James Carville said something interesting in his interview with Maureen Dowd published in the New York Times on March 23, 2024 under the title “The Cajun Who Can’t Stop Ragin’”:
“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females” dominating the culture of his party. “‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’
“If you listen to Democratic elites — NPR is my go-to place for that — the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election. I’m like: ‘Well, 48 percent of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?”‘
James Carville is a Democrat, a big name Democrat who rose to fame by helping Bill Clinton get elected president in 1992. James Carville is now 79 years old and he has been complaining about “woke stuff” undermining the success of the Democratic Party for years. This is the first time however I am aware of him venturing into manosphere territory or men’s interests territory which is what makes this quote in particular newsworthy and interesting.
Liberals or former liberals going to the conservative side and complaining about how wokeness has taken over the Democratic Party is not that new for me to hear and some of these people also add in gender commentary to what they talk about and criticize in the new modern left but James Carville is new in that he is a big name in the Democratic Party that has been around and well respected and well loved for a long time and that he is still firmly within the Democratic Party presenting himself as giving needed advice to the Democratic Party that the Democratic Party needs to hear.
So I get the feeling; James Carville’s provocative complaint about “preachy females” driving black men in particular away from the Democratic Party towards the Republicans represents a kind of beginning of manosphere influence showing up within the Democratic Party.
This brings up the question of how exactly cultural influences and feminism and the reaction against feminism affect the two major parties in the United States; the Democratic and Republican Parties. Maybe it is a bit odd to talk about manosphere influence entering into the Democratic Party if the Democratic Party is by definition the headquarters of feminism. Won’t whatever manosphere influence that shows up within Democrats or among Democrats simply be driven out of the Democratic Party and go to the Republican Party instead? In this way the Democratic Party will not become more friendly to manosphere ideas, it will simply expel those who express manosphere ideas.
What James Carville is saying however is that the Democratic Party should tone down its feminism in order to not drive away black men and others into the arms of the Republicans. So basically James Carville is saying the Democrats should be more manosphere friendly in order to not lose manosphere friendly voters to the Republicans.
So the James Carville approach is indeed to bring manosphere adjacent ideas or attitudes into the Democratic Party.
Bill Clinton’s big selling point when he was running for the presidency as a Democrat in 1992 under James Carville’s encouragement and guidance was that he was a centrist Democrat or a moderate Democrat, not an extreme leftist, and that was how Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992. So James Carville is not new to the idea that centrism is the way to win elections and moving part way to what the Republicans are advocating for is a good way to steal Republican votes and make it more likely that the Democrats will win overall.
I assume this is what James Carville is doing by condemning the “preachy females” in the Democratic Party. He sees over bearing women trying to tell men what to do as something that is pushing male voters in particular towards the Republican Party and he doesn’t like that.
Right now I see the Democratic Party as representing the Legacy Culture and the Republican Party as representing the rebellion against the Legacy Culture. Feminism is the Legacy Culture; indeed more recently or more currently “wokeness” at least in its more general form of homosexual normalization and a more extreme denial of inherent gender differences is the Legacy Culture I would say. The rebellion against the Legacy Culture then is the battle against wokeness and to the extent it is happening the battle against feminism expressed in the form of men’s rights and men’s interests and manosphere attitudes and ideas.
The odd thing is that in the past, and not too far in the past, this is not what the Democratic Party and the Republican Party were at all in relation to each other. The Democratic Party was the home to the lower functioning poor and the Republican Party was the home to the higher functioning rich; that is how I have seen things for most of my life. I suppose this is how I would characterize the Democratic and Republican Parties from 1970 to 2015; from modern feminism to Donald Trump. Then Trump in particular represented the rebellion against the Legacy Culture and so Trump taking over the Republican Party was the mechanism by which the Republican Party became the party of the rebellion against the Legacy Culture which then placed the Democrats as the party representing the maintenance and continuation of the Legacy Culture.
Before Donald Trump there was no major battle against the Legacy Culture going on; before 2010 before the Tea Party movement and before the manosphere got started there was really no battle against the Legacy Culture going on at all and so both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party were both loyal to and supportive of the Legacy Culture; they were just the liberal branch of the Legacy Culture (the Democrats) and the conservative branch of the Legacy Culture (the Republicans).
So why did the rebellion against the Legacy Culture target the Republican Party? I would say it is because the Democratic Party was the land of the feminists while the Republican Party was where the social conservatives and the Religious Right were; social conservatism and religious affiliation being more friendly to anti-feminism than feminism itself was.
So now we have this situation where it is no longer the low functioning poor Democrats against the high functioning rich Republicans; instead it is the maintain the Legacy Culture status quo Democrats against the abolish the Legacy Culture and replace it with something new and better and anti-feminist Republicans.
Ultimately, in the long run, I would expect the Legacy Culture to be repudiated both among the Republicans as is happening now and among the Democrats as may be starting to happen as indicated by James Carville’s surprising manosphere friendly condemnation of the Democratic Party’s “preachy females.”
Related article: Donald Trump Seems to Herald the Third Social Conservative Backlash
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