Elizabeth Warren, Tom Steyer, and Bernie Sanders demonstrated during the New Hampshire Democratic primary debate why Democrats turn off so many white voters who otherwise are entirely of goodwill on matters of race. Each of them overtopped each other in calling for what amounts to endlessly applying race to public policy when most of the public feels otherwise.
Warren began the pandering to woke coastal elites and black political leaders by saying she firmly supports race-conscious policies in education, employment, and, basically, across-the-board. Steyer one-upped her by explicitly endorsing reparations for black people, a position consistently rejected in polls by overwhelming supermajorities of the public.
Then, Sanders went further into hyperdrive. America, he said, is a “racist society from top to bottom.” This is an obnoxious insult to his fellow countrymen, and it is absurd. For one thing, no racist society “from top to bottom” would have elected and reelected a black man as president of the United States.
This is getting old. Does the public still make at least some assumptions based on race? Of course. Some of those assumptions are far less malignant than others, and they aren’t merely the province of whites against blacks. Does some of the public discriminate based on racial prejudice? Yes. Should such attitudes be anathema? Absolutely.
But the public is sick and tired of being hectored, of being told they are racist and evil without any acknowledgment of how far this nation has come in combating racism, both public and private. The human psyche is such that when people of goodwill are hectored and insulted, they close their ears and dig in, and, if you put the confiscatory or policing force of government behind policies that actually discriminate against some citizens in the name of making up for discrimination those citizens themselves never practiced, race relations get worse, not better.
Much more merits saying on this subject in a format that isn’t rapid-response, but, for now, leave it at this: Politically, the more Democrats go down this path for the sake of primary votes, the more they will hurt themselves for the fall general election. They sound to most of the public not just like scolds but like radical ones. That’s not a way to win Middle American votes.
