Even supposed moderates are on board with radical ideas about race and gender — even though most Americans disagree.
Even supposed moderates are on board with radical ideas about race and gender — even though most Americans disagree.
D emocrats are in trouble in 2022. That much is obvious. Inflation, crime, rising energy prices, persistent Covid alarmism, a disastrous and humiliating end to our 20-year engagement in Afghanistan, and a presidential administration that has utterly failed to deliver on Joe Biden’s campaign-trail message of “a return to normalcy” — all roads point toward a red wave in the November midterms.
But Democrats are also facing an institutional problem that could pose a longer-term challenge to their political ambitions. The party seems incapable of distancing itself from the Left’s increasingly radical stance on contemporary culture-war issues such as critical race theory (CRT) and radical sexual and gender ideology. It has often been said that American voters lean center-left on economics and center-right on culture — and while that’s an obvious oversimplification, it’s true that Democrats tend to win when they emphasize the popular economic parts of their platform (health care, generous public spending, and so on). But even in the face of a coming red wave, the party has continued to double down on the deeply unpopular left-wing cultural ideology that has captured the imagination of its activist class.
During his 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton famously drew a sharp line in the sand between himself and the farther-left Jesse Jackson wing of his party. In what came to be known as a “Sister Souljah moment,” Clinton, during a speech to Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition,” criticized the rapper Sister Souljah for endorsing the killing of white people — comments that were “filled with . . . hatred,” Clinton said.
If you took the words “white” and “black” and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech. . . . We can’t get anywhere in this country pointing the finger at one another across racial lines. If we do that, we’re dead. And they will beat us.
Polling would suggest another Sister Souljah moment is highly overdue. A 2021 Gallup poll found that 62 percent of Americans “say trans athletes should only be allowed to play on sports teams that correspond with their birth gender, while 34% say they should be able to play on teams that match their gender identity.” A few months later, YouGov found a plurality saying that “allowing transgender women to use women’s spaces presents a genuine risk of harm” and that “transgender men should not be allowed to participate in men’s sports or use men’s changing rooms.”
Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education Bill, which has been dishonestly attacked in the progressive media as the “Don’t Say Gay” law for its ban on the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) in kindergarten through third grade, is favored by a margin of 16 points with registered voters nationwide. Most Americans remain unaware of critical race theory — a PR problem that strong, consistent Republican messaging can remedy — but those who have heard of it are “20 points more likely to have unfavorable (58 percent) as favorable (38 percent) opinions of it,” according to a 2021 Economist/YouGov poll. A 2021 Yahoo/YouGov poll found that Americans who have heard of CRT oppose by 14 points the idea that the ideology “is something students should be exposed to in school.”
You’d think that Democrats facing difficult races in 2022 and beyond would be doing everything they could to distance themselves from their party’s national image on social issues. But the outsized influence of the party’s activist wing, powerful teachers’ unions, and the left-leaning corporate media make it difficult for even the ostensible moderates to pivot to the center on cultural issues. Think about the Left’s contemporary line on the culture war: CRT isn’t being taught in schools and, even if it is, that’s a good thing, because it’s actually just honestly teaching the history of race in America, and parental concerns about it are illegitimate and rooted in racism. Alternatively, teaching young children about gender identity is literally saving lives — and anyone who opposes the ideology in public schools is literally murdering transgender kids. These lines have become something approximating conventional wisdom in elite left-wing institutions — and those institutions define the worldview of the modern Democratic Party.
Against that backdrop, how could a moderate Democrat “pivot” on these issues? You can’t “moderate” on the murder of trans kids, nor can you “compromise” on actual, honest-to-God racism. It’s a “yes” or “no” question. If that’s really what’s at stake, any concessions are morally unacceptable. Moderate Democrats in both the House and the Senate have been willing to break with their party on economic issues such as spending and overzealous regulation. But on CRT, gender ideology, and other cultural issues, the entire party apparatus is in lockstep.
Has one Democrat admitted that CRT — or CRT-influenced content — even exists in American public schools, let alone that it’s wrong? The closest you’ll get is Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), who implicitly signaled opposition to teaching the ideology in public schools when he became the only Democrat to vote, in August 2021, for the amendment to the bill sponsored by Senator Tom Cotton’s (R., Ark.) to block the use of federal funds for CRT in K–12. But beyond that vote, Manchin has neglected to discuss the issue publicly.
Other moderate Democrats have been even more reluctant to distinguish themselves from their party’s progressive wing on the issue: Not one of the 48 co-sponsors of Representative Burgess Owens’s May 2021 resolution condemning CRT was a Democrat, and the most conservative House Democrats have opted to avoid discussing the issue altogether. In November 2021, Democrats in Virginia lost the governor’s race and also the state house of delegates. When an NPR reporter asked Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat representing Virginia’s seventh district, “what went wrong” and whether CRT had played a role, she avoided using the term “CRT” altogether, despite the interviewer’s repeated prompting. The best that other moderates can muster is to beg their progressive counterparts to downplay the issue, as illustrated by a CNN report on a November exchange between Carolyn Bordeaux (D., Ga.) — a member of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition — and her colleagues:
A split emerged between two of the party’s frontline Democrats: Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux of Georgia, who is White, and Lauren Underwood of Illinois, who is Black. Underwood wanted to forcefully counter the GOP’s misinformation head-on, while Bourdeaux was leery about elevating the issue, according to sources familiar with the matter. Rep. Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, another Black woman, sided with Underwood during the meeting.
“We have a rising American electorate that are Black and brown people,” Underwood told CNN when asked about the episode. “We should be able to speak to their issues, their experiences as Americans in this country, without feeling like it’s a liability for other audiences.”
Bourdeaux acknowledged it was “one of many conversations among members from competitive districts about how to engage with our diverse and broad constituencies.”
On progressive sexual and gender ideology, moderate Democrats have often gone further: Even many Democrats from right-leaning districts are actively championing the Left’s line. Of the 225 Democrats in the House of Representatives, 224 are listed as co-sponsors of the Equality Act, which would make SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) a federally protected class under U.S. civil-rights law. That includes the most ideologically conservative Democrats in the 117th Congress, such as Josh Gottheimer (N.J.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Dean Phillips (Minn.), Cynthia Axne (Iowa), Abigail Spanberger (Va.), and Ron Kind (Wisc.). Here, too, moderates have been noticeably silent on issues such as male competitors in girls’ and women’s sports, even though most Americans are extremely skeptical of the trend. (The same Gallup poll that found that 62 percent of American adults support the proposition that athletes should play in divisions that match their birth gender also showed that 63 percent of independents and 41 percent of Democrats were in favor of the idea.)
All of that is to say: Don’t expect a Sister Souljah moment from Democrats on CRT and gender ideology anytime soon. If — and it’s a big “if” — Republicans can effectively capitalize on these issues, Democrats will be forced to choose between flouting CRT and radical transgenderism (the new orthodoxy) in their party and supporting them, which would alienate a broad swath of American voters. And if the current state of play is any indication, most of them will choose the latter.