By golly, someone should hire this guy and have him work for the Democrat Party! [checks notes] Again!
Just kidding, of course. James Carville belongs to a time long past when the leadership of his party cared about winning elections rather than Bluesky, and when mainstream culture mattered in their calculations. These days, as Carville notes in this rant captured by the Daily Caller, the elite Academia-based cliques care about what's really important ... virtue signaling. And as Carville at least suggests, what's being signaled isn't all that virtuous either:
“Anybody that questions the absolute, unquestionable benefits of transition surgery is going to be called this equivalent of being against civil rights or being against women having the right to vote … somebody can fact-check me, it’s banned in Nordic countries,” Carville said. “I think the liberal Labor government of Britain just passed legislation on that question.” ...
“But you can’t — if you say the border, we should have had something different — well, that makes you a racist. If you say that we should proceed with caution on this transition surgery … then you’re slammed. And the tyranny of the left is tyranny. And not only tyranny that it causes people grief, it loses us elections, people,” Carville said. “And I got to tell you … there are people that think this, and I’m increasingly agreeing with them.”
“There are a substantial number of people in the Democratic Party — almost exclusively coastal, almost exclusively white, almost exclusively higher-educated — that would rather lose and feel superior about themselves than have to go through the trouble to do the stuff it takes necessary to win an election,” he continued. “And as long as that philosophy is part of the Democratic coalition, it is going to continue to cause unbelievable damage to our electoral prospects. I cannot say it any simpler than that.”
This formulation is pure Carville. He structures this argument so that it's less concerned about the actual tyranny than it is about the elections. If tyranny won elections, you get the sense that Carville might gripe a bit, but he'd also appreciate it from an electoral-strategy point of view.
As it happens, though, tyranny turns out to be ... unpopular. In fact, that's it's defining characteristic. If these policies were popular, the Left wouldn't need to impose them with tyrannical methods, after all. Carville seems to miss that point in this rant, although to be fair, it's clipped from an obviously longer argument that Carville makes.
Transition surgery on minors is weird. Forcing women to abide men in their restrooms, locker rooms, and sports competition is oppression. Allowing unregulated swarms of illegal immigrants to come into the country is dangerous. Letting psychotics threaten people on public transit with impunity is absurd. The people who have to live with the consequences of these elite-fantasy policies are furious. The only way to continue those policies is Leftist tyranny -- to ban all dissent to these policies and to punish anyone who takes action to counter them.
That is why the Left began leveraging their influence on Big Tech speech platforms and in mainstream media to censor and suppress any debate over these issues. They use "misinformation" and "fact check" regimes and orgs to not just argue these topics but to actively deplatform those who dissent. That became particularly acute during the pandemic, where nonsense lockdown policies, masking mandates, and compulsory vaccinations became Too Important To Discuss Because People Were Gonna DIE!!!1!1!!
Tyranny is both the strategy and the end goal. The Left demanded tyranny to impose those nonsense policies as well as to keep other topics off the table, such as the corruption of the Biden family and the exposure of its bagman Hunter Biden. They want to deplatform their opposition so that they can control the debate space as well as the regulatory and legislative space, and to deny any access to their opponents. As is always the case, the purpose of tyrannical strategies is to ensure unopposed rule as opposed to popular self-governance, which always ends up trending back to reality rather than Utopianism in the long run.
So Carville's right, and perhaps more right than he knows. And more Right than he'd care to admit, too.
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