Two, Three, Many Sister Souljah Moments!

That’s what the Democrats need.

One doesn’t need to be a Marxist revolutionary like Che Guevara, who advocated two, three, many Vietnams, to think Democrats are in need of a bit of revolution in their ranks. In my view, they need to think about a “Sister Souljah moment”—indeed, two, three, many Sister Souljah moments!

Recall that the original Sister Souljah moment occurred in June 1992, when Bill Clinton, speaking at a gathering for Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, commented on a statement rapper/activist Sister Souljah had made in an interview with The Washington Post. In the interview, she replied to a question about whether black-on-white violence in the 1992 LA riots was a “wise, reasoned action” as follows:

Yeah, it was wise. I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?...White people, this government and that mayor were well aware of the fact that black people were dying every day in Los Angeles under gang violence. So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?

Clinton’s comment on this to the Rainbow Coalition was:

You had a rap singer here last night {on a panel} named Sister Souljah… Her comments before and after Los Angeles were filled with a kind of hatred that you do not honor today and tonight. Just listen to this, what she said: She told The Washington Post about a month ago, and I quote, 'If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?…So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?

If you took the words 'white' and 'black' and reversed them, you might think David Duke [founder of a Louisiana-based KKK organization] was giving that speech.

At the time, Democrats were suffering from a highly negative image of being soft on crime and public disorder and practicing a racial double standard (sound familiar?). Given what Clinton said and where he said it (to the Rainbow Coalition), his message was crystal clear: Democrats should not tolerate violence and inflammatory rhetoric, including any that comes from members of their own coalition. There should be no double standards.

Clinton was relentlessly attacked by Jackson and other figures on the party’s left for his apostasy. But normie voters got the message. Here was a different kind of Democrat who was willing to throw obvious Democratic lunacy over the side. Clinton reaped the reward and helped to change the party’s image for the better on key cultural issues…at least for a while.

That was a long time ago and today Democrats’ image is significantly worse and over a wider range of cultural issues than it was back then. The animus toward the party among working-class voters has reached epic proportions and Democrats appear clueless on how to overcome that. The reigning theories seem to be talking more about economics (“kitchen table issues” or, more daringly, “abundance”), insisting they’re “fighters” and cussing a lot. Damon Linker gets to the heart of how absolutely hopeless this approach is.

[W]hat liberals need to do to defeat right-wing populism…[is] to moderate on culture. That means on policies and moral stances wrapped up with the old culture war (like trans and other gender-related issues) as well as in other areas of policy that have a strong cultural valance—like crime, immigration, and DEI. This isn’t just necessary because Democratic positions on these issues are unpopular at the moment. It’s also crucial because culture is more fundamental than politics: It sends a signal to voters about where a politician or party stands on base-level moral questions. When voters become convinced that a specific politician or party has bad (or just sufficiently different) moral judgment, they lose trust in that politician or party. And then other, more superficial policy commitments don’t matter…

The area surrounding the Texas-Arkansas border has been solidly Republican for a while, but the Biden people wanted to demonstrate that federal dollars are available to all, regardless of political leanings, and they hoped they might be able to tilt the area’s partisan alignment a bit back toward the Dems if those dollars were used to jump-start a solar-panel-construction industry in the region, creating jobs and boosting the local economy in other ways…The money arrived, but in the 2024 election, the region voted even more overwhelmingly for Donald Trump than it had in the previous two election cycles…The effort failed because the voters in Texarkana, like voters in rural and exurban communities around the country, have learned to distrust the Democrats on fundamental issues of morality and culture, making them disinclined to trust them on anything else…

The way to [reach these skeptical voters] is for the party to make an effort to distance itself from the leftward cultural stances associated with its most animated progressive activists, but also often affirmed by many millions of well-educated upper-middle-class white and often female professionals. Since people fitting this description frequently hold top jobs in the Democratic Party itself, this is a hard ask…

This, I’m convinced, is the top challenge facing liberalism and the Democratic Party today.

Exactly. This is the top challenge facing the Democrats today. Yet they are shockingly M.I.A. in dealing with it. Democrats overwhelmingly would rather do anything than do what is needed: two, three many Sister Souljah moments. Consider how Democrats have handled culturally-inflected issues since their 2024 election defeat.

Trans? A few peeps, quickly slapped down by the Groups and party activists.

Immigration? Everything Trump’s doing is wrong. We’ll only cooperate with federal law enforcement when we feel like it.

Crime? Not a problem. Everything’s going great—especially in D.C.! Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries: “The crime scene in D.C. most damaging to everyday Americans is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.” Trump’s turning D.C. into a police state!

Race? DEI is wonderful and we’ll defend it to our dying breath. Same thing with racial preferences. Those who oppose these policies are racists and white supremacists.

The list could go on. Using the traditional 0-10 Sister Souljah scale, where zero is doing nothing at all, 5 is barely adequate, and 10 is what Bill Clinton did, I’d give today’s Democrats a 1 for the occasional grudging admission in interviews and the like that maybe the Democrats have overdone their noble commitments a little bit (though of course their heinous opponents are 100 percent wrong). And the 1 might be generous.

They’ve got a long way to go but they could learn a lot from what Clinton did and how he did it. First, his criticism was unsparing and it was directed at an actual person as opposed to a vague allusion to something unnamed someone’s might have gotten wrong despite the best of intentions. Second, and very important, he made his intervention confrontational by entering the lion’s den—making his statements in a public appearance sponsored by a group that was part of his coalition and associated with the attitudes he criticized. Given all that, there was no way this was not going to be injected directly into the media bloodstream, provoke a tempest of controversy, and send a very clear signal to the voters he wanted to reach. Genius.

Democrats could go there if they wished. Democratic politicians are always giving speeches to various groups that are part of their coalition and present perfect venues to unload on some exemplar of cultural lunacy. There are a lot of groups and a lot of lunacy to choose from. Indeed, there’s so much lunacy that, like I say, they need two, three, many Sister Souljah moments!

All that’s lacking is the guts to do it and right now that seems distinctly lacking in Democratic ranks. If that continues, it’s likely that right populism will be with us for a very long time. Gulp.