Andrew Sullivan’s take on Trump’s loss amounts to “Ding, Dong, the Witch is dead.” As to wokeness, he writes,
This mass secret vote revealed that the New York Times’ woke narrative of America — the centuries-long suffocating oppression of minorities and women by cis white straight men — is simply a niche elite belief, invented in a bubble academy, and imposed by bullying, shaming and if possible, firing dissenters. Some of us who refused to cower can gain real satisfaction from knowing we were not mad, not evil, not bigots, and that a huge swathe of our fellow citizens agree.
I don’t think that this election showed that Woke ideas are unpopular. It’s some of the tactics of the BLM folks that are unpopular. Critical Race Theory (CRT) has swept through the academic world. It has not achieved similar success with non-college-educated adults in part because it has not really tried. That doesn’t mean that proselytizing among those adults would fail if it were tried. Or that proselytizing to their children in schools will fail as it gets tried.
This religion is still dangerous. The election did not change that. Hold the gloating.
Interpreting the election results is certainly confounding. Believing the media, the results should have been maybe 80% getting rid of the ‘evil’ Trump who has been the advocate for the vile anti-wokeness; the rump deplorables being shut out across the board. Other people would have anticipated that 80% or more of the country would vote in reaction to riots and looting, with a coalition of activists, anarchists, people hoping the federal treasury could be looted to rebuild, and so on voting for Harris.
So what do we do with a near perfect split when each side is apparently intolerable to the other? After all, there weren’t tons of undecided voters. Instead, they were apparently entrenched, swayed neither by four years of media campaigns against Trump or 6 months of violence in the streets of various cities. Even the house didn’t flop one way or the other, but regressed towards 50%.
I think Sullivan has a point, as he usually does when analyzing the children of his tribe. When Trump lost, the woke kids lost a foil that led initial credence to their narrative. In the absence of a real live xenophobic bloviating ignoramus in the oval office, getting their story of woe off the ground will no longer be a snap.
Kling is right if I hear him right, that is, saying that the woke that are with us will always be with us. I think they are those elite children who, in each generation, suffer from the complex of Peter Pan”.
Without a white male clown in the WH, more career-oriented young elites will be more prone to notice what’s in front of their eyes: the faces of their woke classmates are festooned with hardware while the clothes they wear are cartoonish even to members of their own generation. And even on a contemporary campus! Seriously? The woke kids gain power and attention from time to time — whenever it appears that the center cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed upon Twitter. Otherwise, they are underground and ridiculous.
So too the leftists who make earn money pandering to the children of the elite, i.e., professors and administrators of our most expensive universities, will have less incentive to pander to the woke tribute to adolescent self-pity and lusts for public displays of browbeating.
“Without a white male clown in the WH”
Hm?
“When Trump lost, the woke kids lost a foil that led initial credence to their narrative.”
If only the movement could be defanged by the simple replacement of the president. This seems like wishful thinking to me, particularly based on the history that predated Trump.
Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, etc.
The official BLM narrative was based on myths. These myths were fully supported and perpetuated by the MSM and academia. Rioting and looting were dismissed as a justified response to racial oppression. Anyone that disagreed with the official narrative was a racist. All occurred under Obama and had zero to do with Trump.
I think this is partly right in that Trump was an accelerant, but overestimates both his affect and the importance of what this election signals. This ideology first spread widely while a progressive black man was president, so I don’t think it needs a foil in the White House. Moreover, it’s premature at best to declare ‘wokeness’ defeated. It’s most likely going to get some big wins in the Biden administration and keep moving forward. Eventually another black personality will get shot by police and it’ll flare up regardless who’s president, and push the Overton window a little further. There is little reason to believe the fundamental ideological trajectory of the US had changed course.
Re Sullivan: sooner or later he’s going to become a complete persona non grata in his own tribe because of certain views he holds, unless he repents. Whether it’ll be next year or in 5 years I don’t know.
You don’t think that’s already happened? That’s why he was run out of New York Mag?
For those that may have missed it, here is the final column:
“What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/andrew-sullivan-see-you-next-friday.html
It doesn’t make any difference that Pence is measured and calm where Trump is thin-skinned and tetchy.
It doesn’t make any difference that Amy Coney Barrett does her homework and can take people through an argument step by step. It doesn’t matter that she’s the anti-Trump in this way or the other. She still gets the same five-alarm treatment. It’s the same left-wing freak-out for everybody who gets in the way.
Does Pence get any credit from the CBS host who thinks a fly on Pence’s head is a portentous omen?
Think of the MSNBC host who called Clarence Thomas a traitor to his race and predicted he’d steal the election away from Biden. Thomas puts up with these slurs from Democrats with immense dignity, but they don’t start behaving decently in response.
What do you call someone who takes children fleeing the poverty and dysfunction of Haiti into her own house and her family? If you write for the Atlantic you call her racist.
Trump was his own worst enemy, with his personality.
To be sure, he had charisma for some, but not for most.
A likable Trump who stays on message—-limited foreign entanglements, a re-shoring of manufacturing, controlled immigration, an alliance of the productive—-would flatten the Democrats, woke or not.
Biden is a corporatist-globalist first, who will toss out some goodies for Democratic Party operatives, under various virtuous woke-sounding programs.
US leadership should target tight labor markets and loose property markets.
I’m sorry but, as we may recall, they hated the Bushitler quite vigorously too, and he didn’t fight in the least, just flopped around and played dead.
Also, Reagan was 40 years ago. But perhaps Joe Biden will be a sufficient substitute. I hear he’s nice.
It was media lies, and Dem Deep State criminals, who were far bigger enemies to Trump than Trump’s own personality.
You claim that the Clinton’s dirty tricks funded Steele Dossier, accepted by Deep State criminals to fraudulently get FISA approval to spy on Trump is because of Trump’s personality?
Granted, lots of folks who liked Trump’s policies didn’t like his personality. But it was his stubbornness that allowed him to fight and win the first time, and fight and get more than 10 m more votes the second time.
Trump’s enemies cheated and stole the election. His personality did NOT make them do that.
HR Clinton committed numerous crimes with her illegal server – no indictment, no trial (scot-free!)
Comey & FBI lied to FISA court – so far no indictments except one mid level agent who actually changed a memo (so there is clear evidence). What’s his name? No publicity, no clarity on punishment, not even clear if he goes to jail. And the rest? So far scot-free. (Durham claims investigation continues.)
After actually reading his tweets and following them, I think they helped far more than hurt him – since so many critics so often mis-quoted him. Those interested enough to check would see the truth.
Others believe the media lies. Again. And Again.
(Believe a liar once, shame on the liar. Believe a liar twice … shame on you.)
“I don’t think that this election showed that Woke ideas are unpopular.”
Absolutely correct. Biden campaigned as a Wokester. To a large degree his success, as with Obama’s first election, can be attributed to the projected desires of establishment elites like Sullivan to believe in something that is not there.
Biden promises to focus punitive wokeness on the white working class: his campaign web page is a list of atrocities planned against them: federal oversight of local police ; destruction of home equity values; eliminating millions of jobs in oil, gas, and coal; huge corporate tax increases the incidence of which will fall on workers; kowtowing to China; reconverting the military into a woke indoctrination camp; flooding the labor market with immigrants, etc.
To this the web page promises new spending and new promises of racial quotas and racial divisions. If Biden stands for anything it is apartheid: read the campaign web site: https://joebiden.com/joes-vision/. Race overrides everything. Biden repeatedly refers to Hispanics as “brown” even though a majority consider themselves white and anybody who has spent anytime in Spain knows green-eyed blondes are far from uncommon there: working class whites are the enemy. Secondly Biden promises more federal funding for establishment elites in sinecured and tax exempt industries. All the mandated wokeness training and new economy killing regulations means jobs and promotions for the compliance industry.
Victor David Hanson understands how all this plays out:
“Or what unites the Google and Facebook zillionaires, the full professor of English, the Washington Post senior editor, Barack Obama, George Soros, the head of a major network, Harvey Weinstein, Robert De Niro, or Don Lemon?
It is a desire to sound off about mandated equality, but only as long as one has the resources to be unaffected by the necessary consequences of one’s loud egalitarian advocacy. As a general rule, the more one is insulated from the downside of one’s abstract progressivism, the louder and more vehemently he expresses it.”
Just as Wokism was never a problem when it was just a boot on the throat of the working class, so too it will fade from consciousness when accommodations are reached with the establishment. The hate thought crime enforcement industry will go back to tossing young men out of college without due process and boycotting and burning small businesses who fail to pay the prescribed BLM extortion. All will be well and we won’t hear anymore about this topic.
Before the election Sullivan was rooting for a blowout and claiming it was the only solution to…well everything.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/dreaming-of-a-landslide
Now that the election has happened, an election in which Donald Trump increased his vote count from 62M or so to 72M and narrowly lost, we are told by Sully that this is what he always wanted? What happened to defeating Trumpism once and for all? What happened to the mandate Biden needs? What happened to your opinion from a month ago.
There aren’t even some large difference between Trump and down ballot (maybe 1-2% of voters split ticket, and its hard to tell how many of those 10 million new GOP voters wouldn’t have bothered without Trump).
I dunno, I’m seeing zero predictive power here.
I think it’s great that Trump did better with women and people of color and that we found out lots of college educated whites and Asians are lying about how down with wokeness they are. It’s not super clear if that’s enough to stop wokeism. Wokeism mostly doesn’t expose its outcomes to electoral mandate.
A lot of people like Sully want to think that now that Trump is gone, the “center-left” whatever that is, can stand up to wokeness. Well, its put up or shut up time. I don’t really believe them. Wokeness exploded in Obama’s second term before Trump and the existence of the Orang Man didn’t stop anyone from taking a stand.
I was incredibly proud of the Trump supporters in D.C. yesterday. 100% peaceful. Yep, 100% peaceful. Thanks for representing my team so well, even if I disagree with your cause on voter fraud conspiracies.
But, I was also proud of BLM/Antifa. Instead of their usual 90% mostly peaceful protests, I had clocked in at like 93%. Way to go on the improvement! Keep up the good work you guys and gals! Baby steps to 100%!
Yeah, so some elderly folks, kids and women got assaulted or harassed, but gotta give credit where it is due on the improvements….
https://twitter.com/ritapanahi/status/1327754135312105474?s=21
asdf,
I agree that there is zero predictive power here. You make some good points.
>—“A lot of people like Sully want to think that now that Trump is gone, the “center-left” whatever that is, can stand up to wokeness. Well, its put up or shut up time.”
Fair enough and I do get why you say “whatever that is.”
As for myself (and my lack of predictive power) It’s not so much that I have seen the future and see the last stand for wokeness on the horizon. It’s more that am confident that if the center left doesn’t stand up to it, the voters will. Democrats often care more about fighting with each other than winning and we could easily see more of that.
Either way, I don’t think wokeness can stand the light of day in a way it would have to in order to sweep the nation the way many of our apocalyptic commenters imagine. Only a very small percentage of Democratic voters really understand the actual content of Critical Theory. Most just hear that its “anti-racist” and think that sounds OK because they understand themselves to be against racism. Make them aware that really means telling them they are themselves racist and abandoning enlightenment values, and you will peel off a huge number from a party that could barely win when it was completely united against a deeply unpopular opponent.
>—-“Wokeness exploded in Obama’s second term before Trump and the existence of the Orang Man didn’t stop anyone from taking a stand.”
Wokeness exploded under Obama and exploded even more under Trump. Should we conclude all Presidents cause wokeness? I’d be much more inclined to blame the universal presence of cell phone video capability. Obama never supported any version of Critical Theory. He was much more inclined to celebrate progress made and much more inclined to a “the arc of history bends towards progress” point of view than to tell anyone they were doomed to have no personal agency due to inevitable structural racism.
When can we stop focusing on wokeness based on raw politics and recognize it for what it is – an ideological set of ideas that is concerned primarily with changing mindsets as opposed to influencing the immediate results of political outcomes?
I’m not concerned with the political outcomes. I’m concerned with this stuff impacting schools, corporations and the broader liberal values. How much more of this sh*t does may Asian wife need to tolerate over Zoom calls while black people complain about 400 years of racial oppression and white folks apologize for their white privilege? Why does her big Pharma company need pay Robin DeAngelo for her silliness?
Hans,
I don’t know how many more idiotic Zoom calls your wife will have to sit through. But however many it is, I don’t think it rises to anything like the Civil War inducing provocation that some commenters seem to think it does. She is getting paid to sit through them, right? Her big pharma company is mostly trying to immunize itself against bad publicity and lawsuits if someone catches one of their employees on cell phone video making some racist comment that goes viral.
I have volunteered with Hospice for over 20 years and in the last few, we have had to sit through a morning of idiotic training sessions every year on how to wash your hands, how to not sexually harass someone, infection control, how to avoid other miscellaneous general policy violations, etc. Then a poorly written multiple choice test where we are actually given the answer key with the test which serves to prove we received the trainings. No training yet on racism but if there was one more on that it wouldn’t be noticed much.
Corporations both for profit and non-profit want to avoid law suits and bad publicity in an atmosphere where anything can be videotaped and go viral. They want to be able to portray an offending employee as as a rouge operator.
Schools are a different thing but schools K-12 are controlled at the local level which I trust is still secure in North Texas. I agree with you about the threat to broader liberal values. We should have that fight with wokeness sooner rather than later but surely you realize it’s going to be impossible to get people to take Trump seriously as any kind of champion of broader liberal values.
The point of the humiliating zoom calls and training sessions is the break your will. Once your will is broken, then they take the meat.
Wokeness is the Havel’s Green Grocer sign of our times. Once you have agreed that you will comply with lies, they can just up the ante on the nature and degree of lies.
“but surely you realize it’s going to be impossible to get people to take Trump seriously as any kind of champion of broader liberal values.”
I voted for Trump and have no regrets. But, I do acknowledge your statement above and congratulate you on the Biden victory. Keeping my fingers crossed that you can keep your promise that he will be a moderate, but of course, I’m rooting for them Georgia Republican senate candidates just to keep things honest.
I just hope that you’re able to broaden your perspective on wokeness. It’s not about politics and or voters. It operates a few levels below that. Thanks!
“The point of the humiliating zoom calls and training sessions is the break your will.”
Very true. But, I think it’s actually worse than this. It’s about establishing and defining cultural norms that no one would voluntarily violate without looking and feeling like a fool. Most people are sheep and will go along (or pretend to go along) with whatever they feel the majority thinks. I would of course gladly violate these norms to breakup the groupthink, but I’m a silly person with nothing to lose and I love to violate norms.
>—“Most people are sheep and will go along (or pretend to go along) with whatever they feel the majority thinks.”
It’s a lot harder to brainwash people than you think. Or to predict which way public opinion will go.
It’s certainly not a desire to think like the majority that fuels the extraordinary growth of conspiracy theories of all types on all sides. In all their many forms, these are all fueled by the conceit that the believers are in possession of some special knowledge not recognized by the majority.
When that QAnon inspired guy shot up the Comet Ping Pong Pizza and then explained himself by saying, “The intel wasn’t 100%” I thought we were seeing the humiliating end of something. Nope. That was the beginning of something. That publicity just helped to spread the thing.
Look, I’m not claiming to understand why people choose to believe the things they do but I am convinced it has a lot to do with extremists and nuts of all types being able to find each other on the internet and insulate themselves into their own private news feeds where they won’t be disturbed by news that challenges their personal world view.
You see everyone submitting to majority opinion Hans and I see what used to be a common reality shattering into many different pieces. I have one brother who believes the world is tightly controlled by an international socialist conspiracy and another who thinks it’s tightly controlled by a worldwide capitalist conspiracy. The only thing they agree on is that nothing is as it seems. These are not majority opinions and the more you get into the weeds with them the more they fragment again into niche conspiracy theories.
I’ve gotten so I’m less interested in what people believe than why they believe what they do. And a lot less impressed with the idea that everyone wants to identify with the majority. Everyone wants to think their opinions are special and that their opinions are much smarter than mere majority opinion. Critical Theory, for example claims to discover a deep structure to power relationships that mere ordinary people of the majority miss. Just like all the other conspiracy theories, it claims to hold the key to understanding what mere majorities can’t.
I think the immediate threat is what powerful liberals decide. But there is little reason to think powerful liberals have this under control. Even most powerful liberals who are exposed to critical theory don’t actually resist it. They cave, it’s not just a matter of a lack of knowledge. How secret can critical theory be when you’re burning down all the major cities?
In the longer run…its nice that Trump won more POC, but wining 30% of a growing demographic isn’t a formula for winning. I think that people like Sully essentially free-load on the deplorable vote. As there are fewer are fewer deplorables (because the demographics are darker, because their kids get wokeness nonstop K-12, university, and in popular media) you can’t keep relying on them to save you from yourselves.
My most instructive experience is with people from Malaysia. Where the put upon Chinese minority know that hyper affirmative action is a bunch of bullshit, but they are stuck with it anyway, because they don’t have the numbers to overcome it. Why shouldn’t America end up that way when its minority-majority. Why shouldn’t woke whites ally with browns to impose a woke-ocracy? Whose going to stop them? By the time anyone woke up, it’s too late.
Indeed. What’s more, I bet they remember the massive 1969 anti-Chinese riots well and know what will happen if they make too much noise.
“Should we conclude all Presidents cause wokeness?”
No, I think we should conclude that it’s a sustained cultural trend, not an artifact of a president or two. For those who expect to be alive in 15 or 20 years or a while thereafter, the 1st and 2nd derivatives are pretty important, and demographics is destiny, as they say.
There is a long list of political trends popular among elites and unpopular among the majority of the public at one point that after ten years or so became popular enough to overturn the status quo; indeed that describes most of important political wind changes of the last few generations. I’m doubtful voters will hold fast on this one.
While one can come to grip with your grief of your fav losing, even it be on just 1 vote, calling a 6m popular vote diff as narrow is, well Trumpian. Popular vote for JB 79.2m vs DT 73.4, that’s about 6m/8% difference. Narrow, eh? Don’t give conservatives a nincompoop moniker.
And in EC it is 290 vs 232. JB has ~30% more EC votes than DT. Narrow, eh?
If you mean narrow in the sense that the swing states only had narrow differences. That’s the way the system is designed/expected to work. May be all those swing state Trumpians thought others will do their work, a la HRC voters in 2016 perhaps?
Sorry, Arnold. Sullivan’s column is gated and long ago I learned that he makes too many unforced errors.
We can always pick up some Dems and extrapolate that most Dems are sorry for their comrades’ obsession with “Woketopia”. Indeed, it doesn’t make any difference in the “cultural” fields where Woke fans thrive. More importantly, and regardless of what the federal government can do, punitive and mandated “wokeness” will be hard to contain. It may trigger violence and then the federal government will have to take a position.
Let us talk about politics. In his comment, reader BenK asked what Americans do “with a near-perfect split when each side is apparently intolerable to the other”. Yes, the election’s outcome looks like a near-perfect split, but it’s far from perfect. I bet that the Republicans will continue supporting Trump who now is in control of the party (yes, there are few old Senators that like too much their jobs and know they have to be careful about supporting Trump, but they will never become Dems). Even if he decided to retire after 1/20/21, he would be able to choose his successor. After the 2022 election, there will be no doubt who has taken total control of the R-Party.
The other side, however, will have to deal with two issues: to contain the Socialist-insiders and to negotiate with an increasingly organized Radical Left. The Socialist-insiders will press hard for their economic program whereas the Radical Left will press for it but also for the cultural program (I prefer to distinguish it from the Woke program although they overlap). They will have to negotiate a three-party agreement soon otherwise the two issues will dominate Biden’s agenda in the first two years. If by the end of March 2021, they have not negotiated it, I bet the D-Old Guard will have a hard time delivering anything other than revoking whatever Trump’s executive orders they don’t like. They cannot afford an outbreak of hostilities “within” their great coalition and risk a huge defeat in the 2022 election, but this prospect enhances the hand of Socialists and Radical Leftists, perhaps to the point of having veto power on the Old Guard’s proposals.
Just for those interested in relevant Argentinian experiences: in the past 70 years, the absolute majority of the Perón vote has been supported by a coalition of many factions that tested the endurance of Perón’s legacy. On the other hand, the anti-Perón vote has failed many times in building a similar coalition. Why has one succeeded and the other failed? To argue that Perón’s legacy became Schelling’s focal point for many interest groups is an interesting idea but not sufficient to explain its endurance. Anyway, what could be the focal point of a new D-coalition “led” by a D-Trump that has yet to be discovered?
Thanks for great notes on Peron & Argentina. As relevant to the US today as Nazis or Hitler or Weimar; or Venezuela or Cuba or the UK with Brexit. All different, all with some similarities of human nature.
I’m sure you’re correct that, once the Pres. is in place after January, most politicians will be looking at how to win in 2022, including those whose real aim is the next Pres. election 2024.
“Critical Race Theory (CRT) has swept through the academic world.”
The “educated strata” is notorious for their gullibility and to “indulge in false logic”. It is the drive to conformity with the rise the bureaucratic state in the US that propels them to subscribe to critical race theory since “belief” is critical to gaining their place in the machine. The antidote to this belief and the over production of “elite” is to return to a more capitalist society where the ambitious do “not have to overcome any obstacles erected by shortsighted governments and a narrow-minded public opinion. ” The universities have returned to their 17th century nature that led to the Industrial Revolution and being steam power being missed by the technophobic status universities such as Oxbridge.
“The fading of the critical sense is a serious menace to the preservation of our civilization. It makes it easy for quacks to fool the people. It is remarkable that the educated strata are more gullible than the less educated. The most enthusiastic supporters of Marxism, Nazism, and Fascism were the intellectuals, not the boors. The intellectuals were never keen enough to see the manifest contradictions of their creeds. It did not in the least impair the popularity of Fascism that Mussolini in the same speech praised the Italians as the representatives of the oldest Western civilization and as the youngest among the civilized nations. No German nationalist minded it when dark-haired Hitler, corpulent Goering, and lame Goebbels were praised as the shining representatives of the tall, slim, fair-haired, heroic Aryan master race. Is it not amazing that many millions of non-Russians are firmly convinced that the Soviet regime is democratic, even more democratic than America?”
–von Mises, Ludwig (1945). Bureaucracy
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
“It is possible for the mind to indulge in false logic, to make the worse appear the better reason, without instant exposure. But for the hand to work falsely is to produce a misshapen thing—tool or machine —which in its construction gives the lie to its maker. Thus the hand that is false to truth, in the very act publishes the verdict of its own guilt, exposes itself to contempt and derision, convicts itself of unskillfulness or of dishonesty.”
–—Charles H. Ham, Mind and Hand: manual training, the chief factor in education (1900)
Thanks for great quotes. Reminding me of first two; first time this fine Ham quote about Mind and Hand.
I’m reminded of how all smart folk are smart enough to lie to themselves and believe their own lies. “Without instant exposure”.
Without evidence of the lie – those who want to believe it, can believe it. As long as the lie is just in the mind.
Will there be evidence of fraud in the Dominion and other vote-counting machine logs? Or other exposure?
Hope so for that 10% chance the gloating is premature.
But because of the inability to prove that the election was honest, Trump is not going away. We’re not going to hear him say “You won’t have Trump to kick around anymore”, unlike Nixon (who I won’t label as Tricky Dick here, now).
So the Trump-hating woke folk will still be able to hate Trump and hate Reps and slander anybody who disagrees as a “racist”.