Longtime famed team-left strategist James Carville recently shared his doubts in the woke movement, urging that democrats have a “messaging problem” that could cost them the 2022 midterms. In a Vox interview, Carville didn’t hold back. “Wokeness is a problem, and everyone knows it,” he said. “You ever get the sense that people in faculty […]
Longtime famed team-left strategist James Carville recently shared his doubts in the woke movement, urging that democrats have a “messaging problem” that could cost them the 2022 midterms.
In a Vox interview, Carville didn’t hold back.
“Wokeness is a problem, and everyone knows it,” he said.
“You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like ‘Latinx’ that no one else uses,” he explained. “Or they use a phrase like ‘communities of color.’ I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a ‘community of color.’ I know lots of white and black and brown people and they all live in...neighborhoods.”
He said that if democrats want to hold power, they need to use more commonplace, relatable language, avoiding “jargony language that’s unrecognizable to most people.”
Carville noted that the far-left progressive activists are preventing the democratic party from winning elections in rural parts of the country.
“We can’t say, ‘republicans are going to call us socialists no matter what, so let’s just run as out-and-out socialists.’ That’s not the smartest thing to do. And maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isn’t the smartest thing to do because almost f****** no one wants to do that,” he said.
“Here’s the deal. No matter how you look at the map, the only way democrats can hold power is to build on their coalition, and that will have to include more rural white voters from across the country. Democrats are never going to win a majority of these voters. That’s the reality. But the difference between getting beat 80 to 20 and 72 to 28 is all the difference in the world,” he added.
Most importantly, according to Carville, woke politics almost cost the democratic party the 2020 presidential election.
“We won the White House against a world-historical buffoon,” he said. “And we came within 42,000 votes of losing. We lost congressional seats. We didn’t pick up state legislatures. So, let’s not have an argument about whether or not we’re off-key in our messaging. We are. And we’re off because there’s too much jargon and there’s too much esoterica and it turns people off."
