Dems Should Touch Grass, Starting With The Soccer Field
The article discusses the challenges faced by the Democratic Party following significant electoral losses and suggests a novel approach for reinvigorating their connection with voters: engaging in community soccer games. The author argues that through playing soccer, Democrats might better understand the perspectives and realities of immigrant communities, who often do not align with the party’s embrace of so-called ‘woke’ ideologies.
The piece emphasizes that immigrant communities are not inherently conservative nor fully aligned with Democratic ideals, but they tend to reject the rigid rules and rituals of wokeness. The author attributes the Party’s recent struggles to an overemphasis on issues perceived as irrelevant or annoying to voters, such as identity politics, rather than addressing more pressing concerns like border security and inflation.
Highlighting a disconnect between Democratic elites and average voters, the article cites New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, who calls for a liberal politics that moves beyond merely defending against the right. The overall message stresses the need for the Democratic Party to redefine its approach to be more inclusive and relatable to diverse constituents.
As Democrats try to recover from their electoral shellacking, I have one simple trick for them to regain their sanity: play more soccer. Not watch more soccer. Not buy more scarves representing the team they pretend to love from their semester studying abroad. No, they need to actually go play soccer in the community — and if they’re not hearing a lot of Spanish and the occasional African accent, they’re doing it wrong.
If they do get out and kick a ball around, they might get a sense of how completely out of touch they are with the people they claim to champion. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, and people don’t just give it up when they move to the United States. If you want to meet immigrants, play soccer. And if you do so, you will notice they are not woke.
This is not to say immigrant communities are all natural conservatives, eager to vote for Republicans as soon as they can. It is just that they are not woke, and this is easy to see because wokeness has so many rules, taboos, and rituals. Realizing this does not require extensive sociological study — all you have to do is observe people, such as soccer-loving immigrants and children of immigrants, saying or doing things that would get them canceled on any Ivy League campus.
This pattern repeats itself across many other activities and milieus; and again, noticing this lack of wokeness does not require deep cultural study. If Democrats want to know why they are losing Latinos, black men, and other groups they regard as electoral vassals, they need only look around.
The warning signs were there, but the people who have been running the Democrat Party and its associated institutions are in thrall to (or intimidated by) an ideology that is unpopular in itself and also inimical to good government. Wokeness led Democrats to focus on policies voters considered irrelevant at best, and annoying or infuriating at worst, while simultaneously encouraging Democrats to be incompetent.
The result was an electoral beatdown, as most voters realized Democrats cared more about getting men into girls’ locker rooms than they did about securing the border, more about pronouns than policing, and more about identity politics than inflation.
The truth is that leftists do not have a positive vision for America. The ingredients of wokeness — critical race theory, transgender ideology, and suchlike — are destructive and divisive, and they offer no real hope to their adherents.
Even some on the left are realizing this. For example, after the election, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote, “In the longer term, we’ll need liberal politics that are about more than just fending off the right.” She noted the divide between Democrat elites and everyone else, admitting that “few politicians anywhere have figured out how to hold together a coalition that includes both affluent, educated, cosmopolitan elites and blue-collar voters who prize tradition and social stability. Maybe doing so is no longer possible, but at the very least, it will require a plausible vision of what a thriving progressive society looks like.”
This is an implicit admission that leftism has failed, not just electorally, but as a governing philosophy and even as a way of life. Goldberg’s response to the election results illustrates this, as she admits that her “instinct is to retreat into my family.” This is a very natural response to defeat. It is also utterly at odds with Goldberg’s career, which she has dedicated to attacking the natural family and its primeval solidarity of mother, father, and child.
Leftism is at a dead end and will remain so until the “affluent, educated, cosmopolitan elites” Goldberg places herself among abandon their woke obsessions and instead learn to govern for the common good, which begins by recognizing that the natural family is the foundation of a flourishing society. If not, our elites will either lead us to ruin or be replaced.
Voters are attempting the latter, and the shock of the election may reverberate throughout the culture from Hollywood to Wall Street. People are fed up with incompetence fueled by ideological insanity. They really do not want to live in subservience to the weird pieties and dogmas of wokeness. Leftists would have realized this sooner if they got out of their bubbles and spent time with the people they purport to champion. And kicking a soccer ball around is a great way to touch grass.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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