Longtime Democratic Party strategist James Carville said during a recent appearance on Politicon’s “Politics War Room” that the party will need to undergo a major transformation in order to remain viable on a long term basis.
Carville — who routinely criticized the party’s embrace of identity politics and “politically correct” language throughout the 2024 campaign cycle — suggested that the coalition’s far-left “progressive” wing should form their own party.
“Maybe we need to have a schism,” Carville said. “You’ve got plenty of different [parties] — Justice Party, the Working Families Party, the Socialist Party. The only thing I’d ask is just don’t use the word ‘Democratic’ in any title that you have because most Democrats that I know that are running for office don’t want your name, don’t want you to be part of the deal.”
“Yeah, sure, they would be glad to take your votes. Who wouldn’t? Everybody wants to get as many votes as they can. Maybe you come up with your own name,” he added.
Carville went on to call for a process like those that play out in Europe’s parliamentary systems, in which political parties rarely win governing majorities on their own and are instead forced to form coalitions with smaller parties. “You just sit down, and you say, ‘OK, we want to be part of a governing majority. And we have these things that we want you to do to bring us in.’ And we have negotiations, and we figure out a way that we can live with different parties and different titles but under the same general philosophical roof,” he said.
Carville — who ultimately predicted a Kamala Harris win after months of criticizing the party’s messaging — went on to stress that he still wants about “85 percent” of what he referred to as the “identity left” wants.
“I don’t think we can work together on pronoun politics,” the veteran political strategist continued. “If this election did not teach you how damaging that is, I don’t think there’s anything that I can tell you. And you say, ‘This guy is stuck in another century — not another decade — and he represents nothing to do with the future of our movement.’ I can accept that. You’re not really going to hurt my feelings.”
The former Clinton strategist went on to call for an “amicable split” between the party’s often warring ideological factions.
“I don’t quite understand why you’re so anxious to have the word ‘Democrat’ in the description of what you do. But maybe we can have an amicable split here and you go your way and we go our way,” he continued. “And after the election, we come together and see how much common ground we can find. I know this is of heresy. It’s always been — the Democratic Party has always been the coalition. People said we have to work hard in the coalition.”
Carville has offered a number of poignant critiques of his longtime party’s messaging in recent years. Last March, the “Ragin Cajun” generated headlines when he stated that the Democratic Party’s messaging has become too feminine, which he credits for a massive decline in Democrat appeal among working class voters.
“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females … It’s too much ‘don’t drink beer, don’t watch football, don’t eat hamburgers, this is not good for you,’” he said, adding that the messaging is unappealing to working class Americans, particularly to male voters. “The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’”
Carville further argued that the messaging goes beyond gender and is linked to an elitist mentality among urban and suburban liberals who want to impose their viewpoints and lifestyle choices on the working class.