None of the issues that Dems ran with (ok, maybe gun control) is necessary poison or cause for immediate concern. But the Dems did an awful job at framing these issues. Police reform was an issue that Dems jumped the gun on, associating it with the activist movement BLM rather than integrating BLM's raw and real energy within the platform in a way that is relevant to all people (I.e. even though white people are also liable to get bonked by a uniformed thug, the dem messaging allowed it to be compartmentalised as "an issue for blacks" which robbed it of its potential).
Yeah, things like BLM drive me nuts.
Because of my history, I relate a lot of things to the gay rights movement, and this could have gone the path of either of our two most prominent issues: employment protections and marriage equality.
Employment protections have been a major priority for the Human Rights Campaign for decades, dating back to a time when marriage equality was still a fringe issue. I think the reason for its failure to date is that it ultimately doesn't have universal appeal.
The underlying assumption is that America must have groups with a different legal status. (African-American affirmative action is probably the most prominent example.) These separate legal statuses started as remedies for the most blatant historical discrimination, but liberals seem to want to see how many additional victim groups can be added to the list. Although not intentional, issues like employment protections (for an enumerated and ever-growing laundry list of small groups, of course) produce an image of a Liberalism that wants to balkanize America as much as possible.
In contrast, marriage equality has more of a universal appeal. In this case, it was individual gay couples who were fighting for the right to be treated the same as all other couples. (In contrast to the operatives pushing for employment protections, marriage equality was much less of a top-down issue, and it was never really the darling of the gay political leadership. There may be a lesson in there somewhere.)
Coinciding with the rise of the marriage issue, increasing numbers of people began coming out of the closet, so the absence of same-sex marriage meant that nearly every American knew someone who could
never marry
anyone they
ever fell in love with. The "separate legal status" issue was flipped on its head, with those opposed to marriage equality seeming to be the ones to want gays to have a separate legal status.
But enough of my rant on gay rights issues. Back to Black Lives Matter.
This would have been so easy to make a universal issue. Police overreach, in theory, is an issue that should make large numbers of people uneasy. Although it might be applied disproportionately to minorities, it has probably affected, to some degree, large swaths of the population. There are even those on the Right who probably would have complained just as loudly against an overzealous government and against government employees.
Instead, BLM made this a Blacks-only movement. Police overreach became a "Black" issue. Other people need not concern themselves. There was a point in time when this could have become an "American" issue, but that opportunity seems to have been squandered.
On the whole, I have a negative opinion of Social Justice Warriors. They mean well, and I often agree with their goals, but sometimes it seems as if being right--after all, if you're right, you should never compromise on anything less than total victory--is just more important than actually achieving anything.
End of rant.
Back to the gay marriage issue, it seems to me that there were even conservative arguments for marriage equality. If you argue that the opposite of marriage is not abstinence (which is absurd) but cohabitation, then you could argue that opponents of marriage equality were undermining marriage by creating a large number of couples who were becoming role models for how to live without marriage.
Out of curiosity, are domestic partnership registries even still around? I never hear anyone talk about them anymore.
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