For the Record: I Say It's Spinach

 

Drawing by Kaamran Hafeez, originally in The New Yorker but I don't have a date, via Fine Art America.

AP finally found a couple of Democrats in a diner, and the results aren't pretty:

Some Democrats in rural Pennsylvania are afraid to tell you they’re Democrats.

The party’s brand is so toxic in the small towns 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh that some liberals have removed bumper stickers and yard signs and refuse to acknowledge publicly their party affiliation. These Democrats are used to being outnumbered by the local Republican majority, but as their numbers continue to dwindle, those who remain are feeling increasingly isolated and unwelcome in their own communities.

“The hatred for Democrats is just unbelievable,” said Tim Holohan, an accountant based in rural McKean County who recently encouraged his daughter to get rid of a pro-Joe Biden bumper sticker. “I feel like we’re on the run.”

The article's basic thrust, not about how Republicans have been driven insane by the vicious lies of Rupert Murdoch's media and the sermons of Southern Baptists, but rather how Democrats "have a problem" ("symptomatic of a larger political problem threatening the Democratic Party heading into the November elections"), outraged our friend @drvolts, late of Wonkette, in a terrific polemical thread, like

The "Dems" that people in these areas hate bear virtually no resemblance to real-life Dems. It doesn't matter what Fetterman or any other ostentatiously in-touch-with-working-people candidate says -- they'll never hear it! They'll just hear lies about him. That's the root of it.

— David Roberts (@drvolts) February 17, 2022

[snip]

Consider: have you ever, in your life, a single time, seen a piece in mainstream media framing it as a problem that the GOP has completely lost cities? That the party's brand is "toxic" in urban areas? Are any Republicans taken to task for that or forced to answer for it?

— David Roberts (@drvolts) February 17, 2022

Into which various people, including Matt Taibbi in what seemed like an unusually sober mood and then me (my contribution is on top but Taibbi's was posted first), intruded:

This looks like a point, but it was the press, years ago now, faithfully reporting strategy views from inside GOP, like the 2013 "autopsy".

Doesn't compare to the continual moralistic chiding of Democrats now from outside party, demanding we court the rural white minority. https://t.co/yr7deFksXM

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) February 19, 2022

The soul-searching Republicans of the Obama years--now mostly ex-Republicans from the nevertrump faction--were responding to the demographic time bomb condemning the GOP to permanent irrelevance if it didn't change, in particular if it didn't find a way of attracting Latin votes.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) February 19, 2022

Do I feel sorry for those people, clinging to god and guns and meth? Sure! But they don't want my pity. They just want history to stop. And I can't help with that.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) February 19, 2022

What's really at issue is another one of those IOKIYAR rules. 

Republicans don't really care about "hearts and minds", so they can't be expected to try to understand anybody's experience as a member of this or that ethnic or cultural group—instead, they'll work identity politics on a purely mechanical basis, writing off the people that don't like them and minimizing their voices through gerrymandering and targeted vote suppression. At most, they'll look for a wedge issue to split off part of the group, as after the "autopsy", when they decided to try making inroads with the mostly older Latinos who are "social conservatives" and could be wooed with churchy, anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion messages (but not bothering to work for the mostly older Black Americans with similar views, who are too sophisticated politically to fall for the line that these things are more important than work conditions and the social safety net). 

Democrats, on the other hand, are all about the hearts and minds,  so we're supposed to try to please everybody, regardless of how openly they hate us. What's the point of that? I say the hell with it. We already have a majority, if we can just get them out of the house.