Failure in One Word: Latinx

So, here’s a question for my liberal Democratic friends. If we’re on the side of people of color and the working class, how come they’re leaving us in droves? And if your answer is that they’re just too dumb to know who their real friends are, well, see, there you go again. 

Let me offer one word and one policy to explain why Democrats were so thoroughly rejected by voters last week. The word is Latinx and the policy is college loan forgiveness. 

Latinx is only the worst of the tortured (and torturing) language that gets tossed around on National Public Radio. In fact, if you want to hear the voice of the Democrats’ disaster, just tune into any random half hour of NPR news or culture programming. You’ll likely hear “Lantinx,” “marginalized communities,” “Black and brown people” (capitalize Black, but not brown, and no, I don’t know why), “they,” used in reference to a single individual who identifies as is neither a he nor a she, and “kindness,” used in a context that gives you the feeling that if you aren’t kind in just the exact way that the user insists she will track you down and beat the bejesus out of you. There’s a joke that goes like this. If a giant meteor were about to hit the earth, the NPR headline would read, “World to end tomorrow! Women and people of color to be especially hard hit!”

But here’s the thing about Latinx. Only 3% of Hispanics use it to describe themselves. It’s a goofy word dreamed up by some academic, obsessed with fluid gender identity – which none of the rest of the country is, most definitely including Hispanics. 

Who talks like this? I’m not sure, as I’ve never heard anybody talk like this outside of NPR, but then I don’t spend any time in the UW Education Department’s faculty lounge. I know the 74,347,879 people (and counting) who voted for Donald Trump don’t. 

But even if you don’t use all of this language, I’m sure you know people (or maybe you are such a person) who share the attitudes behind it. These folks are hyper-sensitive to issues of social justice and quick to discover social injustice hiding behind every pronoun. In fact, college-educated white liberals are much more likely to believe that America is a racist society than are the “Black and brown people” they claim to champion. 

They are also advocates for the working class. Over and over again for a couple of decades I’ve heard my fellow liberals bemoan how stupid the working class is for falling for the Republicans when it’s the Democrats who have all the good policies – higher minimum wages, Obama care, throwing lots of money at public schools (which we just did again big time and so unwisely here in Madison), etc. 

Maybe the worst and most damaging book I’ve read along these lines is Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? In it, Frank bemoans the fact that working class voters have been hoodwinked by the GOP, which tosses them conservative social issue bones while the rich eat their lunches on economic policy. It never occurs to Frank that maybe blue collar voters find the social issues more important than the economic policy — – just like affluent liberals who welcome higher taxes on themselves to pay for social programs they favor. 

Nothing speaks louder to this than the Democrats’ making college loan forgiveness a centerpiece of their agenda. It simply never made any sense and it was the furthest thing from progressive. College grads make, on average, about $1.5 million more over the course of their career than those with a high school education. So, forgiving college loans amounted to a massive redistribution of wealth from the haves to the have-nots. It makes Republican tax cuts for the rich look like chump change. 

Moreover, it was bad politics. Only about a third of American adults have a college degree. If you don’t have one, why on earth would you think it was such a hot idea to pay off the loans of people who do? Well, you wouldn’t, and that’s one reason Trump won voters without college degrees by 56% to 42%. 

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd hit the mark when she wrote: 

Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color). This alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help. “When the woke police come at you,” Rahm Emanuel told me, “you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”

And David Brooks drove it home when he added: As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet…. In 2024, he built the very thing the Democratic Party once tried to build — a multiracial, working-class majority.

So, now what? Bernie Sanders didn’t miss a beat by arguing, correctly, that the Democrats have alienated the working class and then quickly following that up with exactly the wrong prescription. “Here is the reality, the working class of this country is angry, and they have reason to be angry,” he said in a statement. “We are living in an economy today where the people on top are doing phenomenally well while 60% percent of our people are living paycheck to paycheck.”

Wrong. Blue collar workers just reinstated a guy who brags about being a billionaire and who lives in a 62,000- square- foot mansion, a guy supported by Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet. The working class does not resent the rich. They resent snobby, condescending liberal elites. 

The answer isn’t policies that shade toward socialism. In fact, the answer isn’t in policy at all. It’s in values. We need to talk about rewarding hard work and merit and we need to lay off the social policy. Right now, Democrats are viewed as the party that wants to tax the working class to give free stuff away to people who don’t work as hard as they do while they also focus on things that seem inconsequential, if not bizarre. The party of transgender women playing women’s sports just isn’t going to win elections. 

And, in any event, social progress is rarely made through government policy. Gay marriage happened because the culture changed. In fact, laws against it are still on the books. Let progress happen in the broader culture and catch up with it later in laws if you need to. The party that gets too far outfront on this stuff loses and finds itself in a position where it can’t do any good on anything. 

I argued last week that the Democrats’ disaster wasn’t the result of specific candidates or errors in strategy. This is not about technicalities. This is about hitting a regular cycle when urban elites with more education start lording it over a larger number of folks who come to resent it. 

Nobody knows how long this Dark Ages period will last. And if the choice is between classically liberal values – like free speech, the rule of law and rational thought — and the backlash values of strongmen, conspiracy theories and repression, well then, my party cannot abandon the things that really matter and we’ll be in the minority until the storm blows over. 

But we can blunt the backlash by dropping the edgy social policies, promoting mainstream middle class values, like hard work and personal responsibility, and leaving the faculty lounge language in the faculty lounge. 

And on a related matter… they’ll be back. Expect Democrats to come roaring back in 2026. Several reasons. First, it’ll be a midterm election when the party in power almost always loses seats. Second, Republicans will have to defend more Senate seats then the Dems, the reverse of this year. Third, Trump voters show up only for Trump. Democrats will overperform because they show up for off year elections. Plus, Trump is likely to do stuff that fires up the Democratic base. So, look for Democrats to take back Congress in two years — assuming there are still going to be elections. But if they roar back with the same old identity politics they’ll find themselves in a long-term losing trend.