Democrats Can't Change
Structural factors won't allow Democrats to shift to more electable policy positions
Centrist Democrats want the party to drop some of the far left stuff and shift to more moderate messaging in order to be more electable. They also want the party to stop focusing so much on race and gender. I don’t think the Democrats will be able to moderate on any of that.
Racial Nationalism
Race and gender identity politics is the essence of the Democrat party. Before they practiced racial identity politics they practiced ethnic identity politics. Democrats were promoting the false line that “America is a nation of immigrants” as far back as the 1950s and FDR leaned into immigrant identity politics (Italian, Irish and Jewish) even before that.
Today’s Democrat coalition contains a huge number of racial nationalists, especially among young people. Those people would not support primary candidates who explicitly rejected black and brown racial nationalism.
Gender
The transgender lobby is extremely powerful and well organized. A former staffer for that lobby recently became the first transgender person to win election to the House of Representatives. After Trump’s victory, two House democrats tried to distance themselves from transgender extremism - and they were immediately vilified in the left wing press and faced revolt from their own staff. Politicians who want to win Democrat primaries have to pander to transgender activists; that’s why Kamala Harris pledged in the 2019 primary to support taxpayer funded transgender surgeries for detained illegal immigrants. Democrat politicians know that the trans stuff is electoral poison for them, but it’s impossible for them to drop it. The activists in the Democrat base are too strongly attached to the issue.
The Extremist Base
The Democrat base was disappointed that Kamala Harris pivoted toward the center in the campaign. (Trump pivoted toward the center as well, but the Republican base has a personal loyalty to him which transcends policy positions.)
Left wing Democrats argue - I think correctly - that taking more extreme positions can sometimes help you win more voters because a coherent extreme message can be more compelling than an incoherent moderate one. Those people would like to see the Democrats take an even more left wing economic stance, like Bernie Sanders. I don’t like Sanders’ policies, but his economic rhetoric is unfortunately popular. If Democrats were capable of focusing on economics alone, a Sanders-style economic message might win, but I don’t think people who go hard left on economics are capable of moderating on racial issues or social issues or anything else. The impulse towards extremism in the Democrat base will make it impossible for Democrat politicians to moderate on anything.
The Narrative of Inevitable Leftist Victory
I also don’t think it’s possible for Democrats to concede defeat on any issue. The idea that the New Thing is always right is a core part of the Democrat’s self image. All red states have laws against transgender procedures for children and transgender athletes in female sports. If Democrats dropped those issues now, they would have to admit that the conservative rubes were right and they were wrong. I don’t think Democrat activists will be willing to do that.
Censoriousness
Democrat spaces have a very censorious climate. Their side actively censors dissident news outlets and there’s also a climate of fear around saying the wrong thing. Centrist democrats think that their party can simply stop being censorious and hold on to all of its real policy positions, but I don’t think that’s possible. Once you drop the censorship, a lot of democrat ideas fall apart.
Democrats also can’t afford to stop being censorious, because if the people being censored are allowed to speak, Democrats will lose. There are many issues where one side is vehemently demonized and censored, and many people think that if only the Left would stop demonizing the other side, people would be more sympathetic to the Left. But actually, once you hear from the non-Left side, it immediately becomes clear that the issue does not actually have two sides.
For example, Charles Murray and other scientists who talk about race differences in intelligence are vilified and cancelled by the Left. People have the impression that there are two sides to the race and IQ debate. But once you give the hereditarians a fair hearing, you realize that there actually are not two sides. Humans have been evolving for a hundred thousand years in different environments. It is impossible that every group would have evolved to be exactly the same. The Left has to be censorious because their position would not be able to stand on its own under any serious scrutiny.
Conclusion
The internal culture of democrat organizations makes it impossible for them to moderate.
History suggests that this stuff goes in cycles. The cycle we're in right now has been particularly bad, but that doesn't mean it isn't ultimately just another repeat of the same cycle. While Trump seems to have defeated wokeshit in this election, the fact is, he's considerably more liberal on major cultural issues than the last Republican president before him, and most of his supporters have been willing to follow his lead on that.
This means that it's entirely possible we will see a respite from woke while the left recovers from the insanity of the past ten years. The binge is over and the hangover has set in, firmly nailed into place by Trump's victory this year. Marching orders will go out to put the wokeshit back in the closet for a while, where it will rest up and gather strength for the next binge of insanity 10-15 years from now.
That's my personal prediction. The crazies will never truly go away, of course, but their leash is held by cynical people who do not believe in any ideology and only care about getting power. The latter group will calculate, probably correctly, that the crazies have become an obstacle to them having power, and will tug the leash accordingly. Of course, I could be wrong! Part of me hopes I am. I'm not sure if it's better or worse for the left to keep going full retard until the end of time.
"The internal culture of democrat organizations makes it impossible for them to moderate." Cultures can change, but incentives can stifle change. What incentives make change impossible in the case of Democrats? I think the problem with the culture of the Democrats is that they are coupled to and sustained by people that traverse through an entrenched pathway of government-funded education, full of secular dogmas. That pathway is dangerous for everyone, but especially for people not possessing the ability and family support to think for themselves. Isn't the difficulty of the Democrats to change caused primarily by incentives of government-funded education?