The Wrong New Democrats

https://www.foxnews.com/media/david-hogg-clashes-irate-james-carville-over-democratic-primary-plan-calls-him-win-elections

James Carville, aging “centrist” Democrat strategist, vs David Hogg, one of the “new-line” trendy uber-liberal culture warriors. Carville is somewhat of an elder statesman within the Party, having helped craft policy and successful electoral campaigns with Clinton, Obama and Biden and having a respected voice within the DNC. Hogg, known for his survival of the Parkland school-shooting tragedy and subsequent “March For Our Lives” gun-control advocacy, has acceded to the vice-chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, largely as a result of his insular celebrity and perceptual relationships with “the youth”. My take on this?

In my last post, I discussed the Human Centipede-like urge that Democrats seem to have on a state and national scale to take up the cursed mantle of cultural warfare in the face of obvious, intractable and well-founded opposition from across the political spectrum. Democratic national leadership and super-donors seem to feel that forcing unpopular, irrelevant issues down the throats of Democratic politicians, candidates, supporters and ultimately voters will somehow yield Democratic political victories, based on slanted statistics and individual bouts of anecdote- i.e. David Hogg’s crowdsurfing his way from upper-crust high-schooler to the vice-chairmanship of the DNC on the strength of collective victimhood.

James Carville is, at heart, a realist. Experience, disappointment and tempered successes have taught him that the way to success in elections is to set realistic, measured objectives and take what they can get in their furtherance. I’m not claiming he’s a messiah or that his brand of half-measures is particularly effective (after all, his wing of the party has lost to Donald J. Trump twice and their time in power was noted primarily for disappointment) but he isn’t wrong about the society we live in either. Extremes discounted, Americans don’t particularly want extremes in our government, and a sane, centrist Team D is a good thing.

David Hogg is an idealist and an extremist. In his perfect Democratic Party, the Party is taking big, bold steps to advance a gun-control agenda, a trans agenda, an economic agenda, etc. It’s not that courage, expediency and ambition are undesirable, but they need to be titrated to what is achievable and reasonably popular with the majority of society. Hogg is not the embodiment of this. Indeed, his entire emergence onto the political scene has been to advocate the self-immolation of the Party by demanding primaries against less-than-zealous Democrats and the replacement of Party leadership with more aggressive membership. Make no mistake- this is literally the Tea Party movement with better fashion.

Now, I’m not entirely unsympathetic. Watching the flaccid Biden Administration “attempts” to address some of the slow-rolling crisis of our time was frustrating in the extreme; indeed, one of the primary causes of the Biden/Harris failure was the perception that Democrats are simply impotent, inept, ignorant and incapable of actually solving problems. Hogg does have a point when he points out that primary processes are vital; 2024’s coronation proves exactly why. But there is a difference between a vigorous and fair primary process and an ideological purity test, and Hogg is demanding the latter. In Hogg’s party, there is no room for centrism, particularly on hot-button cultural issues. And that is not a winning strategy.

But wait, it gets worse. Remember, gun control is David’s origin story (and yes, Parkland was a tragedy, and no, there were no crisis actors), but it is fair to point out that Hogg used that tragedy to crowdsurf his way to political fame. As he has matured though, he has hardened in his views- and now, as the vice-chairman of the DNC, his opinion actually matters. When the DNC vice-chairman is tweeting things like “If you don’t support banning semi automatic rifles you should leave the Democratic Party and join the Guns Over People party.”, that’s a huge problem. Why? Well, he’s alienating the Americans who are actually electorally-decisive to pander to the politically-active Dems who can’t win outside of their regional power bases, and that commits the Democrats to hold the idiot ball yet again.

Now, let me get on my particular hobby horse yet again. For Democrats, gun control is a nice warm reliable comfort coffee. It gets pearl-clutching, gun-fearful liberals and their checkbooks all hot and bothered, is visible enough to be a problem, and allows the perception of progress from silly things like gun buybacks (of extremely dubious and limited effect per RAND) or protest marches and the occasional successfully-passed gun control legislation, and it helps the Democratic establishment divert attention from more important issues that are politically inconvenient. This dates back to the 1980s, but there’s something particularly abrasive about a body-surfing opportunist like David Hogg presenting this message. Now, I don’t think he’ll ever read this, but here’s the root problem with Hoggism.

First, David, you and your party lack credibility. Tragedy happens, and we ought to act to minimize the risk of reoccurrence, but that is an incredibly nuanced discussion even in operational terms, even before we start discussing political possibilities. Taking broad-stroke approaches like “let’s ban all semiautomatic rifles” or other “solutions” to extreme examples is exactly what the Democrats have tried to do on a state front for the past thirty years, and the backlash to those policies is a big part of what has cemented Republican majorities across governments despite their many challenges. Simply put, we cannot trust a Democratic party that leads by overreaction, and we know from decades of observation that the Democrats are the champions of overreaction (example: California, Massachusetts).

Second, David, who the fuck are you to set conditions on membership in a political party? Before I channel my inner George Washington, let me point out that you and your team need my vote and my support and my dollar far more than I need your guidance or input or policy proposals. You are 25 years old, of a privileged background, and have done nothing to serve our nation or society. March For Our Lives is an leftist circle-jerk that was well-engineered to get you deposited into the halls of donors and self-styled activists (quite successfully), and now, as the vice-chair of one half of our major political parties, your plan is to alienate everyone with a different opinion? Bold choice, kid. Bold choice. Are you like, trying to lose even the concept of a Blue Texas, or an Ohio return, or ignoring Georgia and the Carolinas and Arizona? Gun owners in all of those states make up an electorally-determinative, educated and politically-active constituency that is more than willing to make its decisions based on single issues of importance. Handing you even a twinge of a grasp at the reins of the DNC is like putting a child in the cockpit of an advanced airliner…an episode that is going to end tragically.

Third, and most seriously, this excursion into absurdity is exactly what drives gun owners firmly away from Democrats and the government in general and undermines even “reasonable” efforts to regulate arms. David Hogg is a symptom of liberal overregulation and zeal, not a cause, and that cause stems from biased donors, legacy politics and long-time politicians who refuse to craft a middle ground acceptable to Americans as a whole. This is why, luckily, they’ve lost more than they’ve won…but it’s also why contemptibly terrible candidates like Donald Trump have been successful and are currently wrecking the government.

At the end of the day, we don’t need David Hogg to win. We need to ditch him, the baggage he carries, and move on to a centrally-acceptable, winning message that actually works in 2026 and 2028.