Keeping up with the FITs, No. 21

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They’re at it again. One example:

Matt Yglesias writes,

what you don’t want to do, as a political movement, is run around looking for reasons to exile people from your political coalition. A non-trivial number of rank-and-file Democrats have a range of views on LGBT issues that put them at odds with the bulk of progressives. It is very important that those people keep voting for Democrats, or else Donald Trump is president again and progress on things like military service becomes impossible.

My thought:

He wants progressives to engage in rational political behavior. Tactically, you want to try to tolerate people with whom you do not always agree. But I would argue that Woke progressivism is not a political movement in that sense. Political movements are inclusionary, but it is in the nature of Wokeism to be exclusionary. Exercising the power of shaming, shunning, and excommunicating is at the essential core of Wokeism. The Woke would rather lose elections while retaining their power to intimidate than have it be the other way around.

22 thoughts on “Keeping up with the FITs, No. 21”

  1. “The Woke would rather lose elections while retaining their power to intimidate than have it be the other way around.”

    Even when they lose elections they control the bureaucracy, so it’s not like government outcomes change on the issues that matter to them. It’s rather obvious to me that this is a strategy that makes sense for everyone but swing district democratic politicians or Yglesias types that live vicariously through politics.

    Think for a minute. Yglesias’s big bad outcome if the Dems adopt bad politics is that a Republican president might not allow trans people in the military. Did Yglesias watch the same cringe generals get kicked out of Afghanistan as I did? Yeah, we really need more trans generals, the horror if we didn’t.

    Is some SSRIed up pink hair at Netflix going to give up her two minutes of hate because she it might cause an electoral swing that might change some inconsequential policies slightly for four years?

    • So, this week marks the annual DEI celebration at my wife’s big pharma employer.

      Last year = an appearance by Robin DiAngelo and endless Zoom sessions on blah blah blah racism.

      This year = food bank visit.

      Peak woke may have arrived already. And, I’m by no means implying that woke won’t continue to be a significant force going forward. It probably will. But, we need to celebrate the small victories. People don’t like it.

  2. Wokism is a political movement in the sense that its adherents have captured all the major institutions of society and are using their power to silence and punish the nonaligned and dissenters. It is pure power play politics and it is rational once one sheds the delusion that any democratic accountability left can be brought to bear against the more powerful forces of oppression.

    The US today somewhat resembles England just prior to the English Civil War. The bishops and prelates are suppressing the thousands of Puritan and other individualist nonconformist preachers, cutting off their ears, burning their tracts, and forcing them into exile. The difference is that the oppressed today have a thousand nonconformist preachers in the blogosphere but no Milton, Bunyan, Defoe or Cromwell.

    We live in an uninspired age of illiteracy, indifference and cowardice. In 5 years the US will be utterly indistinguishable from North Korea with famines and all.

    • re: “age of illiteracy”

      One can almost hear the sputtering: “But this is the age of data and analysis! We worship reason itself! How dare you impugn our great intellectual rigor!”

      Your little rant reminds me of Milton’s Seventh Academic Exercise:

      “But without Art the mind is fruitless, joyless, and altogether null and void.”

    • I feel that England just prior to the English Civil War is not a good analogy. For one thing, there is no obvious hierarchy / chain of command of progressive priesthood; it’s much more an entrepreneurial affair, as Handle noted in his old review of Stuntz’ book on criminal justice. Also, the Catholic/CoE priesthood prior to ECW was bent on imposing order (particularly suppressing dissenters’ theological and ecclesiastical entrepreneurship) and today’s progressives derive lots of energy from the destruction of any remains of order which would constrain their entrepreneurship. Accordingly, attackers of order like Defoe would be no use to today’s anti-progressive faction. The right cannot win by imitating the tactics of the left (what Patri Friedman dubbed folk activism). A much better and historically accurate analogy would be the Puritan New England theocracies themselves. They were having constant denominational squabbles, expulsions of dissenters, revivals etc.

  3. “The Woke would rather lose elections while retaining their power to intimidate than have it be the other way around.”

    I agree, but Democratic politicians really hate to lose elections. The party will turn against wokeness if it hurts them badly enough at the ballot box.

    • But, can they pivot at this point? Are there any moderate voices left that can carry the torch?

    • But in order to even have a shot, you have to win the primary election, and you can’t do that in most blue states while running against wokeness. Even in the general election, the loss of enthusiasm among ‘woke’ people may outweigh gains among moderates.

    • That seems like excessive optimism.

      Democrats went pull court press on woke last year and managed to win the Presidency, the House and the Senate. Each year, several million in the Boomer and Silent generations die, and are replaced by something like 5+ million Zoomer and naturalized citizens.

      The right has three serious problems:
      1) New Democratic voters continue to be imported at a rapid pace.
      2) Their children are being brainwashed by the educational system, the same education system that one is required to spend at least some time in to get a decent job.
      3) Many people fear for their livelihoods if they speak out against the woke agenda.

      Radical changes must happen, something like the following:

      On immigration:

      1. Immigration should be dramatically curtailed.
      2. Elimination of automatic birth right citizenship: should instead be based on having at least one American citizen as a biological parent.
      3. Stricter requirements for naturalization and a longer waiting period.

      On education:

      1. Public education funding must become vouchers, and those vouchers should be able to be directly monetized for two parent households who want to homeschool.
      2. It should be illegal to discriminate against job applicants on the basis of educational status. If certain skills are required, employers may test for those specific skills.
      3. Student loans and pell grants for higher education should be eliminated.

      On silencing dissenting voices:

      1. If we’re going to have Civil Rights, political opinions must become a protected class with the threat of millions of fines for people who are canceled over any political beliefs with the sole exception of calling for outright physical violence.
      2. Create a right to social media access, with again the sole exception to that access being calling for outright physical violence.

      These three things need to be front and center for the 2024 Republican platform.

  4. Somehow I don’t expect his argument to be very persuasive to the “ongoing holocaust” types. To paraphrase, “You are right on the moral and ideological merits – I am not criticizing that at all – but as a matter of pure political expediency and tactics, it’s unwise to engage in too much “epater les bourgeois” and aggravating the morally backward, wrong-thinking prole clients in our Vote Banks. So you guys should cool it and lie a little to the extent necessary to keep winning elections. Remember when Obama said he thought marriage was between one man and one woman, and everyone knew he was lying to fool the chumps in order win an election, and then, when it was cool later, he lied again about his position having ‘evolved’? Just do that. Patience! Discipline! Justice delayed is still justice! We’ll get our proles in line with the latest enlightenment soon enough; we always do.”

  6. I’m not sure if they’ve rationally reached this conclusion, but in the long run, ultra-progressives probably benefit from Trump’s political success. He simultaneously accomplishes less for the right than a normal Republican would, while alienating and energizing the left and even the middle far more than a normal Republican would. Compromise with the center-left today, and get 4 more years of Biden (and likely gridlock), which isn’t worth much to them anyway, or reject compromise, lose, get 4 years of Trump and gridlock, and by 2028, much the center-left will have become woke, and you won’t even need to compromise with them. Especially if you’re long-term oriented, the latter is more of a victory than the former.

    • Yes. The “horseshoe” theory. The extremists at each end are closer to each other than they are to the middle.

  7. Ezra Klein published this in the New York Times: “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.”

    And Thomas Edsall gave that quote a second run, again in the New York Times.

    So the memo has been given wide distribution. Matt Yglesias has reiterated the importance and the urgency of this directive, but it was all pretty clear already. If you want to protect the party you really don’t have any excuse for not knowing what your instructions are.

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