James Carville Urges Democrats to Rage Against the Machine

Don’t get woke, get mad, says veteran campaigner who misses some key points.

There was a time when 81-year-old James Carville – a veteran of Democrat election campaigns – was quite the pragmatist. Credited with the Bill Clinton campaign mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid!” he was a canny political operator, lovingly known as the Ragin’ Cajun. And although President Donald Trump broke him – as he has so many others, merely by existing as a Republican – Carville still has some idea of what ails his party and thinks he knows what it’s going to take to fix it. Out with the woke and in with the “economic rage,” he counsels. But the old warhorse appears to have gaslit himself about America’s current affordability crisis.

Brutal Smack-Down of Woke Politics

Published in The New York Times on Nov. 24, James Carville’s guest essay imagines a way out of the Democratic Party’s current malaise. One could go through his missive almost line by line and pick it apart for various reasons, all of them valid. Though at the same time, Carville does lay out some cold hard truths that many elected Democrats might find hard to swallow. Part of one paragraph, in particular, brutally sums up how Democrats have gone astray:

“The era of performative woke politics from 2020 to 2024 has left a lasting stain on our brand, particularly with rural voters and male voters. The term ‘Latinx’ was despised even by many Latino people. Calling folks ‘BIPOC’ should have never been a thing. ‘Defund the police’ was a terrible idea. Polling shows that nearly 70 percent of Americans think the Democratic Party is ‘out of touch’ and that it is more interested in social issues than economic ones.”

James Carville goes on to assert, “We can no longer be a party with a whiff of moral absolutism.” And that’s a point that also strikes at the heart of why the American left has become so insufferable, so constantly outraged, and so utterly humorless. It has, as a body, convinced itself that it occupies the moral high ground on every issue. That’s quite a perversion of the truth, when one considers that progressives have frequently elevated some of the most unsavory characters to an almost saintly status and have attempted to normalize pedophilia with their invention of a new “gender,” sickeningly labeled “Minor Attracted Persons.” And there are so many more examples one could use to shine a light on the extreme left’s promotion of total immorality as the new morality.

Sleeping Beauty James Carville

For James Carville, though, the way forward is a new kind of populism he dubs “a form of economic rage.” The idea is simple in theory. Demonstrate to the American people – and Carville includes folks in the rural heartland, not just city- and suburbia-dwellers – that Democrats really do feel their economic pain and are every bit as mad about it.

The solution, according to Carville, however, is just to double down on the kinds of quasi-socialist handout culture that has decimated the economies of many a blue state: a $20-an-hour minimum wage and free public college tuition. He mentions “expanding rural broadband as a public utility,” apparently forgetting that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris promised to do just that and utterly failed. In fact, they didn’t even try.

Therein lies the whole problem with what James Carville is preaching. He writes as if he were laid low by a poison apple in January 2021, only to be revived from his slumber by the kiss from a handsome prince – presumably not Donald Trump – in January 2025.

Carville appears to have completely missed the 4%-plus rate of inflation (officially) that marked 29 of the 48 months Biden spent in the White House – rising as high as 9.1% in June 2022. He slumbered through the Biden-era gas price surge. For an entire three years of the Biden presidency, the national average price of a gallon of gas, by month, only dropped below $3.50, barely, on two occasions – and got up to $5.15 in June 2022, according to the Macrotrends website.

And that’s not even mentioning those egg prices.

The Real Source of Rage

All those costs are lower now. Yet, according to the gospel of James Carville, “Mr. Trump and decades of corrupt and morally bankrupt Republican economic agendas have splintered the very heart of the American economy.” Never mind that Democrats have controlled Congress more often than Republicans, over the past few decades, while sharing the White House more or less evenly, depending on how far back one goes.

So, the man is on the right track when he pleads with his beloved Democratic Party to abandon its obsession with upending the social fabric of America in the name of “fairness,” “equity,” “tolerance,” and “diversity,” but then he folds.

Convincing people you empathize with them over the cost of living and then just throwing more money at everything? That’s a new way forward for Democrats? Because it seems exactly like the old way. Carville speaks of economic rage, but his party, like him, is simply consumed with rage at President Donald J. Trump. And, perhaps, when 47 is gone, that irrational anger that blinds them to everything else will fall away, and they will return to something resembling sanity. Perhaps.