What does it mean to be a “normal” Democrat in 2025? Earlier this month, Peter Savodnik of The Free Press profiled Sen. Elissa Slotkin, framing the Michigan Democrat as a voice of reason within the party, “reclaiming its soul” as a member of “Team Normal”.
“It was not normal, she said, to alienate voters,” Savodnik wrote. “It was not normal to obsess over race and gender.”
What counts as obsessing over race and gender? Slotkin navigated the Trump-era culture war just as you’d expect an ambitious Michigan Democrat to navigate it, siding with the progressive Left in most major culture war battles while not being the loudest person in the room. Slotkin spent the Trump years supporting legislation and policies which conflated sex and gender identity, opening up single-sex spaces and female teams to biological men and boys. She co-sponsored the radical Equality Act. She participated in a reading of I Am Jazz, an infamous children’s book aimed at normalising childhood transitions.
As a congresswoman, Slotkin opposed Betsy DeVos’s Title IX reform against campus kangaroo courts, which even the Washington Post’s editorial board said brought “needed balance” to schools. In the same year, Slotkin also voted to impeach Trump in 2019. And when the pandemic started, she showed enthusiastically embraced the latest progressive cause célèbre: censorship. As a former CIA analyst, Slotkin took the occasion to urge more content moderation from social media companies, and even hosted a conversation on disinformation that featured Renée DiResta and Nina Jancowicz, the former executive director of the Disinformation Governance Board.
Like most Democrats, she believed the country’s cultural centre had shifted — until the backlash became a potent political force and she began back-pedalling. Better than many Democrats, Slotkin understood that she needed to be perceived as normal and saw identity-based messaging an impediment to that. “We don’t need to obsess about identity politics,” she said in November.
After Kamala Harris’s election loss, Slotkin told Dave Weigel: “I personally think that identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo,” adding that her party should take its messaging “not from the faculty lounge, but the assembly line”. Politico summarised Slotkin’s “theory of the case” as “economic security begets social progress, and in that order.”
The senator argued: “There’s a whole theory of the case that we got the Civil Rights movement in the ‘60s because after World War II, America was so strong economically, we had such a strong middle class, that people understood that someone else having rights doesn’t take away from my rights.”
Her theory may be true, but a clever messaging strategy doesn’t make Slotkin a convincing representation of normalcy. It makes her deceptive, someone who believes voters will ultimately swallow their identity-politics medicine as long as they have good healthcare.
A lawmaker should not be able to take so many divisive stances on, for example, trans ideology and present herself as “normal” without some pushback from journalists. This will be especially important as Democrats respond to the Trump 2.0 vibe shift by memory-holing their Trump 1.0 stances, hoping enough kitchen-table messaging will make voters forget the past.
People can genuinely change their minds. But Slotkin isn’t even facing questions about her prior record, and is instead being allowed to coast into centrist acclaim by criticising identity politics and cultural progressivism without ever addressing her own contributions to the problem. Journalists shouldn’t let her, or any other Democrats who claim to have been a voice of reason all along, get away with it.
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SubscribeI have principles. If you don’t like them I have others.
She should be in the Labour Party.
This is why people dislike the political class. Bullying, harassing, and hectoring us whenever she thought it was a strategic advantage to her career progress, and completing a complete reverse ferret when she realises the cultural tide is pulling against her, with no apology or mea culpa of course.
Morally right or wrong never even enters her head, just victory and personal success at any cost. And yet she will be protected and championed by the MSM we have all grown to hate and distrust.
It is indeed a unique creature that seeks to be a modern politician. Slithering, spineless, selfish, baseless, narcissistic, power hungry chameleons.
What a disgrace the Left are. They have no decency at all. No moral compass. Blindly following their dogmas and to hell with the consequences.
And what a disgrace the liberal progressive media is for not allowing criticism of the Far Left’s dogmas.
Woke only prevails in the UK because it is left alone, unchallenged.
Couldn’t agree more. It is crazy how people refrain from speaking. A few minutes ago I was talking to my neighbour and we had a good old moan about ‘things’. When we parted, he said that he wouldn’t dare say any of ‘those things’ in public.
It reminds me of a book about Russia I once read. Everyone was against the government and they used to meet at night in someone’s kitchen, start the tap running to stop anybody listening and then speak about how bad things were. We are getting there.
I read today that the Home Office had commissioned a report which denounced the use of the phrase ‘two-tier’ as Ultra Right.
Far Right is another term that needs to be discussed. It never is. As far as I can see it has two uses. Firstly it is an expression of hate or contempt in some politically or morally unspecified way. And second it is used as an excuse to act politically. For example to imprison the summer rioters and Tommy Robinson.
They are all labelled Far Right but without it having any agreed meaning. What did any of them do or say that was Far Right? You can only answer that question by specifying what actions or words are Far Right. That is never done.
There is no debate, no discussion, no idea even what the words mean. Then the authorites can use them as they think fit. And condemn any Facebook post they decide is ‘Far Right’.
We should not shy away from the word games. We can always respond by owning the titles with proper objectivity. Can we say, “I am by far right?” and “you are by far wrong?” Thus, escaping the nebulous relativity sphere, wherein the center is constantly pulled leftwards.
BBC talk: Left = ‘activist’ – Right = Extremist.
Most of the people with whom I’m acquainted who promote themselves as ‘progressive’ are more often than not bigoted, intolerant of other people’s viewpoints, quick to condemn anyone who challenges Woke ideology and conveniently distanced from the consequence of the causes they promote.
In contrast, I find that so-called ‘Right-wing people (‘Far Right, as Starmer condemns them collectively) are open to alternative views, are generally more tolerant, and don’t express rigid opinions and engage in militant posturing or virtue signalling.
It is telling of the prevailing circumstances in the UK, where free speech is increasingly repressed by Starmer’s regime (with threats of criminal action against people who post critical comments about MPs, for example), that many people in the political centre ground and mildly to its right do not say what they really think. In all my decades on this planet I have never experienced such erosion of our democratic freedoms and rights. The Covid lockdowns demonstrated to politicians that they could do almost anything they liked to entire national populations, and we meekly accepted our lot. those political lessons are now informing attitudes and approaches by Starmer & Co, after Theresa May and Sunak laid the foundations.
I’m old enough to remember when JD Vance was “weird”. Now the same geniuses behind that attack line want to be as “normal” as the VP.
How true!
(But you must be ancient!)
I am even more ancient, Arkadian. I remember when the Democrat party’s House of Representatives phalanx was still bossed by Southerners, old segregationists of great seniority who ran all the money committees and had allowed FDR his New Deal – for a price.
I think we can agree with her on the benefits of identity politics “going the way of the dodo.” As to her personally or as a politician I am blissfully ignorant about her.
These days if you want to go to Damascus for, say, a quick break it must be very difficult to find a way to get there. I am sure everything has been booked up for months into the future.
This is classic liberalism in action. Do not pay any attention to what I have done. Only focus on what I’m saying. I will say whatever I need to say to get into and stay in office so that I can do whatever I really want to do once there. That’s how Biden got elected. Conservatives take the opposite stand. Pay no attention to what anyone is saying. Only focus on what they’ve done. That’s how Trump got re-elected.
Awful people strikingly connected to the awfulness of the modern university and to the modern corporation too, though that latter group is changing rapidly.
She strikes me as another Talleyrand wannabe. Unfortunately for her, she has merely his cynical craftiness without benefit of M. Talleyrand’s intellect.
She’s just someone gaming the system for her own benefit.
Jashinski keeps slamming it
Slotkin did the wise thing politically by moving toward the center, she won here in Michigan against a solid opponent who tried but failed to hurt her with ads showing her previously extremist views.
Interestingly, now she has voted against sanctioning the ICC — which she supported as a Rep… perhaps her true stripes are yet to be revealed.