With “Squad” members becoming less popular and the use of leftist terms like “Latinx” failing to catch on, political scientists and top Democrat strategists have concluded that progressives have failed to take the reigns of the party.
A Saturday New York Times analysis, titled “In Shift From 2020, Identity Politics Loses Its Grip on the Country,” admitted that the progressives’ mantra of inclusion at all costs — like saying “pregnant people” to prioritize a miniscule percentage of the population over women — has backfired.
“The last time Kamala Harris ran for president, during the 2020 primaries, people were losing jobs or friends because something they said or posted online came off as insensitive,” political reporter Jeremy W. Peters wrote. “An unfamiliar new language around identity was catching on, with terms like ‘Latinx’ and ‘BIPOC.’ The homeless were now ‘unhoused’ and there were ‘pregnant people,’ not women.”
A 2020 survey conducted by the CATO Institute found that 62 percent of Americans said the political climate prevented them from “saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.”
Even a majority of Democrats — 52 percent — agreed with that sentiment.
Yascha Benjamin Mounk, a German-American political scientist and professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, told the Times that the progressives’ “brief era of their unquestioned dominance is now coming to an end.”
Mounk, the author of The Identity Trap, noted a shift in the acceptance of far-left cultural views
“Even as these ideas start to be debated more openly, and some of their worst excesses are being rolled back, they continue to gain more influence in many contexts,” he said.
After the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, American college campuses became hotbeds of intense protests, encampments, vandalism, and more — even leading to the arrest and suspension of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) daughter for her involvement in a pro-Palestinian campus takeover at Columbia University:
“In academia, many top universities no longer mandate diversity statements for job applicants. Some schools have rebuked student activists for heckling visiting speakers and suspended them for disrupting events,” Peters wrote. “And to the consternation of free-speech supporters, they have cracked down on pro-Palestinian activists who have pitched tents in campus quads and taken over academic buildings.”
“Squad” members Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) both got sent packing after losing primaries to more moderate Democrats over the summer.
“The whole party is being shadowed by what happened in 2020, and now it’s trying to outrun that shadow,” Rahm Emanuel, a former senior adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, told the Times.
According to Emanuel, many in his own party greatly overestimated how well slogans like “defund the police” would be received by voters.
Only 15 percent of Americans supported abolishing police departments in 2020, a Gallup poll found.
Over in Hollywood, shows and movies with seemingly-forced diversity are flopping.
“…attempts at inclusive casting did not always attract audiences, who seemed uninterested in some rebooted movie franchises or TV classics, like the all-female The Marvels or The Wonder Years with a black family,” the political reporter observed.
After Marvel’s She-Hulk: Attorney-at-Law dropped on Disney+ in 2022, viewers took to social media to complain about “whiney feminist writing,” Breitbart News reported:
While Americans generally still care about racism and injustice, Peters wrote that scholars have observed that “people are now acknowledging that certain identity-focused progressive solutions to injustice were never broadly popular.”
According to a September Pew Research study, only four percent of U.S. Hispanics say “Latinx,” and 75 percent who have heard of the term said it should not be used.
“It’s clear now that they have failed to take over the Democratic Party,” said Democrat strategist Mark Mellman.
“They thought this was going to be a much quicker process,” he added. “But I think they’re in it for the long term. The battle is going to continue.”
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