Marc Novicoff (intern for Matt Yglesias) writes,
Here at Slow Boring, we’ve written on defunding the police a couple times, and I don’t think it’s a good idea. But on top of that, I also don’t think it’s a progressive idea, and the fact that it became one and somehow can’t unbecome one points to the biggest problem in the progressive movement: its extremely recently enshrined, yet unshakeable orthodoxies.
. . .At many times, it feels like the point of the progressive movement in 2021 isn’t to gain power and then enact reforms to ameliorate suffering, but rather to impress each other by saying the most inoffensive words in the most inoffensive order and then if you predictably lose in a landslide, so what, because everybody who didn’t agree with you from the start is racist anyway.
Will anti-Woke progressives be effective? Or do they, like never-Trumpers, represent a small set of intellectuals with no real following?
Never Trumpers had a more difficult task, despite Trump’s narcissism, offensiveness, and many other bad attributes – there were policies that made sense. Granted, I would probably disagree with many progressive policies, but I don’t see any you could logically argue for, never mind making sense.
I see Tulsi Gabbard as a “canary” who answers this question. In the 2020 primary campaign she did moderately poorly, but it was noticeable that she disappeared from the debates not because the voters didn’t support her but because the Democratic party establishment blacklisted her. This suggests to me that they fear the kind of moderates she represents.
Tulsi generally polled at about 2% during the primaries, plus or minus 1%. Now it was a crowded field, but that’s still a pretty awful showing.
It’s a shame because she was unequivocally the best Democratic candidate. As I’m on the right, that sentiment is probably a good indication of why she didn’t see much support from Democrats.
–“Will anti-Woke progressives be effective? Or do they, like never-Trumpers, represent a small set of intellectuals with no real following?”–
I think implicitly aligning the Woke Left with Trumpism does dirt on Trumpism. QAnon is the right wing equivalent of Wokeness.
How many battalions do these anti-woke progressives command? More seriously, how many institutions do they command, and what kinds of resources do they have at their command in order to change people’s minds (bank accounts, social status, etc.)? Anti-woke Yglesias has a substack, and Klein, who simps for the woke, has a sinecure at the NYT. Who are the donors that are going to bankroll primary challenges to woke politicians that cost the Democrats seats and EC votes in purple areas? Where are the newly endowed chairs that ban woke academics? How many companies have teams or lawyers and HR managers working on minimizing the risks posed by workers being too woke? Where are the PR folks advising corporations against woke-washed branding? Follow the money; that’s what most people do anyway.
“Will anti-Woke progressives be effective?”
Short answer: no, not until woke becomes so unpopular that it is marginalized as a movement. Given the explicit support of woke from academia, the MSM, social media, government agencies and many S&P 500 companies, I’m betting that woke will remain bundled with progressive causes for the near/medium term.
I’m still surprised that our host declines to acknowledge *institutional power* as the primary difference between the progressive left and the centrist/right when it comes to the lopsided discussions of these issues in the town square. The only backstop is the electorate who is somehow able to see through all of the filters and marketing on behalf of woke.
It would have been interesting to see how the Never Trumpers would have gone if Trump had lost.
Biden was heavily disliked by many woke folk. It was Bernie or Warren. A woke mate of mine patiently explained how Biden would lose should he get the nomination. Even Harris wasn’t liked. She had been the prosecutor in California.
Biden has been surprising, but perhaps mostly fiscally. The surprise adoption of almost MMT is not great. But a large part of that seems to be because of the disarray of the Republicans due to the ‘stolen election’ business.
The real position of people inside the Whitehouse on woke would be interesting to hear. They might think they can diffuse the crazy like they did successfully with the Occupy movement.
The anti-woke left was the 1990s Democratic Party. How did we go from Bill to Hillary? They are literally married, but they couldn’t be more different.
My answer is that changing demographics and an additional generation of indoctrination was enough to make trading away the Scotts Irish worth it in the eyes of the left. They jumped the gun slightly in 2016 and started writing checks that only 2028 could cash without fail.
I’ve stated my own view that if my suburban moderate Dem area can oust the CRT scandal ridden school board I will belief there is a meaningful anti-woke left. If not, it doesn’t exist. I will let the empirical results decide.
The now ‘wokesters’ often either disliked or hated Hilary. Ironically Bernie, the old white man, was their candidate.
Remember how the Berners were claiming that the DNC stole the nomination from Sanders?
Hilary was only interested in identity politics for as much as using it to say criticism of her was sexism.
“…but rather to impress each other by saying the most inoffensive words in the most inoffensive order…”
Inoffensive? Really?
How can you label them with no real followers when CRT advocates can get schools, universities, Hollywood, and the news media to abide by their dictates? They can even get double standards applied when cancelling someone!
There is literally no movement in the US at the moment with comparable power and none that have succeeded as quickly as they did.
They’re like the Bolsheviks who were nothing in late 1916 and were running the country a year later after an anti-imperial revolution that they had no part in.
Well, two points.
1. Since there is no politburo, magisterium, national academy, or central committee to tell us what is and is not ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’, these labels both inspire some reflexive loyalty and are also always a little bit up for grabs. So people try to play the game where they appeal to that loyalty, and then try to nudge the semantic definition or understanding of what is or isn’t inside the label’s set, in order to nudge the loyalist adherents towards adopting new and different positions and policies.
Sometimes it’s because they disagree with the actual policies, but more often it’s based in pure electoral calculus and political expediency, because while one may agree with a proposal and the intent behind behind one, one is more pragmatic regarding the greater priority of holding on to power and occasionally having to let some issues slide if they will lose elections for your side. You can tell when the objections and criticisms are pretty clearly not very rigorous or heartfelt, and more in the tone of “I wish everyone would just grow up and be smart, and let this drop and shut up about it for the moment, until it’s safe to bring it up without risking elections.”
Yglesias does this all the time and it’s a rhetorical maneuver he’s honed to perfection over many years, and young padawan Novicoff deserved to get the intern gig because he’s picked up on it and deploys it well.
But, make no mistake, anti-policing attitudes – ranging from mild to extreme – have characterized leftist views *for generations now*. They are definitely progressive. There are few matters more regularly illustrate a consistent left-right split than crime and policing. All the people calling for reducing the funding pf police departments or abolishing them altogether were strong progressives, and almost all conservatives were strongly opposed.
2. If you are part of “X movement” that now has a clear problem of doing not-X things, which become unshakable orthodoxies, which are bad policies that are both harmful to the public, that don’t help those who are suffering, which don’t even have the saving grace of being useful for winning elections, and couldn’t be talked sense to by cooler, wiser heads, would pause a little to wonder what that means and whether that was a really a movement worth supporting. Or maybe, sensing some inherent danger in the situation, would start to question the wisdom of overcoming or circumventing all constitutional barriers on the path to a One Party State with plenary authority to do anything to anyone.
That is, from the outside view, it would seem that this kind of complaint would fill a reasonable complainer with terrifying alarm instead of a kind of grumbling acquiescence and hope for reform. “There is something about this movement which spins out of control doing bad stuff in a way we can’t correct. Uh oh. There might be some design flaw here, should we keep running this reactor anyway?”