Yet "tangled up in social issues" remains a popular misconception. Why?
It’s not a “misconception.” Democrats choose to spend their political capital changing the status quo on social issues. For example, Americans overwhelmingly oppose affirmative action: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans...
Affirmative action was banned in California in 1996. Which party tried to repeal the ban in 2020? Republicans didn’t pass a law to ban affirmative action even more!
> Americans who had heard the phrase affirmative action in the Center’s December survey were asked whether they saw it as a good or a bad thing. Among those who had ever heard the term, 36% said affirmative action is a good thing, 29% said it is a bad thing and a third weren’t sure.
> By comparison, Gallup has asked U.S. adults whether they “generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for racial minorities.” In 2021, the last time Gallup asked this question, a 62% majority of Americans favored such programs.
> Public attitudes about affirmative action can also vary depending on the specific context in which it is being discussed, such as in higher education or the workplace.
> A larger share of Americans disapprove than approve of higher education institutions taking race and ethnicity into account when admitting students, according to several recent Center surveys.
> In that survey, 74% of U.S. adults said that, when making decisions about hiring and promotions, companies and organizations should take only a person’s qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity. Around a quarter (24%) said companies and organizations should take a person’s race and ethnicity into account – in addition to qualifications – to increase diversity.
The unpopular approach of considering race is what Democrats have pushed recently. E.g. Prop 16:
> A "yes" vote supported this constitutional amendment to repeal Proposition 209 (1996), which stated that the government and public institutions cannot discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to persons on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting.
And I didn’t cherry pick anything. I quoted the portions of the article that said support depends on context, and then the paragraph discussing the college context and the employment context. The article itself happens to specify a percentage in text for one but not the other.
Then I mentioned Prop 16 as a concrete example of a Democrat-supported policy. But you can’t compare that number to the 74% because Prop 16 was a vote by a very liberal state, while the Pew poll is nationwide.
Note that the questions for both admissions and employment specify diversity as the goal. For example, the options for the employment question are:
> Only take a person's qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity
> Take a person's race and ethnicity into account, in addition to qualifications, in order to increase diversity
People support the end of increased diversity, but oppose race conscious admissions and hiring as a means to that end. That’s entirely consistent.
> That’s not a conflicting opinion. People support diversity, but oppose the principal approach to achieving diversity.
That is a conflict! You are describing a conflict! I don’t see how the discussion proceeds from here.
You see a similar pattern on many issues. E.g. people support balancing the federal budget. But most would say that they oppose cutting entitlement spending to balance the budget. That is, people’s specific opposition to cutting entitlement spending outweighs their general support for balancing the budget. In practice it just means that people’s preference in favor of the general issue is weakly held, while their opposition on the specific issue is strongly held.
But people answering polls don’t necessarily know that. Which is why you need to look at polls that are worded more specifically.
I am a pretty liberal person, but watching a white male candidate pass the interview but not get a job explicitly because he was a white male (because the only slots left were for "diverse" candidates) even makes me uncomfortable. That's a lived experience. I watched it in real life.
Jon Stewart has had two guests that he pushed back on that were both right while Stewart was wrong.
The first guest was on his Apple TV show, and he said something to the effect of "there's more of us [who disagree with reparations]," and Jon Stewart spoke over him and generally denied his opinions as rational. Current events show that that wasn't something to ignore.
The second was a guest talking about how these "social issues" are bad democratic strategy. Social programs are popular when they help the disadvantaged, but not popular when they help a particular group (which I think is in some way related to "intersectionality"?). Jon Stewart became emotional focusing on the injustice rather than pragmatically solving the problem.
I think that is where democrats often run foul of average voters.. they see very wealthy democrats pushing something. It won't hurt the wealthy democrats, but it could hurt them. Average non-wealthy people don't want to be punished for the sins of past wealthy people who happened to have the same skin color as them.
He is the populist voice of the educated left and I find lots of echo's in my own social circles/education.
Stewart is coming around and waking up to the idea that "woke" policies were rejected, and the democrats need re-framing/a reckoning. IMHO, he is largely the voice of democratic reckoning. Biden wasn't kicked out until Stewart's public evisceration and declaration that the emperor, in fact, has no clothes. He at least adapts with increasing information.
I just finished watching his interview with Ezra Klien, and as an on/off viewer of the TDS from back in his anti-war rants from 2003 or so (still in HS so kind of fuzzy on dates) to today I have seen a noticeable difference; he has finally realized that it's not that 'fraud, waste, abuse' in government doesn't occur on both sides of the isles (that much is probably always clear) it's that the two-party paradigm have in fact insidiously profited in their own specific ways from their respective MOs, and political theater aside are entirely complicit with it as it maintains the status quo.
Anything that deviates from the norm (eg Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul) is to be brandished too extreme, or unelectable and a loss to the other isle is a better result as it is something that detracts from the business as usual approach in modern US politics. The faces/names might change, but the tactics are the same, denying access to RNC/DNC platforms removing or outright denying delegates etc... it's all been done on both sides.
Just look at the face of the man melt when he hears how the Rural Broadband Bill process purposely rendered itself moot, and perhaps made the cluster** of DOGE become an inevitability--the obvious profiteer in chief Musk being the only one to really 'win' because of his innate and impeccable ability to award himself and his corps Govt contracts while championing and branding himself the best CEO the private sector has to offer.
Not only that, watch the interview with Maria Ressa when he realizes that the same Zuck that got Obama elected and then cozied up to Trump when he needed to has been the cause and reason why extremes of political fascism in the Philippines has risen, via Cambridge Analytica, and is part of the same agenda that has been playing out in US elections since 2016.
I don't know what to say about the TDS Host alumni, I reserve judgment on their POVs at this point, but I was a big fan of John Oliver since his days on The Bugle but if/when both him and Jon get together on a stand-up tour like he did with Chappele targeted at their primary demographic I think they can exert their collective influence to their hard-liner leftist audience to see that in actuality the Left-Right paradigm is in actuality a very parasitic symbiosis where the host (The US populace and perhaps World at large) will always suffer if it is the only form of governance we can either fathom or implement.
It's clear that resources and technology aren't the limiting factor in solving a large amount of Humanity's problems, it's that entrenched power (and those who benefit from it) refuse to relinquish any of it and will sooner destroy itself, and us with it, before it ever corrects itself.
It’s pretty shocking that this extremely fringe issue is the only thing you can find to support the narrative that dems are “spearheading” radical social change.
Whats actually happening is that conservative fear monger about random various minority groups, as they have for all of time, and then enact policies intended to harm them. The dems have no choice but to respond.
You would think that conservatives continuing this playbook for, well, ever, would cause people to stop and say “wait… are the conservatives really the ones stirring up the culture war?” But no, somehow it hasn’t. Somehow, we’re all still living under the delusion that conservatives just maintain the status quo and oppose radical change, and not that they’re the ones creating the need for opposing action.
Kamala Harris: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/14/harris-forgivable-loans-lega...
Biden’s SBA: https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/court-rules-biden-admin-di...
Biden’s USDA: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/white-farmers-chall...
Obama’s FAA: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/jan/30/faa-diversi...
Also, politicians are on the hook for their reaction to what the private sector is doing. The cached blurb for Google’s equal opportunity web page still says this: “Google is proud to be an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer.” Google got rid of the “affirmative action” part recently. Democrat politicians supported these programs. Republicans promised to end them.
In my state - WA - there's a prohibition on affirmative action written into the constitution (originally passed in a referendum in the 90s). Democrats have been talking of repealing or otherwise constraining it for ages, and in 2019, it culminated in another referendum:
https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Initiative_1000,_Affirmat...
You can see who supported it in the linked article. It was an indirect initiative so it went to the legislature first, which voted it in as law along party lines. A veto referendum was then held, in which it was repealed:
https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Referendum_88,_Vote_on_I-...
Again, you can look at the article for details on who supported and opposed it.
I can assure you that many people do remember this whole brouhaha and the names associated with it, at least the most prominent ones (like the Dem governor).
I was a CA voter in 2020. The focus I saw from candidates and citizens alike were things like democracy, rule of law, housing costs/policy, and police reform. Prop 16 was a footnote, not a focus, which is probably one of the reasons it lost (alongside the fact that its language made it difficult to tell if it was allowing for civil protections or tearing them down).
And democratic domestic policy focus since has been pretty clear: economic stimulus, infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, and various kinds of working class relief. Pretty standard "promote the general welfare" stuff, sometimes joined with efforts to protect "life liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (even for people who look or love differently). That's what you'd expect from classic liberals who still believe in enlightenment values and ideals. Or even just anyone who wants those things for themselves and realizes that to guarantee it to anyone, you have to support it for everyone.
This was definitely all over the 2024 democratic platform.
The problem isn't that people don't like the policy and values they'd get from the Democratic Party and its candidates. It's that they're increasingly mislead about what the difference is. As evidenced by the polling on relative policy popularity last fall:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/22/trump-har...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/tru...
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/50802-harris-vs-t...
At the end of the day, the Biden administration built way more DEI departments than EV chargers. And Democrats own that.
Huh. That sounds like validation of my original point that the Democratic Party has been "prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds", so dkjaudyeqooe's suggestion that candidates/officeholders should do that seems ... idempotent at best.
Maybe people should pay attention to what candidates campaign on and the policy they enact instead of going off vibes and trigger phrases.
Certainly that would give candidates and officeholders more electoral incentives to produce policy that serves voters.
And voters are correct to connect the employment practices they are seeing to Democrat policies. Democrats have interpreted civil rights laws to allow particular practices with respect to black and hispanic applicants that would be deemed illegal if applied to white applicants.
And of course, voters are entitled to weight platform points based on likelihood of achievement. They might put more weight on a “footnote” if they think the candidate will actually make that happen, and less weight on promises they think won’t transpire. Democrats who voted for DEI have gotten what they voted for. But the ones that voted for high speed rail in California have not.
Do you think declaring their preferred pronouns helped liberal politicians? Who did it ultimately help? Probably the Trump campaign.
Also, "defund the police" is easily the stupidest political slogan ever. It's bewildering. Did no one think "Reform the police" was a winner? And yet liberal politicians lapped it up.
https://www.businessinsider.com/which-democrats-voted-agains...
"[We] made record investments in public safety, putting more police officers on the beat; today, violent crime is at its lowest in 50 years"
"Democrats provided funding for communities to hire more police."
"since day one, President Biden has been working to make sure police officers have the tools they need to protect their communities, including more police officers on the street. We need to fund the police"
"Democrats passed and President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, with the largest ever federal investment infighting and preventing crime, reducing violence, and investing in public safety. That funding enabled cities and states to invest more than $14 billion in public safety and violence prevention, putting more police officers on the beat for accountable community policing."
https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...
Why is it that when looking for examples of what some are doing wrong, you're casting back over 5 years to an activist slogan that even then was treated as a poor expression rather than "lapped it up"?
It's almost like what you're here to do is actually reinforce the unproductive association rather than point the direction to a better way.
You want to talk about what's "bewildering"? What's bewildering is that your apparent confidence (or deliberately mislead?) confusing very online cheer-squad discourse from some corners over stated positions of most officeholders or candidates.
One could charitably assume that it's because you have some acquaintances or media follows who represent themselves or others as you've described and you've accidentally made parasocial promotion into an unfortunate wider partisan caricature. One could also warily assume you're an operative who is here to actively reinforce the associations you were ostensibly fighting against. Perhaps uncharitable, but hardly implausible these days.
The majority of liberal politicians are classic liberals who spend their campaign and policy time as you said you wanted, and it seems you haven't noticed.
"pronoun" doesn't appear in that 2024 D platform document. Also can't find it in a CBS news summary [1] of the Harris campaign. You know what does show up, though? Housing issues. Actual working class tax cut proposals. Child tax credits (pretty pro birth, very pro parent).
And those are what I think about when I think about liberal officeholders and candidates. Because that's what I see them talking about when I follow them and what's discussed in the media coverage I follow.
Where are you directing your attention?
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-platform-policy-p...
I'd say stated policy positions don't matter period. Nobody reads policy documents, it's all vibes.
Sounds like one answer to my question about why people don't recognize it when Democratic politicians do prioritize "housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds."
Have they (notably and visibly in the public consciousness) managed to get results regarding such issues such as housing in areas where they are uncontested?
As an outsider looking in i'd say if i had to imagine a democrat voting area i'd imagine an urbanised area, more progressive but also consistently more expensive.
Is this just "People are stupid and easily manipulated by the media. That's just how it is"?