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No Softening on the Fringe
The strategist didn’t stop at a mild critique. Carville, who helped orchestrate Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, went nuclear on the activists who seized control of the Democratic Party.
“The other option is to say this was a really, really stupid era in a wing of Democratic politics that caused irreparable harm to the party,” he declared. “That’s pretty close to my view.”³
Democrats Can’t Escape the Woke Backlash
Carville has been warning about the dangers of identity politics for years, but the party largely ignored him. In an interview with The New York Times, he said Democrats had become so obsessed with “identitarianism” that they couldn’t recover.
“We could never wash off the stench of it,” Carville explained. “It’s like when you get smoke on your clothes, and you have to wash them again and again. Now people are running away from it like the devil runs away from holy water.”⁴
The “defund the police” slogan particularly enraged Carville, who called it “the three stupidest words in the English language.”⁵
Out-of-Touch Language Alienates Voters
The problem wasn’t just one phrase. Democrats pushed terms like “Latinx,” “intersectionality,” and “communities of color” on ordinary Americans who had no clue what they meant.
“Some of this is just so idiotic that it defies imagination that people live like this,” Carville said. “Can you imagine a majority black city? If I saw three black guys on a street corner, and I said, ‘Good morning fellas. How are things in the community of color today?’ they wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”⁶
Even AOC recognized the shift. After Trump’s decisive win, she quietly removed her pronouns from social media, a move Carville noted.
“What people will tell me is, James, look, you’ve won this fight,” he said. “We don’t, AOC has scrubbed our sight of all pronouns. They just don’t talk about it anymore.”⁷
A Loud Minority Dominates the Party
Carville also highlighted how a tiny fraction of the party seized control.
“I think it was bad political consultants, but I don’t know where people started taking this stuff seriously,” he said. “And at its height, it was 15% of the Democratic Party, 8% of the country.”⁸
Polling shows only 11% of Democrats identify as progressive, yet this small group drives 70% of the party’s noise and dictates policy.⁹
Carville warned Democrats they can’t simply shrug off the identity politics disaster. The party “might just have to affirmatively attack it, because it was so stupid and it was so unpopular.”¹⁰
Men Flee the Party
The problem goes deeper. Carville stressed Democrats’ massive losses among male voters.
“We have a large problem with males, and I’m not just talking about white males,” he told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. “I’m talking about males all across.”¹¹
Over half of men under 30 voted for Trump in 2024, signaling a potential long-term shift that could leave Democrats permanently marginalized.
Culture War Fueled Republican Success
From boys in girls’ sports to radical gender ideology in schools, Democrats’ cultural agenda provided Republicans with the ultimate weapon. Trump’s campaign ad — “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” — became the defining message of the election.
Democrats labeled parents who opposed explicit books in libraries as “domestic terrorists,” promoted gender-transition surgeries for children, and forced everyone to announce pronouns. Voters rejected it all.
Carville says Democrats now face a choice: double down on their radical agenda or admit the party was wrong. So far, denial remains the default.
