Carville might be a grumpy old man, but he might also be right about winning elections in 2022, which is what he was getting at. He was talking shop and explaining why a racist buffoon did so well. On the flipside of ample identity options, my friend is a prof at a large public university. He recently shared an email his department sent him regarding pronouns he might select for their website: ae/aet/aers e/em/eirs fae/faer/faers he/him/his per/per/pers she/her/hers they/them/theirs ve/ver/vis xe/xem/xyrs ze/hir/hirs He found it hilarious that these very intelligent people tried to compile an exhaustive pronoun list. This was not a university-wide effort, just departmental. What % of the department is xe/xem/xrys, and is it greater than the % that would be offended not to find their pronoun on this list? He did not believe this awkward effort was sincere, and I can understand his point. This friend is very progressive, a reliable Democratic voter, and he spans millenial/GenX. I can sympathize with both the need to destroy the patriarchy and racism, and with the need to win elections that help do it. Also, in general, old people are always going to be out-of-step. The Overton Window leaves us all.And beyond that, if Democrats want power, they have to win in a country where 18 percent of the population controls 52 percent of the Senate seats. That’s a fact. That’s not changing. That’s what this whole damn thing is about.
Here's the list of options:
Nope. Nope to all of that. The Left pays more for AOC than the Right pays for Marjorie Taylor Greene because three generations of punditry have embraced neoliberalism so hard that the Right can openly embrace naziism. Overton Window? That's alll Carville, cynically proclaiming that left, right, doesn't fuckin' matter, it's all polo anyway no matter how many Willie Hortons you throw into the mix. And here he is again, implying that if you don't inconvenience the fee-fees of 80-year-old Nazis by making them learn new pronouns, they'll somehow vote Democratic. Carville and his ilk pander to fuckin' old people because they're fuckin' old people with a fuckin' old mentality whose friends are fuckin' old who run fuckin' old businesses and then decry the youth who are disengaged from the process because they somehow think their concerns aren't being addressed and their voices aren't being listened to. And allow me to say - with no quaver in my voice - that I was annoyed by pronouns YEARS before you'n'yours and I'm here to say that if wading through ten options on a dropdown in census software brings the tiniest bit of existential joy to the two people who identify as "xe", fucking do it. Because anyone who has chosen to fight the "I go by xem" battle could use some. There's this long-held belief among Carville's generation that if we just stand in Mountain Pose long enough, the guys who left the Democratic Party when LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act might just come back. And they need to fuck off with that shit.