Blue Dogs and Murderers
The Role of Moderate Liberals in a Party Leaving Them Behind
The Argument published what was for me a pretty depressing piece recently on how moderates are becoming a minority within the Democratic Party. The assumption I and many other middle aged more or less Clinton Democrats have been working off of for years is that the progressive faction within the party was loud but small, and the majority of its voters were actually center left moderates who believed in things like a greater role for government in health care for the poor not the state enforcing inverted race hierarchies ala Ibrahim Kendi. There is some pushback to the idea that the Democratic Party is hard left now, but rather than debate the nature of the coalition I’d like to discuss what the role of moderate and conservative1 Dems is in a party that is leaving them behind in its leftward lurch. Specifically, I’d like to focus on how moderates are essential for preventing groupthink from becoming totally dominant by pushing back against the worst ideas the activist wing of the party has to offer. And I’d like to do in the context of the professional black activist response to the killing of Austin Metcalf by Karmelo Anthony.
Murder Most Foul
For anyone unaware of the case, a few months ago at a high school track meet a black kid, Karmelo Anthony, stabbed a white kid, Austin Metcalf, in the chest after a brief argument over whether or not Anthony could stand in Metcalf’s track team tent during a rain shower. According to court testimony Metcalf told Anthony to leave the team tent, Anthony responded ‘touch me and see what happens’, Metcalf grabbed or pushed Anthony out of the tent, at which point Anthony pulled a knife from his backpack and stabbed Metcalf in the heart killing him. Anthony was ultimately found guilty of murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
The responses to the killing fell out pretty predictably along party lines with far right activists like Jake Lang of Protect White Americans organizing rallies and using the killing to foment their racial retribution narrative and a wide variety of black progressive activists including elected officials like Jasmine Crockett of Texas pronouncing the verdict racist and calling into question the fairness of the justice system. To his credit Metcalf’s father Jeff who acted as family spokesman throughout the aftermath rejected the role of race in the confrontation or legal proceedings entirely and denounced activists on both sides seeking to use his son’s death for fundraising and self promotion.
This being Substack there were of course many articles about the killing and many more about the reactions to it23. I’d like to focus on one especially egregious piece and use it to frame the important role moderates4 need to play in the Democratic Party. It was an essay by Howard University professor Stacy Patton essentially justifying the killing as self defense because Metcalf had insufficient respect for the culture Anthony was raised in, and that if Metcalf’s parents had taught him that if you try to make a black guy follow the rules you’re taking your life in your hands.
She didn’t phrase it like that of course, because when you do it’s obviously insane, but that is the core of her argument. Anthony was raised in an honor culture in which any imposition on one’s actions, no matter how reasonable under any given set of circumstances, is a such a serious breach of respect and dignity that it will rightly be met with violence and white Americans need to accept and make room for that.
The written reaction to the piece was mostly condemnatory as you might expect. But it also had over 2300 likes5. And the responses pointing out that there was no reasonable ethical standard underlying Patton’s argument were mostly penned by non-Democrats. As noted, many professional activists and the only Democratic elected official to comment on the case6 came out in support of Anthony. But so what? Progressives say crazy shit all the time, what does that have to do with moderates?
I Am Spartacus
Progressives saying crazy shit is at best an annoyance when they’re marginalized within the Democratic Party. They make for good GOP fundraising talking points, but that’s about it. That was the case 30 years ago. But what’s the implication of their words when they’re nearing a majority in the party? How about when they’re powerful enough within the party that crossing them sidelines you from leadership roles or potential candidacy? When every incentive within the party itself is to nod along or at least stay quiet when POC activists invoke supposed racial cultural differences to justify murder? Now things are getting messy.
There are elements within the Democratic Party that are trying to walk back the extremes of wokeness7, with some success. Crockett may be loud on podcasts defending convicted murderers, but she also lost her Senate primary to the more moderate James Talarico8. Budding leaders of the party like Jon Ossoff are much more focused on moderately left economic kitchen table issues and spend a lot less time fighting culture wars. But if you go to Democratic Party meetings or interact in leftist spaces online there’s often not a lot of pushback to the substance of extreme identitarianism, and many contested primaries such as the Platner - Mills battle in Maine are going to the progressive candidate even in states where moderates are likely better positioned to win. Even when party operatives acknowledge it’s electorally cancerous to defend things like Anthony’s killing of Metcalf they’re too often failing to make the argument that it’s morally cancerous as well. This is where the moderate Democrat needs to display some courage.
Perhaps I am naive, but I believe most people, even professional liberal political operatives, know that it is wrong to stab someone to death for at most pushing you out of a tent. But with every professional and political incentive aligned around agreeing with extremists, many on the left need a permission structure for dissent to be created before they’ll stand up and say so. They need moderate or conservative Democrats to loudly proclaim that no degree of past racist discrimination against black people justifies killing an unarmed kid who was not directly threatening you. That it is not only bad optics to say so, that it’s also bad morals. We left of center Dems cannot allow the far left to determine the moral Overton Window of the Democratic Party unchallenged. Because if we don’t speak up no one will, and then the party apparatus that actually makes most of the decisions around who to nominate and the party platform will continue to exist in a moral dark fantasyland where historical oppression justifies any and all bad behavior on the part of anyone who isn’t a straight white man. The right can’t play this role because for obvious reasons no one on the left trusts anyone on the right to argue in good faith9. The phone call has to come from inside the house. Even if we are now a minority in the Democratic Party we’re a sizable one, and the party can’t win without us10. We cannot rely on being the silent majority anymore and must start acting like one faction among several all jostling for power and influence. That means being the loud voice for sanity and morality in the room even when it’s inconvenient and even when it might cost us opportunities in the short term. Because the alternative, acquiescing by silence to the worst tendencies of the far left, is unacceptable and will put the party in the wilderness for a generation. So go to local party meetings and speak up when people defend the indefensible. If you’ve got an online following on the left push back against narratives like Patton’s. Only consistent, active pushback against the left flank of the party is going to create the space for moderate voices to be heard. Thanks for reading.
There are dozens of us! About 6-8% of the party.
What is Substack if not the motherland of meta-commentary?
Also, this is one of those articles.
In this instance a synonym for ‘normal, morally sane people’.
The comments aren’t visible to non-subscribers, I’d be very interested to know how those broke down but given only her subs can comment I’d have to imagine there’s not a lot of pushback.
The aforementioned Jasmine Crockett. I couldn’t find any other elected Dems who had commented on the case one way or another, happy to amend the statement if anyone has a citation.
Because really, Dr. Patton’s argument is straight out of the heights of BLM-style woke discourse circa 2021.
In style at least, though even he’s having to walk back past gender related comments.
Plus in the age of Trump the right has lost all moral credibility, so who cares what they think anyway.
And of course in much of the country we’re the majority of Dems, progressives are heavily concentrated in coastal urban areas. You’re never winning in Iowa without a lot of moderates.
I’ve voted Democrat a few times in federal elections, and I often vote Democrat in state elections, but it genuinely frightens me that critical theorists are eventually going to have their hands on the real levers of power across the country. Even if they’re unelectable, they will still fill the cabinets and staff of even moderate Democrats. As a straight white guy it’s really hard to square that even when I support a lot of Dem positions like universal healthcare, strong antitrust policies, and union protections
I've already written off the Democratic Party as a lost cause. I think it has to be destroyed rather than reformed. If there was a moderate or centrist coalition trying to beat back progressive overreach I might support. But it's deeply depressing to watch moderates and centrists compromise with the far left and stay in the big tent.
What bothers me most about all this is that I am a liberal. I think structural racism is real, that historically disadvantaged groups have faced unique challenges, and that broadly speaking one of the things we should do with tax dollars is try to address long standing social and economic inequities.
But I don't support forced transformation of society through DEI regimes, the attacks on Western values and the dismissal of our civilization as settler colonialism, attempts to make gender non-binary when clear majorities of people recognize biological differences between men and women, or economic reforms on socialist or communist principles that are not honest about who will pay for what and how.
It's a mad world when the Democratic Party insists on these identitarian and economic changes that an earlier generation would have said are un American, and that will never be accepted by ordinary people.