Backlash 2021

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The Democrat candidate for mayor of Buffalo lost her election. Republicans did not even field a candidate, the last time there was a Republican mayor in Buffalo was in 1965. For decades the Democratic candidates fought it out in the primary and the winner would turn the general election into their victory triumph. So who did India Walton lose to? The same man she beat in the Democratic primary months before, Byron Brown. From beyond the primary election grave, the establishment of Buffalo dragged Walton off the victory pedestal in the name of “business as usual”.

Walton was endorsed by a broad array of Democratic top liners such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Chuck Schumer. Walton is a democratic socialist and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a socialist group with almost 100,000 members. She started her activist career at the age of twelve when she protested the Rockefeller Drug Laws with her mother as part of the activist group Families Against Mandatory Minimums. From there she became a union representative at 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, executive director of Fruit Belt Community Land Trust, and was a key community organizer during the George Floyd protests. Although seen as a political maverick and aggressively progressive (which her detractors claimed would alienate voters), Walton was able to beat out the four-term mayor of Buffalo Byron Brown in a fierce primary battle despite Brown out-funding Walton by almost four to one.

Instead of conceding as one does when their party has decided to pick another runner to bear the torch of the party, Brown pulled a stunt. He told his supporters, which he has many of as being the mayor of a city for four terms, to fill out his name in write-in ballots. Practically it sounds insane as write-in ballots even in small-term elections are a far shot of a far shot, yet when you have been the mayor for going on two decades your name soon becomes synonymous with the city you live in. Byron Brown’s own Berlin Airlift took off.

Brown was far from the only skeptic of their firebrand primary candidate. The state’s Democratic old guard made their opinions clear about this progressive mom of four who won Buffalo’s primary. State Democratic Chairman Jay Jacobs compared being obliged to vote for India Walton with being forced to vote for David Duke, the face of the Ku Klux Klan. Many feared her “socialist” policies such as defunding Buffalo’s police or establishing a civilian police oversight board would alienate conservative Democrats and give Republicans fear fodder to harp against the party as a whole. Republicans joined a united front with conservative Democrats to shoot down Walton, one-third of the signatures for Brown’s independent nominating petition were from Republicans. Buffalo’s city council even explored a nuclear option for a Walton victory, the plan being to simply remove the position of mayor from Buffalo.

While the last votes are being tallied, it appears that Brown has pulled off his gambit and will take an unprecedented fifth term as mayor of Buffalo. Buffalo ranked as the nation’s second-poorest city when Byron Brown took office in 2006. Buffalo’s poverty rate in 2006 was 29.9%. In 2019 it stood at 28.8%. With Brown as mayor tomorrow it will not be much better. Had India Walton won, she would have been the first socialist mayor of a major city since Frank Zeidler's three-term tenure of Milwaukee ending in 1960.

The implications of this stunt by Brown affect the entire country. A lethargic city politician acted like a spurned lover and rejected the mandate of his own party to keep his 15-year reign of Buffalo going. Rather than acknowledge their own shortcomings as a mayor and candidate, Byron chose power over the well-being of his city. Brown needs Buffalo but Buffalo does not need Brown. If establishment characters in the Democratic party can nullify primaries by collaborating with conservatives to spite progressives then the Democratic party is as an entity dead. To override primaries is an attack on America's tradition and our democratic ethos.

Brown used his victory speech to spit in Walton’s face.

“Today’s election was not just a referendum on the City of Buffalo. It was a referendum on the future of our democracy,”

I don't really get it. I'm not in the US so don't have a great handle on this stuff.

Something doesn't make sense to me. I get the impression that people think the Democrats have swung too far to the left. But it's not like they put Bernie Sanders up there. Biden looks pretty centrist from where I'm sitting. I don't really understand why that translates to people voting Republican, which seem from this distance to be way the hell to the right these days.

Why does (what looks to me like) a relatively small shift to the left mean swing voters run into the arms of a very extreme rightwing ideology?

Why does extreme right look less risky than moderate left?

You're attempting to apply European political standards to the US, and they don't quite track, hence your confusion. Our parties aren't actually that far apart on the economics, which seems to be a primary left vs right axis outside the US, but are extremely far apart on cultural issues, and that is what people are mostly talking about when they say the Democrats have swung to the left, they've embraced a moralizing form of identity politics that they treat as a religion, and large parts of the country find that off putting and alienating, to say the least. They're also trying to ram through a massive spending bill with a razor thin majority, which is also unusual for here, but I don't think that's as much of an issue as the cultural stuff.

Election Day in New York: Progressive Democrats suffer defeats heading into 2022 races

Those proposals dealt with issues germaine beyond NY and blue state New York voters rejected them. The defeated proposals were designed by the democrats who took control of all three branches of government during the 2018 blue wave to bake in control.

OTOH a socialist was elected mayor of Buffalo and the proposal to grant clean air and water as rights passed so that might be an indication that the dems should keep on pushing climate change legislation.

My personal barometer on these things is my bleeding heart liberal mother, and she'd been ranting about how terrible Biden and this current crop of Democrats has been for months, pushed too far left by their DSA wing, too focused on identity politics, driving up inflation with all the spending, etc. When the Democrats have lost my mother, I know they're in real trouble, lol.

By Canadian standards he's center-right, lol.

Thank you.

Does the cultural stuff actually translate into policy?

“What went wrong is this stupid wokeness,” longtime Democratic strategist James Carville pointedly said of the 2021 elections. That, he posited, explains why progressive initiatives, candidates, and causes went down to defeat in dark blue states and cities across the country. The Democratic Party’s activist class, Carville added, should “go to a woke detox center or something.”

Among a variety of other prescriptions, this was the consensus view among political observers outside of the institutions that remain uncaptured by “wokeness.” It was not to last. Those hostage institutions—chief among them, media, academia, and youth-led organizations—swiftly mounted a counterattack.

One of the philosophy’s premier proponents, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, insisted that anyone “seriously” using the term “woke” as a pejorative is revealing how out of touch they are. Slate’s Joel Anderson insisted that the deployment of the term was tantamount to using a “racial slur.” New York Times columnist Charles Blow urged the left to give no ground to the right and the quisling moderates in their midst because “wokeness indicts the status quo,” and the status quo is awful.

The primary aim of this seemingly dispassionate pincer was to convince Democrats that “wokeness” is somehow both righteously transformative and of little concern to most Americans.

According to a poll conducted by Yahoo News/YouGov, controversial race-related curricula just doesn’t rate as an issue among most voters. Fewer than 20 percent of respondents believe the constellation of race-conscious concepts that make up “critical race theory” is being taught locally. Most American adults have never even heard of CRT. And only 5 percent of parents think schools will be a top issue for them in next year’s midterm elections. “With numbers like those,” Yahoo’s Andrew Romano wrote, “a broad ‘parents’ rights’ backlash is, at this point, unlikely.”

That assumption conflicts with a simultaneous effort to convince Democrats that the “parents’ rights backlash” that very much did materialize in Virginia was entirely illegitimate. “Loudoun County tried to address racism and promote diversity within its schools,” the New York Times reported. “Then it found itself on Fox News.”

Its objectives were only to “hire more teachers of color,” and to banish antiquated symbols of the state’s racist past. This wasn’t objectionable until a well-funded Republican effort to scandalize the public stirred to life.

As the district’s former superintendent, Eric Williams, wrote in an email later obtained by reporters, however, “some of the principles related to race as a social contract and the sharing of stories of racism, racialized oppression” and “our use of instructional resources on the Social Justice standards do align with the ideology of CRT.” The emphasis is his own. That’s an important distinction—one that parents recognize all too well. You’re not going to find intersectionality theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw or white-privilege self-help guru Robin DiAngelo on the syllabus. You will find their ideas informing the pedagogy in schools, and that translates into instructional mandates on teachers.

Indeed, this cultural issue likely resonated less than pocketbook concerns. But to the extent that race-centric curricula produced any enthusiasm at all, that enthusiasm favored its opponents. “When Republicans talk about a parental backlash against CRT, they’re not talking about all parents,” Slate’s William Saletan wrote. “They’re talking about white parents.” In other words, the majority of the most affected demographic. Correct. That’s how elections are won.

Democratic Strategist Jesse Ferguson told Business Insider that his party needs to make the case for CRT “relentlessly” ahead of 2022. “Republicans are willing to let white supremacists write curricula,” he added.

This is an increasingly prevalent way of sidestepping what parents find objectionable about the new ideology: the sorting of children by skin color into matrices of oppression, the archiving and policing of “microaggressions” on and off school grounds, the promotion of “whiteness studies” explicitly designed to head off racial aggression in whites before it manifests “between the ages of two and four.”

All this talk is betrayed by the party’s increasingly public discomfort with the behavior of their most indoctrinated allies.

The Democratic activist class insists that their party should keep doing what it’s been doing while expecting different results. There’s a word that describes this kind of behavior.

I don't know if Rufo even believes his laws will work, I think he's more interested in wrong-footing the wokes and making them fight on his turf, and he's been incredibly effective at it, I can't think of a more successful piece of political activism that can be traced to one guy.

Christopher Rufo and David French debated the best way to combat CRT on Bari Weiss’s podcast back in July
https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/40e1af9a/rufo-v-french-should-schools-ban-critical-race-theory

While I disagree with Rufo’s solution no doubt he has been incredibly effective in bringing attention to and defining the problem. Most of my posts on the subject last year and early this year were his City Journal articles.