Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor, Obama chief of staff, and ex-ambassador, railed last week against his own party's fixation on cultural and identity politics, declaring that Democrats have "lost the plot."

He is the latest in a growing number of prominent Democrats to say out loud what the American electorate has been screaming at the ballot box for years.

Emanuel didn't mince words:

"From 'Latinx,' to defunding the police, to 'Police organizations are all racist,' to bringing a set of cultural wars to our schools. We are on the losing side of those cultural wars. Full stop."

As reported by the Post, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has sounded a similar note, urging Democrats to be more "culturally normal" if they want to win voters. The fact that Newsom, of all people, feels compelled to lecture his party on normalcy tells you just how far off the map Democrats have wandered.

The education tell

Emanuel saved his sharpest point for schools. He scoffs at a party "worried about bathroom access and locker room access" while "you have 50% of our kids not reading at grade level."

That juxtaposition is the whole story. Democrats have poured enormous political capital into fights over pronouns, gender ideology in classrooms, and the defunding of school resource officers. Meanwhile, half of American children cannot read at the level they should. The party that claims to champion the vulnerable has abandoned the most basic obligation a school system has: teaching kids to read.

They've sold themselves to teachers unions whose interests diverge sharply from the interests of students and parents. The result is a party that will go to war over locker room policy but won't touch the literacy crisis devouring a generation. Priorities don't lie.

A lesson from 1992 they still haven't learned

More than 30 years ago, Democratic operative James Carville uttered what became the defining phrase of Bill Clinton's presidential campaign: "It's the economy, stupid." It was a reminder that voters care about their livelihoods, their bills, their ability to provide for their families. The simplicity was the genius.

Three decades later, Democrats need to hear it again, and that they still haven't internalized it reveals something deeper than strategic error. It reveals a party that no longer speaks to the people it claims to represent. The working-class voters who once formed the Democratic coalition have watched their party become consumed by the vocabulary and obsessions of white, left-leaning, college-educated elites. "Latinx" was coined in faculty lounges. It polls miserably with actual Latino voters. Democrats used it anyway, because the audience they were performing for was never in the barrio. It was on campus.

The opposition-only trap

Emanuel's critique points to a structural problem that goes beyond messaging. Democrats have defined themselves almost entirely by what they oppose. Their blanket opposition to ICE, to border enforcement, to police, to parental rights in education: none of it constitutes an affirmative vision for the country. You cannot build a governing coalition on negation alone.

Consider the pattern. Defund the police became a rallying cry, and violent crime surged in the cities that listened. Open-borders rhetoric became orthodoxy, and working-class communities bore the cost of illegal immigration. Schools became laboratories for social experiments, and test scores cratered. At every turn, the people who paid the price were not the elites crafting the slogans. They were the Americans Democrats once claimed as their own.

There is also the growing extremism, antisemitism, and anti-Americanism that has metastasized within the party's activist base. Emanuel and Newsom have not addressed this directly, and until someone does, the "course correction" talk remains cosmetic.

Will they actually listen?

The 2028 election looms, and the question is whether Emanuel's critique produces real change or merely generates a few cable news segments before the party reverts to form. History suggests the latter.

Every cycle, a handful of Democrats step forward to diagnose the disease. The party nods politely, then nominates another candidate who speaks fluent faculty lounge and wonders why Youngstown went red. The incentive structure hasn't changed. The donor class, the activist infrastructure, the media ecosystem that sustains Democratic politics: all of it rewards ideological purity over electoral pragmatism.

Emanuel is right that Democrats have lost the plot. But knowing you've lost the plot and finding your way back are two very different things. Finding your way back requires telling the progressive base "no," and no one in Democratic leadership has shown the stomach for that fight.

Carville told them the answer in 1992. Emanuel is telling them again now. The question was never whether they could hear it. The question is whether they want to.