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from
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/democrats-dei-dnc-buttigieg/681835/
Democrats Need to Clean House
The problem with the party goes way beyond the $10 words.
By Josh Barro
An illustration of a sign that reads "Vote Democrat" with the D, E, and
half of the M (which looks like an I) falling off
Illustration by The Atlantic
February 26, 2025, 10:30 AM ET
Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (Noa) using AI narration.
Listen to more stories on the Noa app.
At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about
the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party
roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused
caucuses of DNC members.
Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was
wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those
who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that
looks like something out of Portlandia.”
Democrats talk a big game about “inclusion,” but as Buttigieg notes,
they don’t produce a message that feels inclusive to most voters,
because they’re too focused on appealing to the very nonrepresentative
set of people who make up the party apparatus. Adam Frisch—a moderate Democrat who ran two strong campaigns for Congress in a red district in
western Colorado but got little traction among DNC members when he
sought to be elected as vice chair of the party—wrote about his own experience in the DNC campaign. He noted how just about the only people
he’d encountered in his DNC politicking who hadn’t gone to college were “the impressive delegates from the High School Democrats of America.” Frisch lost out to two candidates who were much better positioned to
speak to the very highly educated, very left-wing electorate that is the
DNC membership: State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, a “champion for
social justice” who has lost multiple statewide campaigns in
Pennsylvania by doing his best impression of Elizabeth Warren; and David
Hogg, the dim-bulb gun-control advocate who still seems to think “Defund
the Police” is good politics. Speaking of things that seem like they
came out of Portlandia: Hogg believes that the gun-control movement was “started centuries ago by almost entirely black, brown and indigenous
lgbtq women and nonbinary people that never got on the news or in most
history books.”
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