"Democrats need organized voters. The political mobilization that the civil rights movement built..."

"... and that has propelled Democrats to victories across the country is aging. The G.O.P. is racing to disorganize and dilute Black electoral power across the South and the Voting Rights Act is all but dead. Your guess about the Democratic Party’s plan to fill the gaps is as good as mine. The party seems to want some kind of economic populist message without embracing the demographic reality that a member of the working class is just as likely to be Black or a woman as a white dude in a Carhartt...."

Writes Tressie McMillan Cottom, in "This Could Be the Winning Issue for Democrats" (NYT).

The suggested winning issue is opposition to data centers: "Americans hate data centers. They really, really hate them.... Data centers evoke strong emotions because they are tangible. Voters can hear them, smell them and see them.... [W]hen political problems become local, people can be persuaded to look beyond their party affiliation or even their own social class to help one another...."

"His beefy tattooed arms and weathered face made him look like a live-action Popeye. He’s often styled in a dirty ball cap and ragged T-shirt...."

"... implying a sort of everyman machismo. It’s the kind of look that suggests (U.S. Senate candidate Graham) Platner could be the Democratic Party’s new great white hope — a working-class white man who can speak to class antagonism in an economically unequal electorate. There’s just one teensy-weensy problem. It turns out that friend-of-the-white-working-class had a Nazi tattoo. The tattoo resembles a Totenkopf, a well-known symbol of official Nazis, the Nazi-adjacent and people who just think that Nazi iconography is tough. The gist is that Platner got the tattoo in 2007 in Croatia when he was on leave with his fellow Marines. Platner has said that he didn’t know the symbol’s semiotics. He only knew that Marines get 'terrifying-looking' tattoos...."

Writes Tressie McMillan Cottom, in "A Nazi Tattoo Exposes Democrats’ Greatest Weakness" (NYT). I've made that a gift link so you can try to figure out what this "greatest weakness" is supposed to be. 

"There is a very sly critique of liberalism in the film’s characterization of Glinda. She is obsessed with being seen as good..."

"... but she frequently passes on chances to act in ways that would better people’s lives. Bowen Yang’s character in 'Wicked' does these great 'yasss girl' ad-libs that link Glinda’s behavior to the way white liberal feminism shows up in the world, more obsessed with status than change. Being 'good' is morally vacuous, like Glinda, if you don’t do anything that matters."

Says Tressie McMillan Cottom, in "Four Opinion Writers Visit Oz and Ask: Who’s Really ‘Wicked’?" (NYT)(free-access link, because this is a long conversation with, obviously, 4 voices).

"Do you think it’s at all reasonable for the mother of a teenage boy to worry about a false accusation of sexual assault? Or is that just like, a normal maternal anxiety?"

Asks Ross Douthat of Tressie McMillan Cottom, who answers: "I think it is about as normal as worrying that you’re going to be sex trafficked at the shopping center if you are a Middle America mom. That is to say, is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? No. And is there a much bigger threat out there that might be a better use of your maternal anxiety?... The feminist philosopher Kate Mann calls it 'himpathy; — this default sympathy for men and for the male condition and that it is so deeply embedded in our culture."

That's part of a conversation at "Diddy and Our Culture’s 'Himpathy' for Powerful Men/How the allegations against/Sean Combs change the way we talk about #MeToo, rumors and powerful men" (NYT)(and that's my last gift link of the month, which should tell you there's a lot more to read there).

"Audiences have different orientations toward humor and political talk. Those orientations have some underlying psychological needs."

"And styles of comedy have political and cultural histories. Bluntly, scholars who study political communication and humor often find that liberals are ironic smart alecks and conservatives are outraged moralists. Some of us are a bit of both, but most of us have a psychological need to be one over the other.... Unfortunately, outrage makes more money, and today’s conservative media is much better at outrage."

Writes Tressie McMillan Cottom in "In the Political Talk Show Race, Outrage Is Winning" (NYT).

"The form-fitting dresses and retro color palette that Sinema favors are a way of broadcasting her bona fides as a middle-class politician and thus someone in step with middle-class values."

"One might laugh at how literal this sounds as political stagecraft, but consider that almost all people in this country think of themselves as middle class, regardless of how much (or little) money they have. It is our cultural default, and we see it as normative. We use 'middle-class' interchangeably with other powerful nationalist signifiers like 'citizen,' 'voter' and 'American.' And, though my progressive comrades may balk at this comparison, if you compare Sinema to some of Congress’s best-known female politicians, her style is easily the most accessible to her constituents. I know enough about fashion, and how much it costs, to know that few American women can afford to dress like, for instance, the preternaturally turned-out Nancy Pelosi. In fact, part of what makes Sinema’s style performance so uncomfortable for many of us is how middle-class it is: She doesn’t seem to be trying to do better. But that does not mean her style story lacks aspiration.... [Her] presentation reads like 'someone who’s got a catalog budget but is trying to imagine what that high-end editorial looks like, someone who aspires to be cool and edgy.' One dimension of class in Sinema’s sartorial performance is that it is basic but aspirational, not in power, but in coolness."

Another article about Kyrsten Sinema's clothing in the NYT. This one is "How Kyrsten Sinema Uses Clothing to Signal Her Social Class" by Tressie McMillan Cottom, who is "an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of 'Thick: And Other Essays' and a 2020 MacArthur fellow."