James Carville: Has the Left Considered Moving to the Right?

600-year-old Democratic political strategist-turned-pundit James Carville took a break from promoting his famously bipartisan marriage to blame “this stupid wokeness” for his party’s defeat in the Virginia governor’s race and other elections this week.

“Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something,” he said on PBS Newshour, during one of the approximately 15 television appearances he somehow fits in every single day before lunch. The Ragin’ Cajun pointed a finger at the left “expressing language that people just don’t use,” referring to what he previously called “faculty lounge politics” in an April interview with Vox: the tendency, he claimed, for urban coastal elites to use highly arcane terms like “Latinx” and “community of color” that regular voters are apparently too stupid to understand.

“We have got to … not be about changing dictionaries,” said the man who built his very long, very successful career on manipulating language and messaging. Instead of “this left-wing nonsense, this claptrap,” said Carville, Democrats have to focus on changing laws. (Far be it from me to defend any politicians, but I hear they’re trying…)

This isn’t the first or even the second or third time that Carville has opined that veering too far left is dragging down the Democratic party, which used to be ideologically perfect during the Clinton years under Carville’s watchful eye. In recent years, he has taken a particular disliking to Bernie Sanders, who he has called a “communist” and an “ideologue.”

Sanders, for his part, responded earlier this year, saying that Carville is not “terribly relevant to what happens in Congress right now.”