James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist who rose to prominence during the Clinton years, is sounding an unmistakable alarm for his partys newly empowered majority.
Speaking on Thursdays episode of the Politics War Room podcast, Carville used the Democrats midterm gains as a springboard to caution against resurrecting some of the Lefts most unpopular obsessions, particularly the ideology packaged as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI. According to RedState, his warning came in response to a triumphant declaration from Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who proclaimed that DEI is back, a boast Carville promptly and bluntly rejected.
I really like him. He's a very personable man. I think these people are all wrong, Carville said, making clear that personal charm does not excuse political malpractice. They tried DEI. The country hated it. Just hated it. It cost us seats.
Carvilles critique did not stop at Khanna. He went on to note that even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., often a symbol of the partys hard-left drift, has occasionally stumbled onto a politically sound position.
Carville aligned himself with Ocasio-Cortezs dismissal of what she called Woke 1, arguing that a return to those earlier, more radical policies would drag Democrats back into a cul-de-sac of cultural extremism and electoral backlash. For a man long associated with the Clinton machine, his comments underscored how far left the party has lurched since the 1990s.
Carville himself has not dramatically shifted since the Clinton presidency, and that continuity throws todays Democratic Party into sharp relief. The Bill Clinton of 1995chastened by the 1994 midterm shellacking and willing to talk about balanced budgets and welfare reformwould likely be branded a right-wing reactionary by many of todays progressive activists.
That context makes Carvilles next point all the more striking. We're finally washing the stench of defund the police, communities of color, or every idiotic jacka-- academic word that [they] could think of. And we got rid of it. And AOC is right. Woke one was some crazy s---. Let's all go back and do it, he said.
He then sketched an agenda that, while still liberal, sounded almost moderate by current Democratic standards. Let's have progressive taxation. Let's have pluralism in America. Let's get out of Iran. Let's open rural hospitals. Okay, these are things that we can agree on.
Carville stressed that he identifies as a liberal, not a progressive, and that his concern is rooted in the plight of Americans far from the coastal enclaves that dominate Democratic politics. I think rural America is the most forgotten part of America, he said, urging his party to start talking about the problems of rural America or rural hospitals or rural education or rural libraries or anything else.
On that point, his assessment is difficult to dispute. Rural communities have been treated as an afterthought by national Democrats for years, as the party has entrenched itself among urban elites, public-sector unions, left-wing activists, and a growing dependency class clustered in major metropolitan areas.
Carvilles warning implicitly acknowledges what many conservatives have long argued: that Democrats, intoxicated by ideological crusades, will keep pushing deeply unpopular policies far beyond what the public will tolerate. From forcing girls and women to compete against biological males in sports, to hiking taxes across the board, to undermining efforts to rebuild the U.S. military, and to advancing ever more intrusive gun control, the partys activist base seems determined to alienate the very voters it claims to champion.
Those positions, combined with the divisive and bureaucratic morass of DEI programs, are political poison in rural America and increasingly in the suburbs as well. Carvilles plea to abandon the crazy s--- of Woke 1 is less a philosophical conversion than a survival instinct from a strategist who still remembers what winning looks like.
When someone is right, he is right, and on this point James Carville is sounding a note of rare clarity within his party. Whether Democrats heed his adviceor dismiss him as just another old white guywill say a great deal about whether they are interested in governing a broad, diverse nation or merely appeasing a narrow, radical base.
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