Liberal Matthew Yglesias delivers a tough message to his fellow Democrats: our party is too pure! His theme is that, by rigorously excluding bigots, the Democrats have condemned themselves to minority status.
His lack of self-knowledge is remarkable. It never occurs to Yglesias that the Democratic Party is already teeming with bigotry–hatred of Jews, Christians, free enterprise and conservatives, among others, that is so intense that people are being shot by members of the “pure” party.
That aside, what is his point? It turns out that the “bigotry” Yglesias is concerned with relates almost exclusively to gender issues. In this context, he notes, in an unintentionally humorous way, the perils of intersectionality:
When my kid was about three or four, I took him to a family-friendly street fair. The adults were a mix of Logan Circle yuppie parents and foreign-born nannies, mostly from Latin America and the Caribbean. Someone started handing out helium balloons to the kids, some blue and some pink. The kids were grabbing the balloons and playing without paying much attention to the color, but then some of the adults started intervening and sorting the balloons: blue for boys and pink for girls.
Take a second and guess whether it was the white yuppies or the Latino and Afro-Caribbean working class who were the self-appointed gender police.
When I ask people in my life this question, absolutely everybody guesses correctly that it was the nannies.
Blue for boys and pink for girls! How bigoted can you get?
Yglesias correctly notes that Democrats are dying, politically, because of their devotion to the “trans” cause, especially their demand that boys play in girls’ sports:
According to Gallup, 69% of Americans and 41% of Democrats believe that transgender athletes should be required to play on teams that match their birth sex. In Pew Research Center’s data, the conservative position is slightly less popular overall but also less polarized, such that 45% of Democrats agree.
The fact that virtually no Democratic Party elected officials or associated elites publicly hold a view that is overwhelmingly popular with the public — and not particularly unpopular with their own base — is a testament to the power of progressive persuasion, successful intracoalitional politics, and, frankly, bullying.
***
Because the substance of this issue is privately controversial even among high-socioeconomic-status Democrats…
Even!
…you easily get at least quiet agreement behind closed doors that the tent-shrinking approach to gender identity and sports has been a disaster. But the same logic applies on topics like immigration and gender roles where there is much more consensus among highly educated liberals about the merits.
“Highly educated liberals.” That is, liberals who live in a fantasy land.
What Yglesias never pauses to consider is that the majority who believe it is unfair to allow men to compete in women’s sports may be right. If you start with the a priori assumption that “highly educated liberals” are right about all things, including their most indefensible prejudices, and anyone who disagrees is a bigot, then the question becomes: how can we get more of those bigots to vote for us?
On the Republican side, things are simpler. We think that our policies are good for the large majority of Americans, and we get more people to vote for us by tirelessly pointing out the merits of our policies and the foolishness of the Democrats’ policies. “Bigotry” doesn’t enter into it.
