The absolute absence of any urgency among establishment Democrats is evident all over the map today. Both are regional dust-ups that paint a much wider story, the first in Idaho where a Political Science professor by the name of Scott Yenor made some extremely dumb-assed comments:

Our culture is steeped with feminism. It teaches young boys and girls that they are motivated by much the same things and want much the same things. Thus, girls are told to become as independent as boys are said to be. […] They are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be. […] Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children. […] Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.

So, a dumb-ass. Fine. Becca Savransky, author of the linked article, reached out to State Senator Melissa Wintrow, a Boise Democrat and the former director of the Boise State Women’s Center. She apparently called the remarks “dehumanizing,” which is a good start. Then she proceed to say:

We’re not going back to the 1950s, I don’t know what everybody is so afraid of. Let’s drop our weapons. Let people be who they want to be.

Unfortunately, she’s wrong about two things here and missed an opportunity. People like Scott Yenor, the current GOP leadership, and all the many Trump voting GOPers out there aren’t after a return to the 1950s. They want a return to the 1850s. Back when Black people and women knew their place and, when they didn’t, could be and were shown their place. That’s who everybody should be afraid of and it’s not an academic issue to mull over a good whiskey anymore. It’s facing us at the national political level right now and every day until the 2022 midterms. Problem is, most folks don’t even hear much about that because it’s not stated when the microphones are turned on for some “Democratic response” to absolute bile like Yenor all the way up the chain to the extremely similar bile coming from people in actual power or who, you know, were either planning or directly involved in attempting and/or abetting violent insurrection against these United States in January of this year.

Second example, this one from Georgia, where there may be some troubling lack of Democratic voter engagement. Yes, just a drawn out race for mayor of Atlanta, but buried in the story is this bombshell:

Next year, the [Democratic Party] machine is going to be up and running at the fullest extent of its power, and you are going to see all this money flowing into Georgia

Antonio Brown, Atlanta City Council member

Always “next year” with establishment Democrats. Instead of screaming about election access and voting rights, you can always hear them saying “We only need to show up and work when it’s the big election cycles for the top offices,” regardless of vast recent evidence to the contrary. Compare and contrast that attitude with the GOP, currently and aggressively taking control of county election boards in red states across the country (you’ll recall those as the election boards that refused to throw the election to Trump regardless of vote count in 2020), rewriting election laws in every state they can (to make it easier to disregard vote counts when the GOP candidate loses), limiting access to voting in every state they can (including Georgia, where we see in this article that turnout is down, at least in part due to restrictions placed on vote-by-mail and early voting), and blocking any attempts to reform any part of creating guarantees for voting access, controls for the drawing of equitable voting districts, and broad standards for state and local election certification at the federal level.

But it is, of course, perfectly fine for the Democrats to take a long rest and really only bother to wind that old machine up for the really big races. No trouble with that approach at all.

This is why they fail.