Top Democrat admits liberals ‘lost the plot’

Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has torn into his own party for embracing race and gender activism over “middle class values.” Can the Democrats row back the worst excesses of the woke era? And could Emanuel lead the party in 2028?

”We lost the plot,” Emanuel said on ‘The Fifth Column’ podcast this week. “We as Democrats nationally, 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.”

“Nobody seems to be calling the whistle on this,” he continued. “You are worried about bathroom access and locker room access, why don’t you focus on classroom excellence?”

“We went from acceptance to advocacy. I remember fighting for Title IX,” he said, referring to the anti-discrimination law that mandated equal athletic opportunities in schools and colleges for women. “Why would you undercut the premise of Title IX with the ability of trans men [to play] in women’s sports?”

Emanuel is – or was – regarded as a standard-bearer within the Democratic Party. After three terms representing Illinois in the US Congress, he served as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff from 2009 to 2019, mayor of Chicago from 2011 to 2019, and US ambassador to Japan from 2022 to 2025.

He is the latest in a series of powerful Democratic figures to distance themselves from the worst excesses of the ‘woke’ era. Former Clinton strategist James Carville has called on fellow Democrats to abandon “performative woke politics” and embrace a “platform of pure economic rage.” Senator John Fetterman has declared that he is “not woke” and urged his party to toughen up on crime; liberal think tanks have pleaded with Democrats to stop using words that put “a wall between us and everyday people” – including ‘heteronormative’, ‘microaggression’, and ‘LGBTQIA+’.

Peak woke

The Democratic Party’s woke turn reached its apex in 2024. That year, President Joe Biden proclaimed Easter Sunday ‘Transgender Day of Visibility’, Planned Parenthood offered free abortions and vasectomies from a van parked outside the the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and Kamala Harris defended her record of promising taxpayer-funded sex changes to prisoners and illegal immigrants.

Current President and then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign capitalized on this, running ads featuring Harris advocating for late-term abortion and transgender athletes in women’s sports. In one TV spot, images of cross-dressing White House officials Richard ‘Rachel’ Levine and Sam Britton flashed across the screen, as a voiceover told voters: “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Voters agreed, handing Trump all seven swing states and the first popular vote victory for a Republican candidate since 2004. Crucial to this victory were the votes of young white males, a demographic ignored and condescended to by Harris’ party.

Will the Democrats return to the center?

Emanuel believes that in order to win again, Democrats have to return to the cultural center. “Every one of our most successful electoral presidents anchored themselves in what I call ‘middle class values,’” he told ‘The Fifth Column’. “Values that are universally, at least in this country, ascribed to.”