Stop the Performative Bullshit

End the Virtue Signaling Now

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

Voters will never see Democrats as a working and middle-class party if we continue catering to the whims of… I don’t even know who these people are but they have made the leadership of the Democratic Party lose their goddamn minds.

Let me explain.

The Democratic National Committee held its winter meeting of state chairs in Arizona last week. According to Politico, the mood was grim and veered towards anger.

“They pointed fingers at what they cast as overpaid consultants, expressed despair that working-class voters of all stripes had abandoned them, and lamented that they had lectured voters instead of listening to them.”

(Side note: Your job is to lead, my friends. You hired these consultants, whom you now trash. You’re not exactly an innocent bystander getting hit by some shrapnel.)

The meeting was really an audition for the five white men running to replace Jamie Harrison as chair of the DNC. Some talked about “a return to our true selves to be a party of working people all across America.” Others talked about communicating on platforms like Fox News and the Joe Rogan Experience. Still others talked about a permanent campaign in all 50 states. Everyone avoided ideological battles and pitched themselves as technocrats.

And then there it was — buried almost at the end of the article:

“In a fiery speech, Harrison lambasted critics in his party who want to walk away from ‘identity politics.’ Democrats began their meeting on Thursday with a ‘land acknowledgement,’ a symbolic gesture that grants that the land a person is standing on previously belonged to Native Americans, which conservatives have derided as ‘woke.’”

A land acknowledgement statement, for those of you who have not been spending all your time going down rabbit holes, goes something like this:

“Today I would like to acknowledge the Lenni Lenape people whose land we are on today. I would like to acknowledge their ancestors who lived in [insert indigenous name of land here] areas and were removed from here by colonial settlers. I live on the traditional lands of the Lenape.”

This is a real thing.

Whose benefit is this for? In 2020, Biden won Arizona in part because of significant support from Native Americans. This October, he traveled to the Gila River Indian Community’s land outside Phoenix to apologize for the “sin” of a boarding school system that forcibly separated Native American children from their parents for decades. Ten days later, according to a detailed Brookings study, Native Americans cast more votes for Trump than Latino, Black or Asian American voters. Maybe they appreciated the apology from the president about the boarding school abuse but voters always subscribe to the Janet Jackson mantra (from her excellent Control album): What have you done for me lately?

This is not to say that Biden did not do the righteous thing in acknowledging the pain of family separations in a bygone era. But given the dire straights in which so many Native Americans find themselves, do you really think most of them give a damn about land acknowledgement statements?