all because I am a father of girls and like I have a daughter, too. This is not a universal issue.
So, like, let's call out their bullshit. That's what I'm saying. Right. It's like. There's a little bit of falling prey to what some of the right-wing sphere is saying. Check the facts. Read the fine print. I think there are certain issues Democrats should be more outspoken about,
including I'm not sure who is for the federal funding of gender-affirming care in prison. Why?
Let's just probably move that one to the side. Those two prisoners go above them.
But there are a range of issues that I think there's a risk here of like people losing some humanity in order to feel like they're speaking out against woke, whatever the heck that means.
Psaki is so adamant about her ignorance and credulity. Does she even realize that what she's doing is the moral and factual equivalent of standing up for, say, Anita Bryant?
My one quibble... immigration is as much or more so an economic issue as we've seen over the past week with the H1-B dust up. I attribute a lot of the intemperate remarks I've heard about desi people to be more a reflection of anger over loss of income and jobs very similar to what I hear from my working class brothers and sisters.
They ignore these things at their own peril. These are the very issues that made me curious enough to look into Trump in the first place. And, oh boy, when I started digging...let's just say I'm no longer a Democrat.
Excellent points, but voters didn't just imagine Harris supported tax payer funded transition surgeries, allowing children to transition without parental notification, decriminalization of border crossings, abortion until delivery and defunding the police. Kamala held those beliefs, until the day she became a Presidential candidate. Harris rarely bothered to say she changed her mind, on any of the above issues. If Kamala did claim her thoughts had evolved, she never explained the evolution.
Nearly all of the aforementioned issues are law in CA, where Harris helped run the government for nearly 20 years. CA does pay for transition surgeries. School employees are, legally, forbidden from informing parents, their kids have different gender identities in school. CA law does not allow abortion until delivery, but 9 states do. Harris has stated, women should enjoy unrestricted access to abortion.
Moreover, Harris long refused to enforce immigration law as SF DA, and then as CA AG. In SF, Harris rarely charged migrant drug dealers with felonies, so they could not be deported, after a conviction. CA is today, marred in lawsuits by female prisoners, raped by intact transgender "women" housed in female prisons. Harris bragged, she championed this right for CA prisoners to transition, at tax payer expense. Then she insisted they serve their sentences in female prisons.
Reps actually did a lousy job of explaining just how Progressive Harris polices, have always been. Kamala helped name and write the CA law, that removed incarceration as a possible punishment for thefts up to $950, per instance. Kamala's most enduring legacy, will be tooth paste locked up like gold in Ft. Knox, thanks to the mass shoplifting, she spurred.
Dems are in denial, but Reps did not magically invent Kamala's positions. She held them for decades, as does a large chunk of DC Dems.
This is where I think, thankfully, Democrats are missing it and will continue to miss it. Do "trans" policies raise prices? Not in a direct sense, but they do. DEI and other woke nonsense are killing competitiveness, destroying masculinity, causing an entire generation of boys to drop out, and indirectly bloat corporations with HR and DEI departments, reduce productivity and profits, and most of all ensure that the immigration H1B visa debates will be highlighted. Because it all comes back to basic fairness, which most Americans see as lacking---not because of greedy corporations (and to an extent I can be with you on that)---but because of all the surrounding policies that destroy "normal" life. Economics and culture DO mix. Ask Hollywood. My guess is we'll see a merger of Disney---which was temporarily saved by the non-woke "Moana2" and the anti-woke "Deadpool & Wolverine"---and Warners, which still can't get out of its own way. Only Costco is sticking to DEI (at least in public) meaning that it, soon, will begin to trail others. Ramaswamy and Musk are leading a major "identity charge" for American lean productivity that has no place for crazy environmental or sexual policies, and the ChiComs are reinforcing their ideas every month. So I agree that the Democrats are engaged in culture denialism, but your solution is to act like those cultural and environmental positions are reasonable and that they just need to be hidden from voters. My position is they are poison and will destroy any party cleaving to them. As a Republican, fine by me.
Another great insightful article published by the liberal patriot. Thank you guys for helping me making me smarter. I missed this article over at the free press where Im also a subscriber.
As a lifelong moderate Republican, I have been saying that if the Democratic party reflected the views of The Liberal Patriot, not only would I be a Democratic voter, I would be a loud advocate.
Same
I suggested a while ago that Seth Moulton was the canary in the coal mine for the effort to reorient the Democratic Party. It doesn't sound like it is going well. Beyond The Groups, there are vast numbers of virtue signaling fellow travelers. Put together, they are probably a majority of the base of the party or at least what is left of it.
To be fair, establishment Republicans are in denial about their base just as much. Their version is to be conservative in an election year and then revert when they are in office. Rinse and repeat. After many years, the base is starting to catch on. Hence Trump.
The Supreme Court's decision later this year in the case United States v. Skrmetti, which is challenging Tennessee's statutory ban on pediatric gender medicine, could have a tremendous impact on efforts to break the Democratic Party's embrace of gender identity ideology.
If the Court upholds the ban, not only will it encourage other states controlled by Republicans to follow suit, it may also spell the extinction of the "trans kid" at the hands of the judiciary. While this would be the correct outcome because, with the possible exception of precocious autogynephilic boys, there is no such thing as a trans child, it would provoke a backlash from trans rights activists and their fervent cishet trans allies. But for once they would be on the defensive.
Should the Court find that trans kids are a protected class entitled to heightened scrutiny of laws that treat them differently than other similarly situated individuals, Katie bar the door. It would be a terrible setback for the sex realist movement. Worse, it would condemn gender-confused minors who lack the capacity to give informed consent to treatment with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to a transition process that has yet to be proven safe, effective and necessary.
Adding insult to injury, the majority of those minors who would otherwise get over their gender troubles and find they were attracted to the same sex would suffer catastrophic setbacks in their ability to grow up to be the gays and lesbians they were meant to be.
The Supreme Court with its 3-3-3 split is pretty much a random events generator.
I fear that SCOTUS is going to be nice to "trans kids" in Skrmetti in an effort to stanch the dramatic loss of of the Court's political capital brought about by Dobbs and Chief Justice Roberts' (politely) belligerent stance towards adopting an enforceable code of ethics at the high court.
Roberts is belligerent toward having a clear stance about anything. He is a weathervane so he (and his wife) get invited to all the good parties.
The Democrats are lost in the cultural woods. Somehow they want to deny that America is sick and tired of their garbage cultural wars and positions. What was the most memorable advertisement of the 2024 election - “Harris is for they them. Trump is for you”. Apparently they want to keep on this line of thinking and lose elections.
I’m personally involved in a “culture war” issue that I believe will garner increasing attention in coming years: the issue of “road diets”, where cities choose to reduce traffic lanes available to motor vehicles and give the two outer lanes of four-lane streets over to exclusive bicycle use. The structure is: the two usual N/S or E/W traffic lanes for motor vehicles; “parallel” parking for cars to the right of each traffic lane; an “isolated” bike lane anywhere from four to eight feet wide; and then the curb and sidewalk. They are immensely unpopular with drivers and merchants in such areas, and despite claims of proponents that they will encourage bicycle commuting, the “bicycle lanes” sit largely unused while motorists are fuming in “traffic jams”.
We recently experienced this controversy in Glendale, California, where I reside. “SAFE streets” (Streets Are For Everyone) advocates, juiced by “mandates” and funding from D.C. and Sacramento, spent $1.5 million last May to create a half-mile such segment in the North Brand Boulevard business and residential district. (Similar such projects have been instituted in many other areas of L.A. County, most notoriously in the final eastern two miles of Hollywood Boulevard, which they wish to extend all the way west a further three miles through the heart of Hollywood.) Drivers hated them; merchants and area residents hated them; the Fire Station on Brand Boulevard hated them; and they were largely unused (my recent survey: one user over the course of an hour’s observation).
Finally, we had a City Council meeting on December 10 where maintenance and extension of the project was up for vote. Surveys showed that people were in favor of abolishing the project by about a 7-1 margin. Thankfully, the City Council listened to all the 50+ people who testified and voted 4-1 to spend $500,000 to return North Brand to its prior state.
Now here’s a weird angle to the story. I’m an avid biker, and I *hate* such “confining” bike lanes, and I never use them whenever possible. (I was one of the 50 testifying for removal of the project.) They are unpleasantly “confining” and actually feel much less safe than riding in traffic, which virtually every biker learns to do by, oh, about age 12. I frequently pass by the North Brand project on my bike and regard this setup as nothing but a nuisance, especially when making right turns off Brand.
My impression is that these projects are basically stealth efforts on the part of “Climate Crisis” people to choke off motor vehicle traffic in urban areas to “encourage” bike commuting. They claim they’re for bicyclist (and pedestrian!) safety, when, for example, that entire five-mile length of Hollywood Boulevard experiences all of *one* fatal or serious injury auto-bicyclist accident over the course of an entire year (and for all we know, that could typically be some drunk or drug-addled homeless person riding in dark clothing at night, or an inexperienced E-biker speeding along at 35 or 40). The Hollywood City Council spokesman was completely indifferent to my concerns and objections which I expressed in an email.
I could go on and on, but you get the picture….. (They’re really big in places like Berkeley, Portland and Santa Monica.)
Portlander here. What Mr. McKay says is true. There are motor vehicle eliminationists in the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT).
I won't cover the points Mr. McKay made so eloquently. I'll just add that in Portland the movement to put people on bicycles has taken on elements of a culture war. The college educated, bike riding elite of the city's Portlandia-perfect inner neighborhoods are deeply at odds with the residents of the working class districts of outer east Portland that are too uncool to have been shown on Portlandia. For now, a backlash against forced road diets is yielding some results. It has the local bike activists questioning just how much input neighborhoods should have on bicycle infrastructure projects. Scratch deeply enough and you'll find that inside most progressives there's an authoritarian waiting to spring into action.
I've been reading "Liberal Bullies" by social psychologist Luke Conway. He reports from his line of research that leftists harbor extremely authoritarian views on dissent from their party line, including "crushing" and "destroying" those people. He found that conservatives who scored high on his tests would admit they were authoritarian whereas leftists who scored as high would deny it. And, the more authoritarian the leftists were, the more strongly they denied it!
Leftist authoritarianism is the main reason why I hate them, and I suspect the same is true for a lot of other people who are defecting from the Dem Party.
Read James Carville's article in today's NYT. He is rich into denial about how it was cultural issues that lost the election.
.....but he was also in denial about the election. He thought Harris was going to win.
My wife and I, two voters for Democrats for 50 years, could see two years ago that Democrats were in la-la land about the country and were going to lose, so switched to being Independents.
It's like Democrats don't know any voters outside their bubbles, so think everyone is like them. It's so elitist.
Adding to RT's comments, there is also clock ticking for Dem leaders. DJT has been the Dem's most effective "get out the vote" tool. DJT is term-limited and pretty old. What happens when the successor Republicans don't have even a fraction of his baggage, but continue to embrace his cultural populist message? If Dems are still thinking someone like KH is the future, the party will soon be on life support.
Except that who will want to provide the life support...?
Mr. Teixeira, you call it culture denialism - I call it the fundamental beliefs of many of the people you call Democrats. They will tell you sincerely: America really is a “white supremacist” society. “Structural racism” is how America was founded and built, and it explains all the socioeconomic problems of nonwhites. Anyone who raises questions about immigration levels is a racist. Personal pronouns are fundamental to our existence in a just society and something that must enforced. Transwomen are exactly the same as biological women (just as transmen are exactly the same as biological men) and those who question such a claim are simply “haters” who at the very least should be expunged from polite society and preferably should be subjected to reeducation to be stripped of their atavistic bigotry.
When you say that these people do not view culture issues as real issues, you mean that they think they are not issues that drive voter choices. The trouble is that they view these issues as the only real issues, already decided as matters of fundamental and unalienable human rights and not up for political debate, much less open to revision by vote of the people. You say they think "no one would normally object to Democratic policies around trans issues or immigration issues," but what they really think is that no one can rationally, logically, or morally object to these policies.
You puzzle over their tendencies to change the subject from or outright ignore culture issues rather than consider changing their own positions. Not only do they not feel the need to change their positions, but they also think calls to do so are a betrayal of basic human decency. The ones who deflect or ignore culture issues fully agree on those issues with the ones who defiantly champion them; they just want to give the Great Unwashed time to achieve culture consciousness while they ply them with economic policy.
Of course, the economic policy they want to ply the working and middle classes with is eat-the-rich Socialism, when those classes stubbornly cling to their belief in the power of free enterprise and capitalism to power their economic mobility far better than State planning can. But just as they believe that of course everyone will evolve to their cultural view and norms, they assume that of course everyone agrees with them that Capitalism Is Bad and only the State can provide subsistence.
The Democratic Party you advocate for still has a number of adherents, but (with some exceptions, like yourself) they aren't as vocal and articulate as the Progressives. The Progressives will not stop until the term "Democratic Party" becomes synonymous in voters' minds with all of the culture issues you decry as out of sync with voters' values. It's not likely you will be able to stop them; perhaps you can take a measure of cold comfort in knowing that the Trump takeover of the Republican Party has moved the GOP much closer to your vision of a liberal, pro-capitalist, pro-defense party that the Progressives are.
Expecting "progressive" Democrats to stop advocating their extremist views is like the adage of expecting a leopard to change its spots. They are genuinely concerned about issues like discrimination, economic inequality, environmental degradation, and so am I. It's just that I have my own ideas about (a) how severe and pervasive these problems are, and (b) what MORE should be done through government policies to address them without killing free market incentives to invest and produce efficiently.
The only hope that I see of achieving multiple goals is by a moderate approach between the government command and control approach favored by "progressives," and the indifference to my concerns displayed by MAGA types. And the only way that I see that happening is through the development of a credible centrist third party, encouraged by changes to the electoral process such as ranked choice voting and/or approval voting.
A centrist party is unneeded as it already exists. It is otherwise known as the Uniparty-a fusion of the establishment parts of Republicans and Democrats. What is needed is a populist fusion party consisting of MAGA and the non-establishment portions of the Democratic Party.
The “UniParty” is a term fabricated by RHINOS (Rational Humans In Name Only) to disrespect Members of Congress who have the audacity to work together to achieve rational compromise solutions.
Ranked choice voting is a scam. Exhausted ballots do not count. Ballots are thrown out because the instructions are so convoluted. Voters have to vote for all candidates on the ballot, even if they don't support them. But I'm sure Lisa Murkowski would disagree.
Really? Who gains from it, at whose expense?
I loved the first version of this article, and I love this version even more. The next time some Democrat demands to know why independent voters like me did not vote Democratic for the past four years (or longer), I will refer them to this essay. Thank you!
Much as I value Texeira’s insight, I think he misses a deeper problem: the Democratic Party doesn’t respect the voters and therefore has engaged in little serious self-criticism despite losing twice to Donald Trump in eight years.
Overwhelmingly, the Democratic response to the political earthquake of 2016 has been to blame the voters. Almost every “explanation” I know of Trump’s enduring popularity written from the Democratic side has been little more than a gussied up version of Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remarks.
While the social science jargon may vary, the conclusions do not: Trump voters are lazy, stupid, ignorant, vicious or irresponsible.
Do Republican politicians and other elites have any greater respect for the voters? I doubt it, but at least they recognize their own arrogance clearly enough to conceal it.
The educated professionals and liberal intelligentsia who ran the Democratic Party into the ground are so convinced of their own superiority that they can’t see their own elitism. In their understanding of “democracy” the voters’ role is to shut up and vote Democratic. Then all the smart people will gather behind closed doors to figure out how to make our lives wonderful.
This belief that the voters are children helps explain how the Party could ignore its own democratic principles and ram the Biden-Harris ticket down the throats of Democratic voters, 2/3 of whom said they did NOT want Biden to run again. It explains why Democrats in government and the media felt entitled to conceal Biden’s evident decline, and then gaslight us when the problem could no longer be hidden.
In sum, the Democratic Party, like the GOP, has a democracy problem: they have forgotten what it is, namely government by the people. Even worse, they and GOP establishment candidates like Haley and DeSantis are ambivalent about government by the people. In their view, the people have discredited themselves by electing Donald Trump.
If you truly embrace the democratic form of government, when you lose an election you don’t blame the voters. You blame yourself. Yet blaming the voters is exactly what Democrats and the old GOP establishment have done.
How did we get here? How did the birthplace of democracy end up with a political class that no longer believes in the superiority of the democratic form of government (although they surely believe that they are champions of “democracy”.)?
Money is how, campaign finance. Yes, our discontents have other sources, but at the end of the day, if you don’t raise ungodly sums long before the voting begins, your campaign is judged “not viable” and the voters won’t even hear your name.
Long ago the donors became the true constituents of our elected representatives. We the people are a nuisance, a necessary evil, instead of the source of legitimate authority. That’s how both parties ceased to respect the people, and that’s why so many Americans feel the only way to fight back is by electing Mr. Trump.
If these remarks make sense to you, please visit my website and sign up for my Substack: www.savedemocracyinamerica.org
The phrase “massive narrative and branding project” for me, says a lot of it. My three stepchildren, fifty and older, all accused me of being racist. Me, who dated a black woman in college, employed black tradesmen in the south and illegal aliens in Vegas, all the best at their jobs, and several who I considered friends ate at my home. I now hardly communicate with the steps anymore. The ignorance of the narrative is not palatable.
See if you can catch Jen Psaki, Obama's former White House press secretary, in the act of committing Democratic cultural denialism. This transcript is an excerpt of her interview with Tim Miller on Miller's Bulwark podcast of November 19, 2024. It takes a moment for Psaki to warm up, but then she really gets going:
Psaki: Look, let me just talk about the cultural issues, though, because you mentioned 2004. And like one of the lessons from 2004 that I think was an overwrought wrong one from Democrats was we can't talk about gay marriage ever and nobody can be for it because that's how Bush won the election. Right.
Miller: Yeah.
Psaki: That was the lesson. And right now you have people coming out and saying we can never speak of trans kids in any positive fashion. And you're like, wait a second. First of all, there was an ad that was run that was effective about Kamala Harris's answer to an
ACLU questionnaire and her answer when she for like a couple of months in 2019 about supporting the funding paying for gender affirming care for undocumented immigrants in prison.
Miller: Right. Yes. Yeah.
Psaki: First of all, I don't I don't know who supports that. Why would most people support that? So let's just be clear about that. That doesn't mean that you can't say, you know what? There are kids out there who are struggling through mental health issues, who were born in a body they don't feel like is their own.
And we can be humane and support that as a society. I've also seen and because I went after him the other bit, I can just say this. Seth Moulton, who I know, and he is a good member in many ways, but he has been pulled into the right-wingosphere theory that every community
across the country has trans girls who are beating up girls who were born girls and, like... All of these things.
This is not an issue across the country of all of these states. So many states have passed these laws that like ban trans youth and sports. You know what? And a lot of these states, they don't have a single example. They have zero. They have one. They have two.
So the other risk here is being so pulled into trying to be contrarian that you're not looking at the facts of the issue. And if it's an actual issue. I agree with all that.
Miller: On the other hand, though, like if the view is just like if there's a Democrat that says, I don't think that biological males who have transitioned should be playing in girls sports. I think it's a complicated issue. I agree with you. It's not that like there are very few examples of it.
And it's way over indexed in the culture. Like if a Democrat has that view, like shouldn't you just let them have it? Like, do they really need to be protested?
Psaki: No, I don't think people should be protesting people. But I also think people who get they get pulled into it like I'm going to real talk you. This is something we should say that, like, we are just all because I am a father of girls and like I have a daughter, too. This is not a universal issue.
So, like, let's call out their bullshit. That's what I'm saying. Right. It's like. There's a little bit of falling prey to what some of the right-wing sphere is saying. Check the facts. Read the fine print. I think there are certain issues Democrats should be more outspoken about,
including I'm not sure who is for the federal funding of gender-affirming care in prison. Why?
Let's just probably move that one to the side. Those two prisoners go above them.
But there are a range of issues that I think there's a risk here of like people losing some humanity in order to feel like they're speaking out against woke, whatever the heck that means.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/jen-psaki-dont-speak-to-me
Good thing this woman works for the Democrat Party. No one else would be stupid or crazy enough to hire her.
Psaki is so adamant about her ignorance and credulity. Does she even realize that what she's doing is the moral and factual equivalent of standing up for, say, Anita Bryant?
I doubt if Psaki knows who Anita Bryant is.
My one quibble... immigration is as much or more so an economic issue as we've seen over the past week with the H1-B dust up. I attribute a lot of the intemperate remarks I've heard about desi people to be more a reflection of anger over loss of income and jobs very similar to what I hear from my working class brothers and sisters.
They ignore these things at their own peril. These are the very issues that made me curious enough to look into Trump in the first place. And, oh boy, when I started digging...let's just say I'm no longer a Democrat.