We may be well past 100 days into the Donald Trump presidency, but Democrats are still hard at work doing postmortems on why they lost so profoundly in the 2024 election. While some high-profile Democrats like Gavin Newsom have rightly acknowledged many of the issues that plagued their party during the last cycle, others continue to appear oblivious.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, in one of her first major speeches since losing to Trump, suggested that elephants are the key to guiding beleaguered Americans through the Trump presidency. You didn’t read that wrong. Harris said this to the Emerge Gala in San Francisco:
And look, right now, I know a lot of folks are wondering, what’s going to guide us through this moment? How are we all going to figure out how to chart the course? […] Who saw that video from a couple of weeks ago, the one of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo during the earthquake? Google it if you’ve not seen it. So that scene has been on my mind. Everybody’s asking, what you’ve been thinking about these days? Well … So in the video, for those of you haven’t seen it, here those elephants were, and as soon as they felt the earth shaking beneath their feet, they got in a circle and stood next to each other to protect the most vulnerable. Think about it. What a powerful metaphor.
That’s the message Kamala has now for her people: Be more like elephants (notwithstanding the fact that elephants are symbolic of the GOP). Elephants may never forget, but Harris has forgotten the very tone-deafness that cost her the election.
Not to be outdone, Harris’s running mate, Democrat Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is likewise continuing to bask in the inability to read the room. Speaking to the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, Walz told the audience the reason he was picked to be the vice presidential candidate:
But I also was on the ticket, quite honestly, because I could code talk to white guys watching football, fixing their truck, doing that. … I could put them at ease. I was the permission structure to say, ‘Look, you can do this and vote for this.’
I can’t for the life of me imagine anyone letting Walz fix their truck. And if his Elmer Fudd-like impression of a hunter fumbling to load his shotgun during a campaign bird hunt photo op is any indication of him being a “code talker” for masculinity, masculinity is in dire straits. But Walz’s use of cryptic words like “code talk,” and “permission structure” reveal the root of where Democrats like him and Harris continue to go wrong.
Having long left behind simple, direct communication, the Left swims in obfuscation. They seem to think that people prefer code to words, which actually mean things. For them, the way to reach an alien culture is to first crack the code that these peculiar beings use. And for Harris-Walz, “white guys watching football, fixing their truck” is an alien culture whose code must be broken.
The worldview of these football-watching, truck-fixing white guys is so foreign to the Left, that they must be given permission to vote for someone enlightened to the extent that Kamala Harris is. And who better to give them permission to vote for Harris than someone who can speak their code, Tim Walz—the very same governor who signed a law that allowed for putting tampons into boy’s restrooms in schools.
Code that contains errors usually doesn’t run well, and the Democrats’ code of Walz masculinity was riddled with error. The Harris-Walz Democrat approach viewed the world in caricature. Male and female, masculinity and femininity, and even a person’s identity are only caricatures in their worldview.
What Democrats missed in the 2024 election cycle—and may still be missing—is that many of the guys who watch football and fix trucks are influenced by a worldview that can’t be reached by code talking and permission structures. Their worldview can only be accessed by acknowledging the reality of the way in which God created the world.
God communicated his truths about things like masculinity using clear words, not code—like when the Apostle Paul instructed men to “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.” In the book of Genesis, we’re told clearly—again in words, not code—that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Masculinity and femininity are not caricatures. They’re outworkings of the way God has made us. Sure, it sometimes expresses itself in athletic prowess, the ability to fix things like trucks, the ability to cook a tasty meal, decorate a room, and a myriad other ways. But masculinity, femininity, and other aspects of our God-given identity are far more than expressions of machismo or the clothing we wear. They’re rooted in how God has created us in his image—something that no amount of code talking can mimic.
And that’s why the Left has been falling short in its messaging to a wide range of Americans. They’re operating from a world they’ve created for themselves, and they’re ignoring the world God created. Until Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and other Democrats who follow them understand that truth, they’ll continue to be trampled by the elephant in the room.
Originally published by The Washington Stand
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