Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has managed to hold his nation together through three years of Russian barbarism, but apparently, he could do better by being a tad less shirty with the American president who has now taken Moscow’s side. Or so says the Kyiv bureau chief of The New York Times, Andrew Kramer, in a recent news analysis that amounted to a wince-inducing scolding of Zelensky.

“Fair or Not,” the headline announced, “Zelensky Is Angering Trump.” Now, headlines can be misleading; some are placed by an editor rather than the writer above a story. But this headline—unfortunately—captured the spirit of the article. The Times has provided the world with excellent reporting about Russia’s war in Ukraine, and to his credit, Kramer takes care to note that “Zelensky has mostly played weak hands wisely” in the face of the Russian onslaught.

But then Kramer suggests that Zelensky’s approach has been engendering “not empathy but hostility from the American president,” including a request to meet with Donald Trump that became “the latest example of a dramatic personal style that was once integral to his nation’s struggle but now looks more like a monkey wrench in dealing with the Trump administration.”

[Franklin Foer: A man who actually stands up to Trump]

Kramer seems to believe that Trump is capable of empathy, but the president’s public life suggests that he extends such emotions rarely, if ever, to anyone, and certainly not to the leader of a nation he blames for so many things (including his first bout of impeachment troubles). Trump likely couldn't care less about the fate of Ukraine beyond the war’s impact on his own fortunes, but even so, Kramer criticizes Zelensky for provoking the American president by making the apparently unreasonable demand that America should treat Ukraine as a real country:

Rather than once laying out Ukraine’s position, Mr. Zelensky reiterated at a security conference in Munich, a news conference in Turkey’s capital and two news conferences in Kyiv that he would reject Mr. Trump’s negotiations if they exclude Ukraine.

In other words, a wartime president repeatedly emphasized the single most important point of his government’s foreign policy—that his nation’s fate must not be decided without him—and Kramer is concerned that this position displeases the scornful American president. Kramer notes that “the constant public insistence on Ukrainian involvement has irritated Mr. Trump,” as if Zelensky was making a trivial demand, instead of refusing to have his country bargained over and partitioned by two leaders who are both now openly hostile to his nation and his government.

The reality is that everything about Zelensky irritates Trump, and Zelensky can’t do anything to mitigate that. Even if he bent the knee in the Oval Office and took Trump’s hand while vowing eternal loyalty, Trump long ago signaled that nothing would stop him from abandoning Ukraine to Vladimir Putin if given the chance. Kramer, however, argues that Zelensky should play ball with Trump, as though that could somehow work.

Kramer, for example, claims that cooperation is how Zelensky managed to pry loose Javelin anti-tank weapons from the Trump administration in 2019. This is a remarkably ahistorical explanation that ignores how Trump first attempted to use the Javelins and other military aid to strong-arm Zelensky into helping him discredit Joe Biden—a scheme for which Trump was impeached only a few months after releasing the weapons. It’s possible that Trump allowed the deal out of gratitude for some Ukrainian concessions (such as letting the Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort off the hook for some legal troubles in Kyiv), but it’s more likely that Trump was trying to cover his tracks with a complicated agreement to send the weapons, once the demand to investigate Biden fell through.

[Anne Applebaum: Putin’s three years of humiliation]

Kramer twice refers to Zelensky’s “showmanship,” an odd word to use about the behavior of a man at the helm of a nation at war. Brave and uncompromising public acts could also be called “leadership,” especially if they are meant to buck up a population in arms, signal resolve to the enemy, and spur allies to provide assistance. If such things are “showmanship,” Zelensky is not the first to engage in it. (After all, who did Winston Churchill think he was, flashing his famous V (for victory) signs, demanding help from the rest of the world, and even swanning about in a military uniform in his late 60s during World War II?)

“It is hotly debated in Ukraine,” Kramer adds, “whether Mr. Zelensky erred in his messaging by responding to insults from Mr. Trump with a few snipes of his own, rather than diplomatically navigating the U.S. president’s attacks.” The lack of context here is stunning: Trump, as Kramer himself notes, did not merely issue a few insults or zingers, but instead called Zelensky a dictator and literally blamed him for starting the war. Zelensky responded to these and other lies by claiming that Trump is caught in a Kremlin-created “web of disinformation,” which is quite a charitable explanation for Trump’s support for Putin.

Kramer ends by noting, rightly, that for many Ukrainians, Zelensky’s demand to be included in determining Ukraine’s future “is not just a sign of a stubborn character but a broadly endorsed position in the country.” An entire analysis, however, that amounts to a barely implicit warning to Zelensky that he should stop annoying the president of the United States with his patriotism and steadfastness is a terrible message, not only to the Ukrainians, but to American readers. The truth is that nothing Zelensky can do is ever going to sway Trump from a choice he made long ago, to stand with the only world leader he both fears and respects: Vladimir Putin.

At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members.

Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.”

Democrats talk a big game about “inclusion,” but as Buttigieg notes, they don’t produce a message that feels inclusive to most voters, because they’re too focused on appealing to the very nonrepresentative set of people who make up the party apparatus. Adam Frisch—a moderate Democrat who ran two strong campaigns for Congress in a red district in western Colorado but got little traction among DNC members when he sought to be elected as vice chair of the party—wrote about his own experience in the DNC campaign. He noted how just about the only people he’d encountered in his DNC politicking who hadn’t gone to college were “the impressive delegates from the High School Democrats of America.” Frisch lost out to two candidates who were much better positioned to speak to the very highly educated, very left-wing electorate that is the DNC membership: State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, a “champion for social justice” who has lost multiple statewide campaigns in Pennsylvania by doing his best impression of Elizabeth Warren; and David Hogg, the dim-bulb gun-control advocate who still seems to think “Defund the Police” is good politics. Speaking of things that seem like they came out of Portlandia: Hogg believes that the gun-control movement was “started centuries ago by almost entirely black, brown and indigenous lgbtq women and nonbinary people that never got on the news or in most history books.”

Yet Buttigieg pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the people who have led Democrats down this road of being off-putting and unpopular.

[Read: The HR-ification of the Democratic party]

These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped. And although DEI-speak can and does make Democrats seem weird and out of touch, that’s not the main problem with it. The big problem with the approach Buttigieg rightly complains about—and that Kenyatta and Hogg exemplify—is that it entails a strong set of mistaken moral commitments. These have led the party to take unpopular positions on crime, immigration, and education, among other issues. Many nonwhite voters correctly perceive these positions as hostile to their substantive interests.

What worldview am I complaining about? It’s a worldview that obsessively categorizes people by their demographic characteristics, ranks them according to how “marginalized” (and therefore important) they are because of those characteristics, and favors or disfavors them accordingly. The holders of this worldview then compound their errors by looking to progressive pressure groups as a barometer of the preferences of the “marginalized” population groups they purport to represent. That is, they decide that some people are more important than others, and then they don’t even correctly assess the desires of the people they have decided are most important.

Let’s look, for example, at what progressive Democrats have to offer to Asian voters—or, as a DNC member might say, “AANHPI voters.” On higher education, Democrats advocate for race-conscious admission policies that favor “underrepresented” groups and disfavor “overrepresented” ones. In practice, those policies have meant that Asian applicants must clear higher academic bars than white applicants—and much higher bars than Black and Latino applicants—to win admission to top schools. Progressives have also responded to demographic imbalances at selective public K–12 education programs (which are disproportionately Asian) by fighting to change the admission systems. In New York, progressives sought to to abolish the admission exam, which Asian students have dominated; in San Francisco, where the city’s most prestigious magnet school has become majority-Asian, they actually did away with the exam for a time; in Fairfax County, Virginia, they changed admission rules to be less favorable to Asian applicants. Within schools, they have opposed tracking and fought to remove advanced math courses, “leveling” the playing field by reducing the level of rigor available to the highest-performing students.

Democrats see Asian Americans disproportionately getting ahead in school as an “inequitable” outcome, so they try to stack the deck against them. Not a great pitch to the Asian community.

Of course, I’m sure Democrats who favor affirmative action would say that framing is very unfair. But these are the same people who keep telling us we need to focus on the effects of actions rather than intentions. When Democrats get control of education policy, they make changes that hurt Asians. Is it any kind of surprise that, as Democrats have become ever more obsessed with racial “equity” as a policy driver, Asian voters have swung hard against the party? Is it surprising that Republicans—in spite of overt racism among some operatives and activists in the party—have made strong inroads among Asian voters? I don’t find it surprising, given that Democrats are the party of official discrimination against Asians.

[Read: Democrats deserved to lose]

Or consider Democrats’ approach to crime. Progressives’ insistence on using marginalization as a marker of moral worth has led them to prioritize the needs of people who are engaged in antisocial behavior over those of ordinary citizens who abide by the social contract. After all, few people are more marginalized than criminals, or the “justice-involved,” as a DNC member might call them. As progressives have grown skeptical of police and policing, they have made it more difficult to detain dangerous defendants ahead of trial, and they have de facto (and sometimes de jure) decriminalized nuisances such as public drug use. These policies, combined with the effects of COVID and the George Floyd protests, have led to an increase in crime and disorder in cities. This has been unpopular. And because major cities are disproportionately nonwhite, the negative effects of the disorder have fallen disproportionately on nonwhite voters. So it makes sense that diverse cities swung harder against Democrats than did whiter suburbs, where physical distance has insulated the electorate.

On immigration, similarly, Democrats are excessively focused on the interests of the most marginalized group in the policy equation—foreign migrants—even though these migrants are not citizens and not really stakeholders in our politics. The Biden administration presided over the entry of millions of migrants into the country in a way that was not in accordance with any intentionally enacted public policy. It did this with the enthusiastic support of progressive groups that purport to speak for the interests of Latinos. But the broader population of Latinos reacted—surprise!—quite negatively to the migration wave, as they watched migrants receive expensive government services, overwhelm institutions of local government, and in some cases produce crime and disorder. Some of the hardest-swinging counties against Democrats from 2020 to 2024 were overwhelmingly Latino counties on the U.S.-Mexico border. If you wanted to predict how the migration wave would affect the Hispanic American vote, you would have done better to focus on the “American” aspect of their identity rather than on the “Hispanic” part; as it turns out, long-settled Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans don’t necessarily put a high premium on ensuring that our government spends a ton of money to house and care for economic migrants from Central and South America.

So the problem here is not really the $10 words. Consider the term BIPOC. This (decreasingly?) fashionable buzzword—which means either “Black and Indigenous people of color” or “Black, Indigenous, and people of color,” depending on whom you ask—contains a clear message about how progressives view the hierarchy of marginalization: Black Americans and Native Americans outrank Latinos and Asians. It seems that the message has been received: In 2024, Democrats hemorrhaged support from Latinos and Asians. But the problem can’t be fixed by dropping BIPOC from the vocabulary. To stop the bleeding, Democrats need to abandon the toxic issue positions they took because they have the sort of worldview that caused them to say “BIPOC” in the first place.

[Read: How to move on from the worst of identity politics]

Democrats should say that race should not be a factor in college admissions. They should say that the U.S. government should primarily focus on the needs of U.S. citizens, and that a sad story about deprivation in a foreign country isn’t a sufficient reason for being admitted to the United States and put up in a New York hotel at taxpayer expense. They should say that the pullback from policing has been a mistake. They should say that they were wrong and they are sorry! After all, Democrats talk easily about how the party has gotten “out of touch,” but they don’t draw the obvious connection about what happens when you’re out of touch: You get things substantively wrong and alienate voters with your unpopular ideas. To fix that, you have to change more than how you talk—you have to change what you stand for, and stand up to those in the party who oppose that change.

Even better, you can nominate people who never took those toxic and unpopular issue positions in the first place.

This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.