Democrats spending millions to learn how to speak to 'American Men' and win back the working class

[Sympthsical]

72. I feared this would be more or less the shape of the response

There's that impulse. "Perhaps our problem is that we're too awesome." This is a feint that effects to be answer while ignoring the core complaint.

Nowhere in my thinking did I state that our problem is that we fight for equality. Your response is addressing a concept I did not articulate.

Allow me to stick with one issue - a sticky one - but one I can speak of authoritatively and with personal experience. Trans issues. Now I will not discuss the sports thing or bathrooms or anything in that vein. There has been a shift in the last decade. As a gay man, it has been understood that my orientation is immutable. I am a male who is attracted sexually and romantically to other males. Now, this was a non-negotiable thing for us on the Left for quite awhile. Remember, born that way?

It changed. It got weird. I had trans men coming up to me on dating apps. I very politely declined, because I am not interested sexually in that equipment. I wouldn't even mention the reason unless asked. I have a right to be attracted to what I am attracted to. But that did not go well. I was accused of being transphobic. There was a new ideological philosophy that being gay meant being attracted to a gender not a sex. And if I didn't believe this I was a bigot.

People - even straight cis ones - were suddenly lecturing me on how to properly be a gay man. That is crazy. My lesbian friends were being harassed regularly on dating apps by people who have penises. This isn't a right-wing talking point. This isn't propaganda. This happened to us in our own lives. We talk about this amongst ourselves. Look up what the Cotton Ceiling is - and if the reaction isn't to be creeped the fuck out by how predatory it is, I don't know what to tell you. And this idea, that we should be free without judgement to pursue the relationships we want has somehow become a conservative point of view. In our own spaces. Just, whut?

Now, could we have this conversation in public in left-leaning spaces? No, we could not. People get harassed, deplatformed, and brigaded, and would have posts wiped about this stuff. The crazy became the inflexible dogma. It was orientation erasure. The result is that I see more and more LGBT kind of pulling away from the political component of the community. They don't want to be a part of this stuff. They'll just stay home. I know more Republican LGBTers now than I ever did in my life, and it isn't a function of age. I know younger LGBTers in their 20s and 30s who are just tapping out from this stuff.

So here's why your answer is a problem for me. I am for trans rights. Equality, dignity, respect, access to healthcare, nondiscrimination, and the right to live their lives as they wish as they pursue their happiness. I'm a gay man in the Bay Area with many trans people in my social circle, and I want for them to live their best lives.

However, my simple unwillingness to date someone who is not male is seen as not enough in too many of our activist quarters. I might as well be a right-winger. And that's the polite version. My sex, race, and general identity disposition can come into commentary, too. It's all fair when you're designated ok to hate. It's just how loopy it's gotten.

And you can take just about any issue right now regarding race, sex, gender, orientation, etc. and find similar qualities. There's the baseline liberal position - people deserve equality, dignity, and rights. Systems need reforming and policies enacted to give people the best opportunities we can. Then there's the social media activist driven crazy portions like what I and my friends have experienced. But when you bring up how crazy this has all gotten, you get that response. "Oh, sorry that I just care about equality too much!"

That is not equality. That is an attempt at authoritarian imposition of ideological belief systems on others. And we increasingly cannot see the difference. If I'm hated, I don't care. I'm in my 40s with my partner all settled down. I do not have to tread those choppy waters anymore. But we are alienating people with dogmatic ideological positions well outside the boundaries of mainstream thought that the general population does not want to be browbeaten into.

You can browbeat people in your own spaces. Harass people off social media, hide posts, and generally create a space where exists the power for dogma to be enforced. But all that really does is create an insulated system that increasingly loses touch with everyone else.

The discussion isn't how bad are Republicans. We're on DU. We know Republicans are bad. The question is, why are people being turned off from Democrats - particularly more young people, which is a very dangerous situation for us to be in electorally. Particularly with the census imminent. Have you seen Millennials? We're making that Right turn.

This sort of shit is why. We need to stop pretending it's not a problem, stop deflecting from it, stop going, "But Republicans . . ." We need to figure out how to keep fighting for equality while keeping the crazy at bay.

Because we let the crazy into the house. That's on us. The question now is what kind of broom would we like to use to clean this up. For me, the narrower the better. Keep the good, get rid of the crazy.

If the response to that is, "What crazy? I don't see it," we're doomed. People are screaming at full volume how much they hate a lot of the identity politics stuff. And not just white people. LatinX ground is well worn. AAPI - and 80% of my social circle is AAPI, including my large network of in-laws - increasingly see cultural issues as limiting when it comes to going as all in on Democratic politics as they might otherwise do.

And I didn't even touch on economic issues, where for two years before the election, our message was "What problem?" FFS.

It's gotten to the point that we legitimately might need saving from ourselves, because we no longer have the ability to reasonably course correct without melting down about it. I'm not sure the self-awareness requires exists in this moment. "Our problem is that we're too awesome" just isn't reading the American room.