Well, you see all the good in the world resides in them. So anything that undermines anything they believe in constitutes pure, concentrated evil. That’s you. PCE. My bill is in the mail.
As a Trump voter, I agree with this 100%. I loathe the entire political establishment, but didn’t want to throw away my vote via a 3rd party virtue signal.
Another codicil to the behavioral differences between liberals and conservatives is this: liberals will absolutely dissolve familial and friend relationships over political differences, while most conservatives will not. I suggest it is due to liberals believing conservatives are evil, while conservatives believe liberals are simply wrong. Take it for what you will.
I’d be a little more specific: liberals, at least in the last 10 years, have wed themselves to identity-related policies that they think are all “civil rights” issues, just by virtue of the identity angle. To liberals, being on the wrong side of a “civil rights” issue really does make you a bad person, unlike just being on the wrong side of a tax/spend issue. Of course, these are not, in any meaningful way, “civil rights” issues, but it doesn’t matter. They’ve constructed a paradigm in which they are brave knights and everyone else is an evil goblin.
It’s hilarious and more than a bit ironic when you write a piece about “liberals” using cancel culture to destroy other people, then turn around and lump all liberals together with this behavior. “Some liberals did something that I think is bad, therefore all liberals are bad.”
Yeah, you’re not the first to level this criticism. I guess I’ll have to reread the piece, because I didn’t really intend to frame things that way. My best defense is that I do think the left bears enormous responsibility for not having more tightly reined in wokery. So I’m content to have lumped them in with some of this. Not all of it though. I’ll be more careful in the future to draw these distinctions.
I’d probably frame it as the activist or Social Justice Warrior left. However, I say that but I know a lot of people who aren’t particularly activists who feel strongly that any Trump voter is an evil person, who probably is also a misogynist racist.
This unpersoning seems to be part of what you’re describing here.
I do remind them that we have to win some of these awful people to our side and thinking of them as awful isn’t a selling point.
Finally, the inconvenient fact that these misogynistic racists are also women and members of marginalized populations seems not to sway my fellow leftists opinions on them. I’m not sure it’s exactly what you’re talking about but I think there’s a plea not to dehumanize each other here.
That’s a weird (and kind of hilarious) phenomenon in its own right. In my experience, when social justicey libs encounter a member of a protected class who doesn’t believe the correct things, they just kind of short circuit. They both must attack and can’t attack at the same time so they freeze up. I’ve loved it every time I’ve seen it.
It's quite common for some liberals, especially older ones who still watch TV news, to be completely unaware of the hijinks of the online left and theuf cancellation campaigns. My parents for example think "it's just a tiny minority" because *they* don't know anyone like that personally. TV-viewing libs have no idea what problems motivate Trump voters so they'll default to bigotry as the explanation.
I voted against him. I can't say I really voted FOR the democrats, merely that I thought they were less dangerous. And nothing I have seen since has surprised me.
Evil? No. Sociopathic? Yes. But I would also suggest that despite all the bluster and vandalism, the fact that you don’t reject people based on politics (spurious notion) is either because you don’t take any of it seriously to begin with, or you keep them around for bullying and domination. Modern “conservatism” is the most nihilistic thing our politics has seen.
“recognize that maybe, a little bit, you’ve been kind of a shitty neighbor. That you’ve made yourself into the kind of person who others stop their conversations and cross the street when they see coming.”
That times a thousand. Really well said. Thanks for sharing this. We’d disagree tons on substance. But better to have it out civilly than have cancel culture counting coup.
Even people who are friends of mine, and with whom I basically agree on basically everything, I don’t feel comfortable talking to anymore, and mostly just make me groan when I see their posts.
What I’ve seen and it does gut me too, they only can talk with their own tribe so to speak. You can agree with them that Trump has many flaws. From mere irritation to hatred, it’s how he talks, frames up issues, people. He is a prick. But as you said, it’s tribal on our side of the ledger. ‘Ya but he’s ours…’
They can’t get by the personal to the policy issues. When you talk policies, issues, what hasn’t worked, what’s been disastrous, why this or that will work, may work, needs to be tried, it’s just a brick wall. Cuz it’s HIM. Frustrating as Hell. Again, thanks for your thoughts. I’ve sent it to folks I know.
I just had this discussion with a longtime lib that I know well. I don’t think I really believe Trump about this, but a Republican POTUS floating the idea of reducing the size of the US military by 50% - and from a guy with a track record of being willing to do things people think he can’t do - would’ve been a liberal pipe dream under W. But because it’s Trump, the only lens through which it can be evaluated is whatever lens makes Trump maximally evil. Is he serious? I doubt it. But like, let’s find out before just deciding!
Bingo. Thought exactly the same when Hegseth reportedly proposed 8% cut. Year to year. Requiring different puritans fundings. Who’da thunk that from any R. When every antiwar pink haired liberal would have shout from the rooftops for D mainline pols to say it. Funny times. Interesting as Hell too.
Hmmmm. Well, I don’t know. Are you crying? For all the damage, violence against federal and state and city law enforcement inflicted by Blue state governors and blue city mayors like Bass who deliberately refuse to enforce the law and allow a determined lot of criminals to impede, interfere with and commit violence against federal officials? and against public order. The rioting is large scale now. If you have half a brain, you see it. Coordinated violence and destruction against enforcement of federal immigration laws.
The democrats are going to be destroyed in the midterms. Your political side lost the election. And now you’re supporting the new confederate insurrectionists. Same as the old, 1860’s confederate insurrectionists. If you supports the rioting and violence in LA, I’m talking about you. Look in the mirror. Is that you? If you support that in any way, shape or form, that’s who/ what you are.
Absolutely excellent article. I committed to not voting for Trump after he dogged DeSantis and lied about his response to Covid during the primaries, but after seeing the abject deceit the legacy media put out about Biden's mental faculties, among many other things, I had to reconsider that commitment.
This article is so great because it perfectly encapsulates my frustrations with the left over the last however many years. I don't like the guy, but that isn't the scorecard I use to grade him. Can he do what is best for the country (or at least better than what is being pitched from the other side)? Can he address what I see as a strong appeal to authority and censorship that unfortunately many voters on the left appreciate? These are the considerations I felt the left never cared to understand and I so appreciate you hitting on that word "understand." "I don't understand why..." If you don't understand that's lazy at best. Understanding a different perspective and disagreeing is a beautiful thing. Being intellectually lazy and refusing to try to understand is unacceptable.
Glad you liked it! Democrats might have been able to overcome Trump, despite the utter loathing the electorate feels for them, if they’d just been willing to offer up something tangible. Could’ve been any liberal priority: tougher Wall Street reform, a renewed push for universal health care, massive infrastructure improvement, anything. Instead, they went with, “We’re joyful and also not Trump.” Wow, guys. Can’t believe that didn’t do the trick.
It was infuriating to see Kamala pitched as the “change” candidate (while she was in office, let’s just ignore that) and when she was asked what she would change she said “nothing.” Just crazy.
This is what happens when you snort too much of the diversity dust. How was she a “change” candidate? Um, duh! Just look at her! Totally different! The reasoning is exactly that shallow.
It all comes down to this: I'm libertarian, rather despite both major parties, but when it comes to the modern cancel-culture wokescold Democrats, well, my only message to them is this: "You have NOTHING that I want." Like, AT ALL. I cannot name a SINGLE policy position of the Democrat Party that I agree with. Their position is to abuse and extort me and then inflict upon me a culture and system that I despise.
I voted Gary Johnson in 2016, thinking there was not going to be any difference between Hillary Clinton and her buddy Donny and that it was all just play-acting to set up his pals, I voted for Orange Man twice thereafter. In 2020, it was because he was the only candidate running who condemned the riots and violence of that summer, and at least hint that the Covid mandates had reached the point of lunacy and weren't working, and a politician even implicitly admitting something isn't working and trying to change gears is INCREDIBLY F**KING RARE in politics.
But in 2024? After 4 years of a senile puppet, Democrats cast him aside to anoint (without any votes, O "Party of Democracy™") a literal communist and had 4 years of complete lunatics and weirdos running the show with an iron fist that would have made Stalin himself blush. How many times did the person handling nuclear policy have to steal luggage before finally being fired? How many Democrat-run states said the GOVERNMENT would get to decide if your child would be FORCIBLY STERILIZED and have their GENITALS MUTILATED? Who funded an illegal migrant invasion DIRECTLY subsidizing hotels with OUR TAX DOLLARS, while inflation raged at over 10% for two years, and then said there were plenty of jobs and GDP when the jobs were all crappy service sector jobs and the GDP growth was them hiring an ever-growing army of government goons? Not to mention the DEI mania which was a direct insult and threat to 30-45% of the country's employment prospects (depending on if you count "white Hispanics" or not), and it's not like we didn't notice when DEI hires sucked at their jobs. Oh, all that, and they wanted to censor any and all criticism of them, whether valid or not. Because to the arrogant left, no criticism of them could EVER be valid. Donald Trump may very well have the same maturity he had at age 8, as he implied when he said he hasn't changed since then. But, by comparison, from where I sit, the Democrats are tantrum-throwing 2 year olds who want their way on everything all the time and will raise hell and go nuts until mommy is worn down and caves in, then they'll do it all over again.
And most of those policies were INCREDIBLY UNPOPULAR. No transing kids or trans kids in sports, or the other DEI - Deport Every Illegal - poll well over 70%. The housing market is paralyzed, everyone feels like they're doing with less, and the Democrats deliver... insults and sneering derision on top of unpopular policies, embarrassing officials, and a slew of "SHUT UP AND OBEY, PEASANT" mandates.
Gosh, why would we EVER reject all that in favor of Orange Man? In 2020 it was more of a protest vote for me because the libertarians failed in their most BASIC principles -- rejecting the government Covid mandates as immoral and wrong -- and touted their anti-racism and open borders. As if that would solve anything at the time. Then in 2024 they nominated a gay left-wing Democrat who sort of likes guns but also managed to come off as a weenie about that, too.
Kamala literally said she could not think of anything she would do differently than Joe Biden, who often managed to poll worse than Donald. F**king. Trump. Meanwhile Trump said: deport the violent people who shouldn't be here, stop abusing kids with trans mania, and I'll cut you a tax break on your tips and your overtime pay. The "party of the working class" is so far up its own asshole that it seems hell-bent on repeatedly kicking them in the crotch and spitting on them while they're down right now.
All the "right" people hate Trump: the untrusted media, the far-left Democrats, the establishment Uniiparty RINOs who have sold out non-hard-left people for 100 years on damn near everything. And then the RINOs go and endorse Kamala when for the last 30 years they'd campaigned on opposing most of her policies, "fighting for you," well, they LITERALLY revealed themselves as sellouts. I don't think touting the terminally unpopular Dick Cheney as an endorsement was a good strategy for Harris. It was bizarre to me.
So, yes, it's the cancel culture but it's SO MUCH MORE than that.
To paraphrase from "The Order of the Stick" webcomic:
"[Donald Trump] is a horrible, loathsome, supremely selfish creature who behaves contemptibly, laughs at the pain of others, has no manners whatsoever, and whose mental acuity would be compared unfavorably to that of a [broken coffee] table.
And yet I find I still prefer him to you."
When Democrats understand that, maybe they can course-correct. But they're so tied to their activist base of lunatics, I'm not sure that's possible.
I was thinking about it in almost these exact terms the other day. I’ve been a Democrat my whole adult life, and I have no idea right now - NONE - why the Democrats think I should vote for them. I genuinely have no idea what they are offering, what they intend to do with my support, or what they think I’d want to buy from their store. Good. They’re not Trump. You know who else is not Trump? My five-year old. Not voting for him for president either.
Your five year old might well be able to outperform the debacle that was the Biden regime. :P
I don't know what any party is offering any of us, really. The Democrats are beyond deranged, 80% of the supposed "Republicans" are probably just right-leaning Democrats who want in on the gift, the libertarians think that Democrat Lite is a strategy, and then you have the assorted communist parties who think the Soviet Union and Mao did things right or the assorted religious fundamentalist right wing parties. They had some movement for a centrist party but abandoned it because the right thinks (rightly so, in my opinion) "centrist" means "left winger the media lies about, so it could only ever pull votes from the left. So we ended up with a 90s Democrat.
I think Clinton bungled things for his party with Elian Gonzalez, actually. Everyone was very angry about the SWAT team pointing guns at a 5 year old in a closet. But the Democrats apparently took the lesson that "Wow, I guess people feel super awesome about lots of immigration!" rather than "People don't want us to send an innocent child back to a Communist hellhole at gunpoint." Hence how they try to frame everything as "asylum" when most of the illegals currently here are clearly NOT asylum cases.
Kudos to you for at least making a choice in 2016, Steve. I voted for neither presidential candidate for the worst reason, pure laziness. I despised Hillary (still do), and I failed to inquire as to who Trump was or what he stood for. I'm now a supporter of his, though not a registered Republican.
Trump had used that mocking gesture against other people besides the disabled journalist. So it wasn’t about mocking the disabled. Yes it was crude, so what? Was LBJ crude? Was Clinton a choirboy?
When his supporters saw a video of these other episodes they realized a dishonest narrative was being created. Other dishonest narratives followed such as the “very fine people on both sides” hoax.
So to the extent Trump is rough around the edges, what do you expect from a builder from Queens? Supporters tuned out all the manufactured outrage as garbage. They focused on his priorities and his results he achieved despite enormous pushback. The salesman boasting and hype they didn’t count as lies. The insults they often saw as deserved. They felt the bullies of the world needed someone who could punch back.
He is our Ethan Edwards. We need him right now. When his work is done he can retreat to his well earned retirement.
Libs have a really self-destructive tendency to get stuck on style. “He’s so offensive, I can’t even.” There might be an extent to which it’s helpful to call out offensive behavior, but it has limits. Libs have long since trespassed them, to a brain-breaking extent.
Thanks Diana! I don't know who Ethan Edwards is, but we do need Trump right now. And I think you understand the essential issue better than DD does.
I'm not interested in any more of what David has to say for the same reason I stopped listening to Rush Limbaugh after only a couple of years: he mocked Janet Reno for being ugly.
And although I still pay attention to Jordan Peterson, I was deeply disappointed when he mocked the SI swimsuit model for being overweight, as if she didn't have feelings or didn't have a father of her own who loved her.
I seek voices of people who are kinder and better than me. David's vicious swipes at Trump remind me of all my adult family members, and I don't listen to them, either.
Thank you! Ethan Edward is the John Wayne character in The Searchers. The moral of the movie is we need uncivilized men sometimes to protect civilization, but paradoxically they have a hard time being accepted because they are uncivilized.
Trump of course is civilized but he is arguably a strongman. Who better to deal with the worlds bullies right now and our other difficult problems, but still his methods worry some people and many will never accept him despite his successes.
Diana, I realized that I'd seen this movie long ago, and that it portrays the fascinating fact that children abducted by Native American tribes often resisted rescue and even fought to return.
The principle was that there's a powerful attraction to tribal culture versus "civilization."
Jordan Peterson often comments on the paradox of warriors who are unable to integrate back into society. It’s a stretch to apply that to Trump, but elites are sheltered from and unfamiliar with the rough and tumble world of a builder from Queens so in a sense that is kind of the same dynamic. Even though he went to Wharton and grew up with wealth it is clear Trump is more at ease with ordinary people than with the Davos crowd.
He doesn’t make them feel judged, whether meeting them in person or on TV. Democrats fully oriented themselves around the politics of judgement, so it shouldn’t really be confusing that someone was able to capitalize on that by just not doing it.
And Trump seems to have genuine affection for people in general, and I think that's his superpower. Whether he's teasing Schumer at the Al Smith dinner or mixing with employees at a McDonald's, he always seems comfortable.
I have always thought Trump was an asshole I voted libertarian in 2016 but I felt like I had no choice but to vote for him this time. Even before the election my observation was that left leaning people were full of vitriol and hate with little regard for actual issues and that was a major factor in my decision. I found that I could not have a rational discussion with a liberal without being attacked. It is frightening to me. How can you ever make progress with a screaming manic? Good article I hope you can help build some consensus with this observation but I am not holding my breath.
I’m really not either. It’s such a weird feeling to have been a liberal my whole adult life, and realize (without my politics having changed at all) that I find liberals mostly insufferable now and would rather hang out with conservatives who don’t make me watch what I say.
When Justine Bateman talked about walking on eggshells for the past 4 years it was like feeling the country exhale. It’s too bad that reaching across the aisle and trying to understand each other isn’t the current goal of most people. I hope people read this and think about how destroying people isn’t the awesome strategy they thought it was.
You made some excellent points about why people love Trump, but it sounds like you really, really hate liberals—pretty much all of us.
“Wokeness” is very much what you said—it’s the shaming aspect of identity politics. And nobody got shamed more than regular liberals like me—shamed and unfriended by scolding justice warriors to my left. (I didn’t lose a job, I’ll give you that.)
I could’ve said “fuck that” and supported Trump, but I had more integrity than that. (And so should’ve conservatives, supporting ordinary, better Republicans.)
Look at the ordinary liberals who leave comments after any NYTimes piece—by far, most of us do not like the very online phenomenon of cancel culture. It had us all crouching defensively for a few years. Maybe Trump even helped end it.
But you know what? I still love liberals. We are good people. Most of us never supported canceling people, and even those who did were most guilty of youthful excess and getting caught up in online mobs. You are wrong about us. And yes, you do think we are awful. Pretty much all of us. Even liberals who got caught up in CC can grow out of it, and I know some who have.
And while CC did help to birth Trump, that does not mean conservatives bear no responsibility for supporting a fascist. They had plenty of other, ordinary Republican options.
I’m really sick and tired of liberals telling other liberals what horrible people we liberals are, and how we gave conservatives no choice but to end democracy. See, conservatives have no will of their own. Everything they do is a mechanical reaction to what liberals do, making liberals responsible for all conservative action. I read that kind of thing constantly.
So…I think you’re right about how “woke culture” angered conservatives (and liberals too), but wrong to lump so many great people I know into this scolding group who are the “real architects” of whatever Trump wreaks.
I actually agree with this, and I think my having projected a distaste for all liberals (which is not how I feel) is mostly just a consequence of how often I write about the topic, and how annoying it becomes to use the words “woke” or “cancel culture” over and over and over again. Sometimes, I have to change up the vocab in ways that make it sounds like I’m pissed at more people than I am. I do think liberals deserve some shots for having tolerated “woke” for as long as I did, but my anger at the left is very compartmentalized. I’m angry at wokes for one thing, the establishment for another, and sometimes, I’m even angry at above-the-fray meta-critics like myself.
That we “tolerated woke,” is a reasonable complaint. Too often I kept my head down and didn’t speak up against shaming those who didn’t pass purity tests. Too often I didn’t voice my own more moderate view, for fear I’d lose friends, or standing among my liberal friends. (I’m talking about online spaces.)
Actually, though, there were a couple of times I did this: When Steve Woodford was publicly slammed as transphobic merely for conducting research and concluding that for SOME women’s sports, there might be grounds for limiting competition only to cisgender women, I left a message in a Facebook thread saying I don’t think Woodford is transphobic and that he was being unfairly shamed. The result? A friend I really liked and respected told me that I myself was “a transphobe” and he canceled me from his life “unless I apologize to trans people.” I didn’t even take a position on the trans-in-sports issue! I merely said Steve Woodford wasn’t a transphobe. I’ve never spoken to that friend since, and I’m still sad about it.
In another case, I VERY mildly argued in a thread—this would’ve been around 2015—that I didn’t think shame was a very winning strategy and I thought the left was embracing it too much. Other (younger) liberals in the thread argued that shame was quite useful and necessary. But that was one debate, and mostly I just kept defensive crouch during peak woke.
I also admit to staying quiet for fear of losing some black friends whom I really treasure, and who I believe would not have been very welcoming of a white voice giving even a mildly dissenting voice on racial issues. I did the woke thing—I just listened. And I think that was the right call. I don’t need to take a stand in every last space. My “dissent” would have been very minor anyway—but might have been grounds for a painful shaming.
Part of what kept me from pushing back harder is that much of the substantive content Wokeness is, in my opinion, either correct or at least a worthwhile idea in the public debate, and it’s only the shaming aspect of woke online culture that I really dislike. I think it’s GOOD to be awake—“woke” to systemic racism, which I do think exists. White privilege (remember that term?) exists, although I always preferred the term black disprivilege, which conveys that the problem isn’t that whites have it too good, but that blacks should have the same “privileges,” like being treated with professionslism by cops. I thought it was GOOD for men to be recruited to make spaces safer for women from catcalling and other rapey behaviors. I think it’s GOOD for film producers to try to cast more people of color in leading roles, to cast disabled actors, trans actors to play trans characters, etc.—although I think that too went too far, because it’s not WRONG to cast, say, a straight actor to play a gay character. It is ACTING after all. Even the ridiculed concept of safe spaces seemed reasonable to me—some people’s ability to learn is hampered if they feel sense of triggered anxiety all the time.
My point is that much of wokeness felt like real progress that came from a good place, so many of us were hesitant to side against it, even if we felt its shaming and canceling behavior was nasty.
I was right there with you on all of this. I stayed mum to avoid angering people, I didn’t speak up for people I knew needed relief from the mob. A lot of my writing is effectively penance for that now.
Your thoughts on white privilege vs black disprivilege echo almost exactly my thoughts. I’m on my phone so can’t figure out how to link, but if you slog through my archives, you might like a piece I did called ‘The Unfortunate Privilege Detour.’ Talked about precisely this rhetorical error.
4. Identity politics has mostly been repudiated by all Americans, left and right. I am pretty much the only person left saying, “wait a minute, identity politics is not inherently illegitimate.” To the extent that identity politics equals shaming and canceling, yeah, that’s bad. And to the extent that it pits groups against each other in zero-sum contests for political goodies, it’s bad. But in its most basic form, it’s not crazy to say that, for example, since governmental and cultural institutions for decades (I mean centuries) SINGLED OUT BLACK PEOPLE for maltreatment, based on their actual Blackness, leaving Black Americans with, on average, a fraction of the per capita wealth, lower income, worse schools, more stressful neighborhoods, it is now legitimate for Black Americans (and their allies) to petition their government for relief AS BLACK PEOPLE. The anti-identity politics position holds that, even though Black people were singled out and held down, in order to petition for relief, they must now petition for relief in an entirely race-blind way, never asking for relief that’s as targeted at Black people as the discrimination had for decades (centuries) been. The idea of a “black community” that has been uniquely harmed, even though many whites also have difficult lives, is concomitantly discredited. However, many Black people DO experience being a Black American as a unique experience, and don’t feel they share the same constellation of challenges as other whites who struggle. So, while it might be good politics to lift up Black Americans by including White Americans in the deal, I don’t think it’s inherently wrong for Black Americans to ask for race-conscious policy—that is, to practice DREADED IDENTITY POLITICS. Same goes for women and any other social group that has endured discrimination AS A SOCIAL GROUP. I think it’s dangerous and unnecessary to pretend this social-group-based discrimination did not occur. And I find it distasteful (and curiously convenient for white men) that it’s now deemed unseemly and illegitimate for these systematically held-back groups to ask for restorative policy that’s similarly targeted. However, I recognize that, politically, we probably need to lift up white heterosexual cisgender men along with everyone else. So I guess I’m on board with mostly jettisoning identity politics, but I decline to angrily shame its practitioners as having done an inherently bad thing.
5. Finally, I’m suspicious that advocating group-conscious policy is a major political problem anyway, because that would mean that, suddenly and for the first time in history, Americans have begun voting on the basis of policy positions. American voters are just not that ideological or sophisticated. There’s plenty of research on this which I won’t go over here. Democrats’ problem is that they are unwilling to state their values and stand on those values with strength. Politicians are absolutely addicted to the belief that voters care about policy positions, and cannot get themselves to believe it ain’t so. (Bernie and AOC are willing to do this, but we need more Democratic leaders who do.)
THIS phenomenon is probably some shellshock from cancel culture. Democrats are afraid of being crucified with ideological purity tests from the left, or excoriation from angry blue-collar-types on the center and right, and have become even more mealy-mouthed and poll-tested than they were before—and it’s always been a problem on the left.
An example. During the presidential campaign, Kamala Harris was dogged incessantly by a position she had taken years earlier, in favor of government-paid gender reassignment surgery for prisoners. This is a policy position that’s unpopular, and yet she was on record supporting it. She ducked it for weeks, and when finally asked on a national interview about it, she said, “I think that’s an issue that’s remote for most Americans.” All of this was easily seen as evasive. She subscribed to the theory that “we shouldn’t be talking about the issues where our opponents are strong,” and she tried not to talk about it. Of course, that made it ALL people wanted to talk about.
The worst thing is that her evasiveness communicated WEAKNESS, and that’s fatal to a politician. It’s better for a politician to be strong, but have an honest disagreement with a voter, than to be weak in the process of kinda, sorta, maybe agreeing with the voter.
A politician that understood this, would have answered the question this way: “Yes, I was for that, because we are a civilized country, and civilized countries provide health care for prisoners. Doctors have determined that gender-reassignment is part of the services we call healthcare. I understand why people might not agree with me on this issue, but it’s clear for me.” People who disagreed would have maintained their respect for Kamala Harris. And that’s the way Democrats need to comport themselves in the age of Trump. Be authentic and courageous. State your values and your reasons, strongly and succinctly. And that includes being willing to stand up for what was, and is, good about Wokeness, while admitting the Woke movement had excess, which thankfully is mostly behind us.
1. Every large political and cultural movement will have excess, and wokeness did, in its cancel-culture aspect. I acknowledge that some people lost jobs who should not have lost jobs. Sometimes this was because they publicly took a position that was considered toxic in online culture. In one case I was told about (and I’m sure there were more), a man was fired when a woman accused him of sexual harassment, and “believe women” was the ascendent idea. It turned out he was innocent, but that was proven too late, and his career was ruined permanently. In several high-profile cases, conservative speakers were disinvited from speaking at college campuses, contributing to an impoverishment of the swirl of on-campus ideas and debate. Indeed, I have heard from professor friends that in the years after I left academia (I was a political scientist whose academic career stalled, and I became a composer instead—how typical, I know) the atmosphere became hostile on college campuses for the free exchange of ideas, and the idea environment was impoverished. This was an unequivocally bad development.
2. The moral thrust of wokeness is arguably good. It’s about reducing harm, defending the oppressed, about recognizing previously hidden pathways of oppression and becoming “woke” to their existence so that they can be uprooted. This is not a bad thing to do, nor are these pathways of oppression figments of liberals’, or, say, women’s or black people’s, imaginations. Police really are, on average, more brutal to black people. People of color really do more jail time for the same crimes. People of color really do have less opportunity—and the DEI programs that are now universally defunct have NOT entirely undone that. Women’s voices really are tuned out in spaces where men dominate, and it really does feel more unsafe to be a woman moving about in public—and not because of the woman’s overactive, “hysterical” imagination. Wokeness was about saying, “these things are real, and we are making our culture aware of them, and enlisting people in the project of shining a light on them so that our culture can do better.” That’s good. The problem is that online shaming and career-ruining became the weapon of choice sometimes, and that was worse than unproductive—it probably backfired, although I’m not willing to say that it’s the only reason we’ve (hopefully temporarily) lost our democracy. Where I want to make a stand, however, is that given that the moral thrust of wokeness is, in my opinion, largely good, it’s dangerous to conclude that “wokeness went too far, and gave us Trump…therefore we must now try to get back in the good graces of Americans by saying that everything liberals did since 2016 was wholly wrong, that the oppression we named was never real, that diversity was never a worthy goal, that sexual harassment and even rape is only in women’s minds, that trans people should realize they’re freaks and go away, that racial bias in policing was made up by blacks who are actually guilty of oppressing WHITES with such lies, etc. And I am catching a pretty big whiff of that kind of liberal self-blaming in the air.
Rather, much of wokeness represented real progress, and real people will be harmed by the blowback we’re now witnessing. Liberals should be willing to stand firm on the good aspects of wokeness, while agreeing that canceling and shaming people was counterproductive.
3. The blame for woke excess is typically laid at the feet of “the Democrats.” But “wokeness” was mostly an organic, largely online or campus-driven, cultural phenomenon, not a program imposed by Democratic leaders. And any organic cultural movement will always have some excess. Ordinary liberals are not responsible for, and could never have prevented, more radical leftists from doing or saying unsavory things in service of liberal ideas. I’m sure one can find instances of Democratic leaders using the “language of wokeness,” but it’s just erroneous to say that Democratic Party politicians were vocal, or in the lead, in support of canceling people’s careers, shaming white people, etc. I’ve heard Kamala Harris accused of “running a woke campaign,” but that’s an accusation leveled by people who paid no attention to the campaign itself, and just figured she must have done and said whatever Fox News accused her of. In fact, Kamala Harris ran away from wokeness, and I think this hurt her, for reasons I’ll discuss below: the tl;dr is that people care more about strength in politicians than specific issue positions, and Kamala’s obvious poll driven run away from “woke” positions she’d taken in the past looked weak. When liberals complain about woke excess, they list the real things that went wrong: professors losing livelihoods; online mobs trashing someone’s reputation; colleges making professors sign offensive DEI statements and endure ridiculous DEI training; campuses disinviting controversial conservative speakers under pressure from left-wing students. These were bad things, even though none of them came from Hillary, or Kamala, or Obama, or Nancy, or any Democratic Party-aligned institution. But when CONSERVATIVES complain about wokeness, I don’t even hear about these particular instances of excess. Rather, I hear about how “all the kids are trans now” or “Disney made Ariel black, and mermaids aren’t black” and “all Hollywood movies are woke,” and “Liberals are elitist assholes who think conservatives are all racists.” These are CULTURAL complaints, not policy complaints about “woke” governmental action. (When conservatives complain about governmental action, it’s usually alleged Covid-relevant tyranny, another history that’s been re-written, another case where SOME Covid-preventive misjudgment has been reworked into a narrative of anti-liberty totalitarianism that just didn’t happen.) These are the complaints of people who feel culturally disoriented and disrespected, and want to make America something “again,” to go back to a time when they felt more at home. Things are changing quickly, and its in the nature of conservatives to dislike that change. They’re upset. And that’s understandable. But it’s not something liberals “did to them.”
And anyway, “liberals” mostly means people like me. New York Times readers who hold liberal values but also have some conservative friends. People who sympathized with women who dislike catcalling, but who never wanted anybody to lose a livelihood because they didn’t walk on eggshells online. We were victims of scolding shame culture too, and while we could have pushed back harder than we did, I clearly remember thinking it wasn’t going to be productive to do so IN THOSE SPACES, and I might have been exactly right about that. In more moderate liberal spaces, where MOST liberals hung out—that is, not Twitter but the New York Times, say, or in real-life face-to-face meetings—there WAS pushback against cancel culture, and almost nobody liked it. I remember searching through comment sections of NYT op-eds and finding NOT ONE SINGLE DEFENSE of extremely woke, identitiy-politics-driven, let alone cancel-culture-affirming, progresivism. In those threads, a scolding, shaming far-leftist would have been shouted down. So…I’m just not sure “liberals” did some awful thing to good, salt-of-the-earth “conservatives” that warrants punishment in the form of turning the advanced world into Syria.
So…my modest defense of “woke” or, more accurately, liberals who incorporated some wokeness into their world of ideas. Sorry for the length. If nobody reads it, fine--I got my thinking out of my head and onto the page, so it was worth it.
*Acknowledgement of the excesses that occurred as part of peak wokeness.
*Its content, if not its practice, comes from a good place, really the heart of liberalism.
*It was always far, far more a cultural phenomenon than a governmental imposition, and the parts of it that angered people and pushed them to Trump are not the parts of it that were really “wrong”: people losing careers, say, or campus speech being limited by mobs.
*Identity politics is not obviously wrongheaded in its content, and in fact anti-identity politics might be. Politically, identity politics MIGHT be a loser, but even that is not clear, because…
*Issue positions mostly don’t matter. Rather, in politics, personality traits are king, and values matter way more than issues, and issue positions are only useful insofar as they communicate traits and values. Thus, identity politics positions only hurt politically because they communicate the wrong traits and values, and those positions can be held in ways that communicate the RIGHT traits and values. Democratic politicians have not recognized this, though, and possibly cannot.
OK, so I have kinda sorta organized my thoughts. I'm enjoying this.
Here I mount a modest defense of either wokeness, or more accurately of liberals who incorporated some wokeness into their world of ideas, and I'd argue there's no obligation to jettison it all now as some kind of penance for forcing people to love fascism.
BTW, I will use the terms wokeness, identity politics, and cancel or call-out culture to refer to various facets of the same phenomenon.
I have 5 points to make, and I'll try not to take too much time: (1) I acknowledge there were excesses, and bad things that happened, as part of wokeness; (2) the values-based foundation of wokeness is largely benevolent and pro-human, even if in practice it was sometimes malign; (3) it was an uncontrolled cultural phenomenon far more than a top-down imposed program for which some governing group ("the Democrats," say) should pay a penalty, and its that uncontrollable cultural aspect that generated most of the resentment, and anyway most liberals didn’t actively participate in it, and even were victim of it themselves; (4) beyond values, even in specific policy content, identity politics is not obviously wrongheaded; (5) identity politics MIGHT be a political loser, but this conclusion tends to be overdrawn and based on an erroneous and difficult-to-extinguish belief that issue and policy positions matter in electoral politics WAY more than they actually do.
I too am on my phone, and when I get a chance to sit down at a computer I want to try to organize my thoughts on why, despite agreeing with you on so many points, I feel driven to mount a defense of Wokeness more than a castigation. Maybe it’s because castigation is all I now see—and a willingness to throw every idea in Wokeness out, including good ones. I think every movement will always have some excess in it, and I now think the entire left is paying an outsized price for the excess of perhaps the most unrestrained 5% of us, amplified by social media, a phenomenon perfectly built to amplify harmful excess. But I’ll organize my thoughts better later.
Meanwhile your thoughtful interactions definitely merit a subscription.
Ok, I'm a liberal. I have a daughter that is a trans woman. I have never engaged in Twitter at all. Not one post. Not one sea lion or pile on to what someone says somewhere on the internet. And yet we see people trying to make it illegal to "cross-dress" which would mean that they can arrest trans people who are just walking down the street.
The stuff you describe did happen. AND, it wasn't me or my daughter that did it. There are a bunch of self-righteous busybodies who insist that they know everything about me and my daughter and that we are evil. They don't know shit.
You know, over the last four years, I tried very hard to stay positive, and not pile on anyone. I just ignored my unhappiness with Rowling and spent a lot of time trying to convince Kevin Drum (may he rest in peace). And yet, here they are trying to ruin the lives of millions of Americans to satisfy some crazy moral urge.
I think you are right in explaining the motivations of some Trump voters, just as you have described the behavior of some (not even a majority) liberals on social media.
But there's more going on here. A lot more.
This shit is real to us. Very real. One trans woman I know got so scared she just moved to England. Not everyone can do that.
So, am I an example of that evil liberal? I'm pretty fucking angry, after all. But it's personal, right? It's a threat to me and mine. Wouldn't you be angry?
I would be. I’ve been getting a lot of pushback like this. I’m taking it on and trying to use it to revise my thinking. But as worrying as I find Trump, I still don’t think the left will be ready to take him on until they can grapple with what Trump is a reaction to. I get that a lot of liberals didn’t like woke. But they were the only ones who could have really stopped it and they (we) failed to. I’m a big believer that we all own the excesses of our groups. Woke is on us, even if we weren’t its real supporters. So for now, and from me, the whole left stays on blast. I hope your kid is okay.
I like this reponse. I want to be someone who tries to invite people to hang with me and try out living the way I live. I want to be part of a group that invites people to hang with me and try out living the way we live.
Shaming does not accomplish this. It pushes people away. it is often done by people on the thesis that they are pure. However, I'm clear that nobody is pure.
And one type of exercise I have observed is a rather appropriative pattern. The shaming is executed by people who don't have any skin in the game. A white girl is shamed for being racist by other white girls. This is a phenomenon that is tightly associated with social media, where people attempt to gain status in the form of likes and clicks by ferreting out "bad" behavior and shaming it.
I mean, if someone is demeaning black people, find the black people who are complaining about it and amplify them, and what they say. Point to them and say, 'me too'. By the way, what is your opinion of #metoo?
Oooooo…BIG question. On #metoo, the very short answer is that I was initially supportive, later skeptical, and now think it has been a force for mostly good even if it was imperfect. I think it should have happened sooner, and that my younger self definitely engaged in some douchey behavior that I could have ceased if there’d been a social movement to point out to me how douchey it was. I do think there have been some excesses, and it took on a worryingly take-no-prisons approach to the accused (you will never convince me that Al Franken or Garrison Keillor did anything wrong). I think the standards for male behavior are probably set in a better place now, though I worry it weaponized the concept of safety in ways that could have some unfortunate and unintended side effects. What’s your take? Do you think it’s helped?
A great piece of work that makes clear to me something that I've felt in an defined manner for a long time. Thank you for the effort you put into the wonderful prose.
One point about the difficulty of engaging with leftists is that so many of those people don't just believe things, they *are* their beliefs...ie their sociopolitical beliefs define their essential humanity. This means that when you disagree with them, it's not seen as a difference of opinion, it becomes an attack on their identity as a human being, and people don't respond well to that.
I have acquaintances in various groups I belong to who are of this nature, and I know that if I were to contradict their readily expressed views I would soon be cancelled and ejected from the group.
I’m hardly the first to this party, but the best framework I’ve found for understanding woke is the religious one. Once you understand it as a religious movement, the pieces - really without exception - fall into place. And the church of woke takes its communion on social media, so when you try to point out, online, that a woke person is wrong about something, what you’re effectively doing is standing next to the altar on Sunday morning explaining to penitents that “actually, God isn’t real.” Just a doomed strategy.
Faulting the woke culture for the disregard of moral conviction in choosing a leader is worth considering but also worth considering is a perspective from someone who doesn’t have a bottomless piggy bank of white male privilege.
I did enjoy your word storm despite likely possibly being on your naughty list. I invite you to read a different angle of this from a minority who has patiently (mostly) endured discrimination from these people my whole life. But first, I think it’s important to acknowledge the clear separation of MAGA and the other people who voted for Trump. I’ll make a sweeping generalization on the later and simply consider it a complete lapse in judgment for the confusion a master of lies and manipulation can create and the power of the manipulation of religion and money. MAGA seems to know the depth of his putridness and want that. Somehow they’ve missed that he is indiscriminately putrid and they will sink along with the rest in either the literal sense and/or further moral depravity of continued support of worsening cruel actions and policies. Look at the comments here. Hurting people “is glorious.”
Asserting that being woke is responsible for the “fed up response” of hiring of a felonrapist, profoundly immoral man but I assert that it’s really that we fought back. Woke is clawing or paving the way up a couple rungs of that elusive ladder to equal ground and that progress was resented for taking absolute power and privilege and sharing it. They chose a felonrapist because we lamented that white guys start on the 50 yard line of a 100 yard dash and we stopped accepting it as our cross to bear. They chose a felonrapist because we refused to continue to quietly endure the centuries long torture of intimidation and self supposed supremacy over women, gays, minorities etc. They chose a repulsive reprehensible individual in response to being called out for being douchey as if it canceling people who cancel people is the oppressed people’s moral failure. We gave back a little taste of their own medicine that’s been liberally dished out for ages and that was just a step too far. The the ruin of an equal opportunity nation by a ruthless sick authority figure falling squarely on the shoulders of the uppity for their intolerance of intolerance is deeply telling.
I personally don’t know the way out of this mess other than motivating the 1/3 who did nothing this last election. The ones who are full on maga cult like following trump are fed up with what the woke fed up have felt for centuries and they have the champion of all champions of obsolete fragile white males empowering them.
If you’ve never been the target of a jealous white man in the business world you can never fully appreciate the depth of rot being a woman who performs better than that man can reveal.
"We gave back a little taste of their own medicine that’s been liberally dished out for ages." This, I think, explains the problem. The medicine wasn't given back to the folks who'd initially dished it out, it was given to their grandkids and great grandkids. If I hit you, and you hit me back, we're square. If you hit me because someone else hit you...all I know is that you hit me.
You’re describing woke as a vehicle for social advancement for the historically marginalized (if I’m understanding you correctly) and I guess I just don’t see that value being realized. I regard it as a top-down enforcement tool for a narrow set of illiberal beliefs about identity. On its best day, it was never going to liberate anyone. And most of the people who used it to seize power were in the managerial class, which is to say, they had it already.
Well, I certainly didn’t feel the value myself, but of course I didn’t. The movement was quite expressly not for people like me. How did the steps taken move you forward though? What did they earn you?
Every step forward changed my life significantly. Some of which can only be described as energy. I could feel energy shifts going from one friendly state to another not so friendly state-people are quite easy to read when you constantly have to assess the threat level in every encounter. We finally didn’t have to hide our relationship with every new situation until the threat was assessed. It took many years but that was a remarkable shift. Not being acutely aware of body language, tone, energy frees you from the burden of that distraction, fear and focus-imagine working and knowing someone there is out to cause you harm-that effects more than just your performance. Huge changes from being granted marriage rights and protections, financial protections, anti discrimination employment protections-I was targeted in jobs-my boss was told I couldn’t work with the girls because she suspected I was gay and that automatically made me a sexual threat, adoption and fostering became an option-we fostered teens, exposure and representation which helps remove soften the stigmas etc. There’s so many just for being gay without going into all the other marginalized groups. My first professional job my boss sat me down and said you have three things going against you every time you walk into a patient room. You’re short, you’re young, you’re a woman. You have to first figure out how to overcome those before you can start helping the person with why they’re here to see you.
Love this mild pushback. I mean, a look at the comments here will reveal there is no shortage of liberals who largely agree with the author. “Liberals” did not all conspire to create cancel culture, and most of us feared it. People lost their jobs because corporations were afraid of woke mobs then, just as they are afraid of Trump now. Today, youthful online mobs don’t have that kind of power. Peak wokeness was several years ago.
This author is right about a lot, but I’m tired of blaming liberals for what conservatives support and do. They chose Trump. They see him ripping up democracy, and love it. That’s somehow on us? We don’t have that kind of power, Mr. Scott.
I hear that, but I'm unlikely to let up on liberals for a good while. Conservative politics are still very much in blacklash mode, which means that understanding the recent behavior of the left is vital to understanding the motivations of the right. This will shift eventually, and yelling at woke people will become less useful, but I don't think we're there yet.
Geez, can we move on? Really, how many more times are we going to read about why people who like Trump like Trump? The house is on fire and we’re arguing about who started it?
Yes. And we’re going to keep arguing about it until we correctly identify who started it, because who started it is a pretty damn important consideration. Only two groups are capable of stopping Trump: anti-Trump Republicans (of whom there are approximately two) and Democrats. Democrats are useless right now, and will continue to be, so long as they remain confused about why everyone hates them. I get that you don’t like this part, but it’s necessary if we’re ever going to have a functional, left-leaning party again.
Very insightful article. What worries me most is that every one is focused on their side winning and not on the compromises necessary for the country to succeed. Yes I’m one of those damn moderates!
I remember a friend of mine posting something like “how can you hear trump say these racist things and still vote for him? You must be a racist.” I remember thinking, this person has no racist family members or acquaintances. Which, you know, good for them. But in many places you will absolutely be exposed to those people over and over, and at some point you have to accept that you can’t keep telling your coworkers and uncles and husbands-of-friends that they are racists. I mean, maybe you should, but you’d never be doing anything else. So you learn to interact with them over other things, and mostly you get along. And then when trump says these things, it’s not that it’s ok, it’s just not that jarring, and you don’t necessarily assume that disqualifies everything he says.
Is this nice or right? Maybe not. But that is the reality that some people live with, and I feel like that is hard for many liberals to understand
By the way, didn’t vote for trump, not an American. Just a horrified spectator :-)
Yeah, I’m in the same boat. And I think this is right on. Not everyone is in an ecosystem where challenging every problematic utterance is the done thing. In Trump’s first term, the biggest complaints about him were functionally about style: he’s rude, he’s vulgar, he’s racist. I think his critics didn’t fully grasp how many could ignore that so long as he wasn’t breaking things (which he very much is now).
The paradox through is that the Full MAGA Jacket crowd then delights in their own hypocritical version of anti-virtue signaling and intolerance of dissent from inside the house. 🫤
My own theory of Trump's popularity has long been: "He is the biggest middle finger voters could extend to the political establishment."
I think it dovetails well with this.
lol I probably could’ve saved myself the time and just written that
Well, you see all the good in the world resides in them. So anything that undermines anything they believe in constitutes pure, concentrated evil. That’s you. PCE. My bill is in the mail.
As a Trump voter, I agree with this 100%. I loathe the entire political establishment, but didn’t want to throw away my vote via a 3rd party virtue signal.
Another codicil to the behavioral differences between liberals and conservatives is this: liberals will absolutely dissolve familial and friend relationships over political differences, while most conservatives will not. I suggest it is due to liberals believing conservatives are evil, while conservatives believe liberals are simply wrong. Take it for what you will.
I’d be a little more specific: liberals, at least in the last 10 years, have wed themselves to identity-related policies that they think are all “civil rights” issues, just by virtue of the identity angle. To liberals, being on the wrong side of a “civil rights” issue really does make you a bad person, unlike just being on the wrong side of a tax/spend issue. Of course, these are not, in any meaningful way, “civil rights” issues, but it doesn’t matter. They’ve constructed a paradigm in which they are brave knights and everyone else is an evil goblin.
Seuss said it best with the "Star-bellied Sneeches"
It’s hilarious and more than a bit ironic when you write a piece about “liberals” using cancel culture to destroy other people, then turn around and lump all liberals together with this behavior. “Some liberals did something that I think is bad, therefore all liberals are bad.”
Yeah, you’re not the first to level this criticism. I guess I’ll have to reread the piece, because I didn’t really intend to frame things that way. My best defense is that I do think the left bears enormous responsibility for not having more tightly reined in wokery. So I’m content to have lumped them in with some of this. Not all of it though. I’ll be more careful in the future to draw these distinctions.
I’d probably frame it as the activist or Social Justice Warrior left. However, I say that but I know a lot of people who aren’t particularly activists who feel strongly that any Trump voter is an evil person, who probably is also a misogynist racist.
This unpersoning seems to be part of what you’re describing here.
I do remind them that we have to win some of these awful people to our side and thinking of them as awful isn’t a selling point.
Finally, the inconvenient fact that these misogynistic racists are also women and members of marginalized populations seems not to sway my fellow leftists opinions on them. I’m not sure it’s exactly what you’re talking about but I think there’s a plea not to dehumanize each other here.
Thanks for this essay!
That’s a weird (and kind of hilarious) phenomenon in its own right. In my experience, when social justicey libs encounter a member of a protected class who doesn’t believe the correct things, they just kind of short circuit. They both must attack and can’t attack at the same time so they freeze up. I’ve loved it every time I’ve seen it.
It's quite common for some liberals, especially older ones who still watch TV news, to be completely unaware of the hijinks of the online left and theuf cancellation campaigns. My parents for example think "it's just a tiny minority" because *they* don't know anyone like that personally. TV-viewing libs have no idea what problems motivate Trump voters so they'll default to bigotry as the explanation.
My descriptor was "gob of spit".
I voted against him. I can't say I really voted FOR the democrats, merely that I thought they were less dangerous. And nothing I have seen since has surprised me.
Evil? No. Sociopathic? Yes. But I would also suggest that despite all the bluster and vandalism, the fact that you don’t reject people based on politics (spurious notion) is either because you don’t take any of it seriously to begin with, or you keep them around for bullying and domination. Modern “conservatism” is the most nihilistic thing our politics has seen.
Uh oh, Armchair Freud has diagnosed me.
Why do you think they think you’re evil?
“recognize that maybe, a little bit, you’ve been kind of a shitty neighbor. That you’ve made yourself into the kind of person who others stop their conversations and cross the street when they see coming.”
That times a thousand. Really well said. Thanks for sharing this. We’d disagree tons on substance. But better to have it out civilly than have cancel culture counting coup.
Even people who are friends of mine, and with whom I basically agree on basically everything, I don’t feel comfortable talking to anymore, and mostly just make me groan when I see their posts.
What I’ve seen and it does gut me too, they only can talk with their own tribe so to speak. You can agree with them that Trump has many flaws. From mere irritation to hatred, it’s how he talks, frames up issues, people. He is a prick. But as you said, it’s tribal on our side of the ledger. ‘Ya but he’s ours…’
They can’t get by the personal to the policy issues. When you talk policies, issues, what hasn’t worked, what’s been disastrous, why this or that will work, may work, needs to be tried, it’s just a brick wall. Cuz it’s HIM. Frustrating as Hell. Again, thanks for your thoughts. I’ve sent it to folks I know.
I just had this discussion with a longtime lib that I know well. I don’t think I really believe Trump about this, but a Republican POTUS floating the idea of reducing the size of the US military by 50% - and from a guy with a track record of being willing to do things people think he can’t do - would’ve been a liberal pipe dream under W. But because it’s Trump, the only lens through which it can be evaluated is whatever lens makes Trump maximally evil. Is he serious? I doubt it. But like, let’s find out before just deciding!
Bingo. Thought exactly the same when Hegseth reportedly proposed 8% cut. Year to year. Requiring different puritans fundings. Who’da thunk that from any R. When every antiwar pink haired liberal would have shout from the rooftops for D mainline pols to say it. Funny times. Interesting as Hell too.
This is a brilliant piece. Thank you.
Glad you liked it! Thanks for reading!
“…people wanted Donald Trump to be the president just so they could watch you cry.” Ya. And trust me it’s glorious.
Nice piece BTW.
It’s glorious, huh? But do you really like what they’re doing?
Hmmmm. Well, I don’t know. Are you crying? For all the damage, violence against federal and state and city law enforcement inflicted by Blue state governors and blue city mayors like Bass who deliberately refuse to enforce the law and allow a determined lot of criminals to impede, interfere with and commit violence against federal officials? and against public order. The rioting is large scale now. If you have half a brain, you see it. Coordinated violence and destruction against enforcement of federal immigration laws.
The democrats are going to be destroyed in the midterms. Your political side lost the election. And now you’re supporting the new confederate insurrectionists. Same as the old, 1860’s confederate insurrectionists. If you supports the rioting and violence in LA, I’m talking about you. Look in the mirror. Is that you? If you support that in any way, shape or form, that’s who/ what you are.
Look in the mirror.
The left’s meme game is so, so weak.
Absolutely excellent article. I committed to not voting for Trump after he dogged DeSantis and lied about his response to Covid during the primaries, but after seeing the abject deceit the legacy media put out about Biden's mental faculties, among many other things, I had to reconsider that commitment.
This article is so great because it perfectly encapsulates my frustrations with the left over the last however many years. I don't like the guy, but that isn't the scorecard I use to grade him. Can he do what is best for the country (or at least better than what is being pitched from the other side)? Can he address what I see as a strong appeal to authority and censorship that unfortunately many voters on the left appreciate? These are the considerations I felt the left never cared to understand and I so appreciate you hitting on that word "understand." "I don't understand why..." If you don't understand that's lazy at best. Understanding a different perspective and disagreeing is a beautiful thing. Being intellectually lazy and refusing to try to understand is unacceptable.
Thank you for writing this.
Glad you liked it! Democrats might have been able to overcome Trump, despite the utter loathing the electorate feels for them, if they’d just been willing to offer up something tangible. Could’ve been any liberal priority: tougher Wall Street reform, a renewed push for universal health care, massive infrastructure improvement, anything. Instead, they went with, “We’re joyful and also not Trump.” Wow, guys. Can’t believe that didn’t do the trick.
It was infuriating to see Kamala pitched as the “change” candidate (while she was in office, let’s just ignore that) and when she was asked what she would change she said “nothing.” Just crazy.
This is what happens when you snort too much of the diversity dust. How was she a “change” candidate? Um, duh! Just look at her! Totally different! The reasoning is exactly that shallow.
It all comes down to this: I'm libertarian, rather despite both major parties, but when it comes to the modern cancel-culture wokescold Democrats, well, my only message to them is this: "You have NOTHING that I want." Like, AT ALL. I cannot name a SINGLE policy position of the Democrat Party that I agree with. Their position is to abuse and extort me and then inflict upon me a culture and system that I despise.
I voted Gary Johnson in 2016, thinking there was not going to be any difference between Hillary Clinton and her buddy Donny and that it was all just play-acting to set up his pals, I voted for Orange Man twice thereafter. In 2020, it was because he was the only candidate running who condemned the riots and violence of that summer, and at least hint that the Covid mandates had reached the point of lunacy and weren't working, and a politician even implicitly admitting something isn't working and trying to change gears is INCREDIBLY F**KING RARE in politics.
But in 2024? After 4 years of a senile puppet, Democrats cast him aside to anoint (without any votes, O "Party of Democracy™") a literal communist and had 4 years of complete lunatics and weirdos running the show with an iron fist that would have made Stalin himself blush. How many times did the person handling nuclear policy have to steal luggage before finally being fired? How many Democrat-run states said the GOVERNMENT would get to decide if your child would be FORCIBLY STERILIZED and have their GENITALS MUTILATED? Who funded an illegal migrant invasion DIRECTLY subsidizing hotels with OUR TAX DOLLARS, while inflation raged at over 10% for two years, and then said there were plenty of jobs and GDP when the jobs were all crappy service sector jobs and the GDP growth was them hiring an ever-growing army of government goons? Not to mention the DEI mania which was a direct insult and threat to 30-45% of the country's employment prospects (depending on if you count "white Hispanics" or not), and it's not like we didn't notice when DEI hires sucked at their jobs. Oh, all that, and they wanted to censor any and all criticism of them, whether valid or not. Because to the arrogant left, no criticism of them could EVER be valid. Donald Trump may very well have the same maturity he had at age 8, as he implied when he said he hasn't changed since then. But, by comparison, from where I sit, the Democrats are tantrum-throwing 2 year olds who want their way on everything all the time and will raise hell and go nuts until mommy is worn down and caves in, then they'll do it all over again.
And most of those policies were INCREDIBLY UNPOPULAR. No transing kids or trans kids in sports, or the other DEI - Deport Every Illegal - poll well over 70%. The housing market is paralyzed, everyone feels like they're doing with less, and the Democrats deliver... insults and sneering derision on top of unpopular policies, embarrassing officials, and a slew of "SHUT UP AND OBEY, PEASANT" mandates.
Gosh, why would we EVER reject all that in favor of Orange Man? In 2020 it was more of a protest vote for me because the libertarians failed in their most BASIC principles -- rejecting the government Covid mandates as immoral and wrong -- and touted their anti-racism and open borders. As if that would solve anything at the time. Then in 2024 they nominated a gay left-wing Democrat who sort of likes guns but also managed to come off as a weenie about that, too.
Kamala literally said she could not think of anything she would do differently than Joe Biden, who often managed to poll worse than Donald. F**king. Trump. Meanwhile Trump said: deport the violent people who shouldn't be here, stop abusing kids with trans mania, and I'll cut you a tax break on your tips and your overtime pay. The "party of the working class" is so far up its own asshole that it seems hell-bent on repeatedly kicking them in the crotch and spitting on them while they're down right now.
All the "right" people hate Trump: the untrusted media, the far-left Democrats, the establishment Uniiparty RINOs who have sold out non-hard-left people for 100 years on damn near everything. And then the RINOs go and endorse Kamala when for the last 30 years they'd campaigned on opposing most of her policies, "fighting for you," well, they LITERALLY revealed themselves as sellouts. I don't think touting the terminally unpopular Dick Cheney as an endorsement was a good strategy for Harris. It was bizarre to me.
So, yes, it's the cancel culture but it's SO MUCH MORE than that.
To paraphrase from "The Order of the Stick" webcomic:
"[Donald Trump] is a horrible, loathsome, supremely selfish creature who behaves contemptibly, laughs at the pain of others, has no manners whatsoever, and whose mental acuity would be compared unfavorably to that of a [broken coffee] table.
And yet I find I still prefer him to you."
When Democrats understand that, maybe they can course-correct. But they're so tied to their activist base of lunatics, I'm not sure that's possible.
I was thinking about it in almost these exact terms the other day. I’ve been a Democrat my whole adult life, and I have no idea right now - NONE - why the Democrats think I should vote for them. I genuinely have no idea what they are offering, what they intend to do with my support, or what they think I’d want to buy from their store. Good. They’re not Trump. You know who else is not Trump? My five-year old. Not voting for him for president either.
Your five year old might well be able to outperform the debacle that was the Biden regime. :P
I don't know what any party is offering any of us, really. The Democrats are beyond deranged, 80% of the supposed "Republicans" are probably just right-leaning Democrats who want in on the gift, the libertarians think that Democrat Lite is a strategy, and then you have the assorted communist parties who think the Soviet Union and Mao did things right or the assorted religious fundamentalist right wing parties. They had some movement for a centrist party but abandoned it because the right thinks (rightly so, in my opinion) "centrist" means "left winger the media lies about, so it could only ever pull votes from the left. So we ended up with a 90s Democrat.
I think Clinton bungled things for his party with Elian Gonzalez, actually. Everyone was very angry about the SWAT team pointing guns at a 5 year old in a closet. But the Democrats apparently took the lesson that "Wow, I guess people feel super awesome about lots of immigration!" rather than "People don't want us to send an innocent child back to a Communist hellhole at gunpoint." Hence how they try to frame everything as "asylum" when most of the illegals currently here are clearly NOT asylum cases.
Kudos to you for at least making a choice in 2016, Steve. I voted for neither presidential candidate for the worst reason, pure laziness. I despised Hillary (still do), and I failed to inquire as to who Trump was or what he stood for. I'm now a supporter of his, though not a registered Republican.
Trump had used that mocking gesture against other people besides the disabled journalist. So it wasn’t about mocking the disabled. Yes it was crude, so what? Was LBJ crude? Was Clinton a choirboy?
When his supporters saw a video of these other episodes they realized a dishonest narrative was being created. Other dishonest narratives followed such as the “very fine people on both sides” hoax.
So to the extent Trump is rough around the edges, what do you expect from a builder from Queens? Supporters tuned out all the manufactured outrage as garbage. They focused on his priorities and his results he achieved despite enormous pushback. The salesman boasting and hype they didn’t count as lies. The insults they often saw as deserved. They felt the bullies of the world needed someone who could punch back.
He is our Ethan Edwards. We need him right now. When his work is done he can retreat to his well earned retirement.
That is why, if you really want to know.
Libs have a really self-destructive tendency to get stuck on style. “He’s so offensive, I can’t even.” There might be an extent to which it’s helpful to call out offensive behavior, but it has limits. Libs have long since trespassed them, to a brain-breaking extent.
You nailed it lady!
Thanks Diana! I don't know who Ethan Edwards is, but we do need Trump right now. And I think you understand the essential issue better than DD does.
I'm not interested in any more of what David has to say for the same reason I stopped listening to Rush Limbaugh after only a couple of years: he mocked Janet Reno for being ugly.
And although I still pay attention to Jordan Peterson, I was deeply disappointed when he mocked the SI swimsuit model for being overweight, as if she didn't have feelings or didn't have a father of her own who loved her.
I seek voices of people who are kinder and better than me. David's vicious swipes at Trump remind me of all my adult family members, and I don't listen to them, either.
Thank you! Ethan Edward is the John Wayne character in The Searchers. The moral of the movie is we need uncivilized men sometimes to protect civilization, but paradoxically they have a hard time being accepted because they are uncivilized.
Trump of course is civilized but he is arguably a strongman. Who better to deal with the worlds bullies right now and our other difficult problems, but still his methods worry some people and many will never accept him despite his successes.
Diana, I realized that I'd seen this movie long ago, and that it portrays the fascinating fact that children abducted by Native American tribes often resisted rescue and even fought to return.
The principle was that there's a powerful attraction to tribal culture versus "civilization."
I'm watching it now! Thanks again.
Jordan Peterson often comments on the paradox of warriors who are unable to integrate back into society. It’s a stretch to apply that to Trump, but elites are sheltered from and unfamiliar with the rough and tumble world of a builder from Queens so in a sense that is kind of the same dynamic. Even though he went to Wharton and grew up with wealth it is clear Trump is more at ease with ordinary people than with the Davos crowd.
He doesn’t make them feel judged, whether meeting them in person or on TV. Democrats fully oriented themselves around the politics of judgement, so it shouldn’t really be confusing that someone was able to capitalize on that by just not doing it.
And Trump seems to have genuine affection for people in general, and I think that's his superpower. Whether he's teasing Schumer at the Al Smith dinner or mixing with employees at a McDonald's, he always seems comfortable.
I don't know why I've not heard of that movie. It's even directed by John Ford for goodness sake! Thanks, Diana 😊
I have always thought Trump was an asshole I voted libertarian in 2016 but I felt like I had no choice but to vote for him this time. Even before the election my observation was that left leaning people were full of vitriol and hate with little regard for actual issues and that was a major factor in my decision. I found that I could not have a rational discussion with a liberal without being attacked. It is frightening to me. How can you ever make progress with a screaming manic? Good article I hope you can help build some consensus with this observation but I am not holding my breath.
I’m really not either. It’s such a weird feeling to have been a liberal my whole adult life, and realize (without my politics having changed at all) that I find liberals mostly insufferable now and would rather hang out with conservatives who don’t make me watch what I say.
When Justine Bateman talked about walking on eggshells for the past 4 years it was like feeling the country exhale. It’s too bad that reaching across the aisle and trying to understand each other isn’t the current goal of most people. I hope people read this and think about how destroying people isn’t the awesome strategy they thought it was.
You made some excellent points about why people love Trump, but it sounds like you really, really hate liberals—pretty much all of us.
“Wokeness” is very much what you said—it’s the shaming aspect of identity politics. And nobody got shamed more than regular liberals like me—shamed and unfriended by scolding justice warriors to my left. (I didn’t lose a job, I’ll give you that.)
I could’ve said “fuck that” and supported Trump, but I had more integrity than that. (And so should’ve conservatives, supporting ordinary, better Republicans.)
Look at the ordinary liberals who leave comments after any NYTimes piece—by far, most of us do not like the very online phenomenon of cancel culture. It had us all crouching defensively for a few years. Maybe Trump even helped end it.
But you know what? I still love liberals. We are good people. Most of us never supported canceling people, and even those who did were most guilty of youthful excess and getting caught up in online mobs. You are wrong about us. And yes, you do think we are awful. Pretty much all of us. Even liberals who got caught up in CC can grow out of it, and I know some who have.
And while CC did help to birth Trump, that does not mean conservatives bear no responsibility for supporting a fascist. They had plenty of other, ordinary Republican options.
I’m really sick and tired of liberals telling other liberals what horrible people we liberals are, and how we gave conservatives no choice but to end democracy. See, conservatives have no will of their own. Everything they do is a mechanical reaction to what liberals do, making liberals responsible for all conservative action. I read that kind of thing constantly.
So…I think you’re right about how “woke culture” angered conservatives (and liberals too), but wrong to lump so many great people I know into this scolding group who are the “real architects” of whatever Trump wreaks.
I actually agree with this, and I think my having projected a distaste for all liberals (which is not how I feel) is mostly just a consequence of how often I write about the topic, and how annoying it becomes to use the words “woke” or “cancel culture” over and over and over again. Sometimes, I have to change up the vocab in ways that make it sounds like I’m pissed at more people than I am. I do think liberals deserve some shots for having tolerated “woke” for as long as I did, but my anger at the left is very compartmentalized. I’m angry at wokes for one thing, the establishment for another, and sometimes, I’m even angry at above-the-fray meta-critics like myself.
That we “tolerated woke,” is a reasonable complaint. Too often I kept my head down and didn’t speak up against shaming those who didn’t pass purity tests. Too often I didn’t voice my own more moderate view, for fear I’d lose friends, or standing among my liberal friends. (I’m talking about online spaces.)
Actually, though, there were a couple of times I did this: When Steve Woodford was publicly slammed as transphobic merely for conducting research and concluding that for SOME women’s sports, there might be grounds for limiting competition only to cisgender women, I left a message in a Facebook thread saying I don’t think Woodford is transphobic and that he was being unfairly shamed. The result? A friend I really liked and respected told me that I myself was “a transphobe” and he canceled me from his life “unless I apologize to trans people.” I didn’t even take a position on the trans-in-sports issue! I merely said Steve Woodford wasn’t a transphobe. I’ve never spoken to that friend since, and I’m still sad about it.
In another case, I VERY mildly argued in a thread—this would’ve been around 2015—that I didn’t think shame was a very winning strategy and I thought the left was embracing it too much. Other (younger) liberals in the thread argued that shame was quite useful and necessary. But that was one debate, and mostly I just kept defensive crouch during peak woke.
I also admit to staying quiet for fear of losing some black friends whom I really treasure, and who I believe would not have been very welcoming of a white voice giving even a mildly dissenting voice on racial issues. I did the woke thing—I just listened. And I think that was the right call. I don’t need to take a stand in every last space. My “dissent” would have been very minor anyway—but might have been grounds for a painful shaming.
Part of what kept me from pushing back harder is that much of the substantive content Wokeness is, in my opinion, either correct or at least a worthwhile idea in the public debate, and it’s only the shaming aspect of woke online culture that I really dislike. I think it’s GOOD to be awake—“woke” to systemic racism, which I do think exists. White privilege (remember that term?) exists, although I always preferred the term black disprivilege, which conveys that the problem isn’t that whites have it too good, but that blacks should have the same “privileges,” like being treated with professionslism by cops. I thought it was GOOD for men to be recruited to make spaces safer for women from catcalling and other rapey behaviors. I think it’s GOOD for film producers to try to cast more people of color in leading roles, to cast disabled actors, trans actors to play trans characters, etc.—although I think that too went too far, because it’s not WRONG to cast, say, a straight actor to play a gay character. It is ACTING after all. Even the ridiculed concept of safe spaces seemed reasonable to me—some people’s ability to learn is hampered if they feel sense of triggered anxiety all the time.
My point is that much of wokeness felt like real progress that came from a good place, so many of us were hesitant to side against it, even if we felt its shaming and canceling behavior was nasty.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply!
I was right there with you on all of this. I stayed mum to avoid angering people, I didn’t speak up for people I knew needed relief from the mob. A lot of my writing is effectively penance for that now.
Your thoughts on white privilege vs black disprivilege echo almost exactly my thoughts. I’m on my phone so can’t figure out how to link, but if you slog through my archives, you might like a piece I did called ‘The Unfortunate Privilege Detour.’ Talked about precisely this rhetorical error.
(3/3)
4. Identity politics has mostly been repudiated by all Americans, left and right. I am pretty much the only person left saying, “wait a minute, identity politics is not inherently illegitimate.” To the extent that identity politics equals shaming and canceling, yeah, that’s bad. And to the extent that it pits groups against each other in zero-sum contests for political goodies, it’s bad. But in its most basic form, it’s not crazy to say that, for example, since governmental and cultural institutions for decades (I mean centuries) SINGLED OUT BLACK PEOPLE for maltreatment, based on their actual Blackness, leaving Black Americans with, on average, a fraction of the per capita wealth, lower income, worse schools, more stressful neighborhoods, it is now legitimate for Black Americans (and their allies) to petition their government for relief AS BLACK PEOPLE. The anti-identity politics position holds that, even though Black people were singled out and held down, in order to petition for relief, they must now petition for relief in an entirely race-blind way, never asking for relief that’s as targeted at Black people as the discrimination had for decades (centuries) been. The idea of a “black community” that has been uniquely harmed, even though many whites also have difficult lives, is concomitantly discredited. However, many Black people DO experience being a Black American as a unique experience, and don’t feel they share the same constellation of challenges as other whites who struggle. So, while it might be good politics to lift up Black Americans by including White Americans in the deal, I don’t think it’s inherently wrong for Black Americans to ask for race-conscious policy—that is, to practice DREADED IDENTITY POLITICS. Same goes for women and any other social group that has endured discrimination AS A SOCIAL GROUP. I think it’s dangerous and unnecessary to pretend this social-group-based discrimination did not occur. And I find it distasteful (and curiously convenient for white men) that it’s now deemed unseemly and illegitimate for these systematically held-back groups to ask for restorative policy that’s similarly targeted. However, I recognize that, politically, we probably need to lift up white heterosexual cisgender men along with everyone else. So I guess I’m on board with mostly jettisoning identity politics, but I decline to angrily shame its practitioners as having done an inherently bad thing.
5. Finally, I’m suspicious that advocating group-conscious policy is a major political problem anyway, because that would mean that, suddenly and for the first time in history, Americans have begun voting on the basis of policy positions. American voters are just not that ideological or sophisticated. There’s plenty of research on this which I won’t go over here. Democrats’ problem is that they are unwilling to state their values and stand on those values with strength. Politicians are absolutely addicted to the belief that voters care about policy positions, and cannot get themselves to believe it ain’t so. (Bernie and AOC are willing to do this, but we need more Democratic leaders who do.)
THIS phenomenon is probably some shellshock from cancel culture. Democrats are afraid of being crucified with ideological purity tests from the left, or excoriation from angry blue-collar-types on the center and right, and have become even more mealy-mouthed and poll-tested than they were before—and it’s always been a problem on the left.
An example. During the presidential campaign, Kamala Harris was dogged incessantly by a position she had taken years earlier, in favor of government-paid gender reassignment surgery for prisoners. This is a policy position that’s unpopular, and yet she was on record supporting it. She ducked it for weeks, and when finally asked on a national interview about it, she said, “I think that’s an issue that’s remote for most Americans.” All of this was easily seen as evasive. She subscribed to the theory that “we shouldn’t be talking about the issues where our opponents are strong,” and she tried not to talk about it. Of course, that made it ALL people wanted to talk about.
The worst thing is that her evasiveness communicated WEAKNESS, and that’s fatal to a politician. It’s better for a politician to be strong, but have an honest disagreement with a voter, than to be weak in the process of kinda, sorta, maybe agreeing with the voter.
A politician that understood this, would have answered the question this way: “Yes, I was for that, because we are a civilized country, and civilized countries provide health care for prisoners. Doctors have determined that gender-reassignment is part of the services we call healthcare. I understand why people might not agree with me on this issue, but it’s clear for me.” People who disagreed would have maintained their respect for Kamala Harris. And that’s the way Democrats need to comport themselves in the age of Trump. Be authentic and courageous. State your values and your reasons, strongly and succinctly. And that includes being willing to stand up for what was, and is, good about Wokeness, while admitting the Woke movement had excess, which thankfully is mostly behind us.
(2/3)
1. Every large political and cultural movement will have excess, and wokeness did, in its cancel-culture aspect. I acknowledge that some people lost jobs who should not have lost jobs. Sometimes this was because they publicly took a position that was considered toxic in online culture. In one case I was told about (and I’m sure there were more), a man was fired when a woman accused him of sexual harassment, and “believe women” was the ascendent idea. It turned out he was innocent, but that was proven too late, and his career was ruined permanently. In several high-profile cases, conservative speakers were disinvited from speaking at college campuses, contributing to an impoverishment of the swirl of on-campus ideas and debate. Indeed, I have heard from professor friends that in the years after I left academia (I was a political scientist whose academic career stalled, and I became a composer instead—how typical, I know) the atmosphere became hostile on college campuses for the free exchange of ideas, and the idea environment was impoverished. This was an unequivocally bad development.
2. The moral thrust of wokeness is arguably good. It’s about reducing harm, defending the oppressed, about recognizing previously hidden pathways of oppression and becoming “woke” to their existence so that they can be uprooted. This is not a bad thing to do, nor are these pathways of oppression figments of liberals’, or, say, women’s or black people’s, imaginations. Police really are, on average, more brutal to black people. People of color really do more jail time for the same crimes. People of color really do have less opportunity—and the DEI programs that are now universally defunct have NOT entirely undone that. Women’s voices really are tuned out in spaces where men dominate, and it really does feel more unsafe to be a woman moving about in public—and not because of the woman’s overactive, “hysterical” imagination. Wokeness was about saying, “these things are real, and we are making our culture aware of them, and enlisting people in the project of shining a light on them so that our culture can do better.” That’s good. The problem is that online shaming and career-ruining became the weapon of choice sometimes, and that was worse than unproductive—it probably backfired, although I’m not willing to say that it’s the only reason we’ve (hopefully temporarily) lost our democracy. Where I want to make a stand, however, is that given that the moral thrust of wokeness is, in my opinion, largely good, it’s dangerous to conclude that “wokeness went too far, and gave us Trump…therefore we must now try to get back in the good graces of Americans by saying that everything liberals did since 2016 was wholly wrong, that the oppression we named was never real, that diversity was never a worthy goal, that sexual harassment and even rape is only in women’s minds, that trans people should realize they’re freaks and go away, that racial bias in policing was made up by blacks who are actually guilty of oppressing WHITES with such lies, etc. And I am catching a pretty big whiff of that kind of liberal self-blaming in the air.
Rather, much of wokeness represented real progress, and real people will be harmed by the blowback we’re now witnessing. Liberals should be willing to stand firm on the good aspects of wokeness, while agreeing that canceling and shaming people was counterproductive.
3. The blame for woke excess is typically laid at the feet of “the Democrats.” But “wokeness” was mostly an organic, largely online or campus-driven, cultural phenomenon, not a program imposed by Democratic leaders. And any organic cultural movement will always have some excess. Ordinary liberals are not responsible for, and could never have prevented, more radical leftists from doing or saying unsavory things in service of liberal ideas. I’m sure one can find instances of Democratic leaders using the “language of wokeness,” but it’s just erroneous to say that Democratic Party politicians were vocal, or in the lead, in support of canceling people’s careers, shaming white people, etc. I’ve heard Kamala Harris accused of “running a woke campaign,” but that’s an accusation leveled by people who paid no attention to the campaign itself, and just figured she must have done and said whatever Fox News accused her of. In fact, Kamala Harris ran away from wokeness, and I think this hurt her, for reasons I’ll discuss below: the tl;dr is that people care more about strength in politicians than specific issue positions, and Kamala’s obvious poll driven run away from “woke” positions she’d taken in the past looked weak. When liberals complain about woke excess, they list the real things that went wrong: professors losing livelihoods; online mobs trashing someone’s reputation; colleges making professors sign offensive DEI statements and endure ridiculous DEI training; campuses disinviting controversial conservative speakers under pressure from left-wing students. These were bad things, even though none of them came from Hillary, or Kamala, or Obama, or Nancy, or any Democratic Party-aligned institution. But when CONSERVATIVES complain about wokeness, I don’t even hear about these particular instances of excess. Rather, I hear about how “all the kids are trans now” or “Disney made Ariel black, and mermaids aren’t black” and “all Hollywood movies are woke,” and “Liberals are elitist assholes who think conservatives are all racists.” These are CULTURAL complaints, not policy complaints about “woke” governmental action. (When conservatives complain about governmental action, it’s usually alleged Covid-relevant tyranny, another history that’s been re-written, another case where SOME Covid-preventive misjudgment has been reworked into a narrative of anti-liberty totalitarianism that just didn’t happen.) These are the complaints of people who feel culturally disoriented and disrespected, and want to make America something “again,” to go back to a time when they felt more at home. Things are changing quickly, and its in the nature of conservatives to dislike that change. They’re upset. And that’s understandable. But it’s not something liberals “did to them.”
And anyway, “liberals” mostly means people like me. New York Times readers who hold liberal values but also have some conservative friends. People who sympathized with women who dislike catcalling, but who never wanted anybody to lose a livelihood because they didn’t walk on eggshells online. We were victims of scolding shame culture too, and while we could have pushed back harder than we did, I clearly remember thinking it wasn’t going to be productive to do so IN THOSE SPACES, and I might have been exactly right about that. In more moderate liberal spaces, where MOST liberals hung out—that is, not Twitter but the New York Times, say, or in real-life face-to-face meetings—there WAS pushback against cancel culture, and almost nobody liked it. I remember searching through comment sections of NYT op-eds and finding NOT ONE SINGLE DEFENSE of extremely woke, identitiy-politics-driven, let alone cancel-culture-affirming, progresivism. In those threads, a scolding, shaming far-leftist would have been shouted down. So…I’m just not sure “liberals” did some awful thing to good, salt-of-the-earth “conservatives” that warrants punishment in the form of turning the advanced world into Syria.
(1/3)
So…my modest defense of “woke” or, more accurately, liberals who incorporated some wokeness into their world of ideas. Sorry for the length. If nobody reads it, fine--I got my thinking out of my head and onto the page, so it was worth it.
*Acknowledgement of the excesses that occurred as part of peak wokeness.
*Its content, if not its practice, comes from a good place, really the heart of liberalism.
*It was always far, far more a cultural phenomenon than a governmental imposition, and the parts of it that angered people and pushed them to Trump are not the parts of it that were really “wrong”: people losing careers, say, or campus speech being limited by mobs.
*Identity politics is not obviously wrongheaded in its content, and in fact anti-identity politics might be. Politically, identity politics MIGHT be a loser, but even that is not clear, because…
*Issue positions mostly don’t matter. Rather, in politics, personality traits are king, and values matter way more than issues, and issue positions are only useful insofar as they communicate traits and values. Thus, identity politics positions only hurt politically because they communicate the wrong traits and values, and those positions can be held in ways that communicate the RIGHT traits and values. Democratic politicians have not recognized this, though, and possibly cannot.
OK, so I have kinda sorta organized my thoughts. I'm enjoying this.
Here I mount a modest defense of either wokeness, or more accurately of liberals who incorporated some wokeness into their world of ideas, and I'd argue there's no obligation to jettison it all now as some kind of penance for forcing people to love fascism.
BTW, I will use the terms wokeness, identity politics, and cancel or call-out culture to refer to various facets of the same phenomenon.
I have 5 points to make, and I'll try not to take too much time: (1) I acknowledge there were excesses, and bad things that happened, as part of wokeness; (2) the values-based foundation of wokeness is largely benevolent and pro-human, even if in practice it was sometimes malign; (3) it was an uncontrolled cultural phenomenon far more than a top-down imposed program for which some governing group ("the Democrats," say) should pay a penalty, and its that uncontrollable cultural aspect that generated most of the resentment, and anyway most liberals didn’t actively participate in it, and even were victim of it themselves; (4) beyond values, even in specific policy content, identity politics is not obviously wrongheaded; (5) identity politics MIGHT be a political loser, but this conclusion tends to be overdrawn and based on an erroneous and difficult-to-extinguish belief that issue and policy positions matter in electoral politics WAY more than they actually do.
I too am on my phone, and when I get a chance to sit down at a computer I want to try to organize my thoughts on why, despite agreeing with you on so many points, I feel driven to mount a defense of Wokeness more than a castigation. Maybe it’s because castigation is all I now see—and a willingness to throw every idea in Wokeness out, including good ones. I think every movement will always have some excess in it, and I now think the entire left is paying an outsized price for the excess of perhaps the most unrestrained 5% of us, amplified by social media, a phenomenon perfectly built to amplify harmful excess. But I’ll organize my thoughts better later.
Meanwhile your thoughtful interactions definitely merit a subscription.
Ok, I'm a liberal. I have a daughter that is a trans woman. I have never engaged in Twitter at all. Not one post. Not one sea lion or pile on to what someone says somewhere on the internet. And yet we see people trying to make it illegal to "cross-dress" which would mean that they can arrest trans people who are just walking down the street.
The stuff you describe did happen. AND, it wasn't me or my daughter that did it. There are a bunch of self-righteous busybodies who insist that they know everything about me and my daughter and that we are evil. They don't know shit.
You know, over the last four years, I tried very hard to stay positive, and not pile on anyone. I just ignored my unhappiness with Rowling and spent a lot of time trying to convince Kevin Drum (may he rest in peace). And yet, here they are trying to ruin the lives of millions of Americans to satisfy some crazy moral urge.
I think you are right in explaining the motivations of some Trump voters, just as you have described the behavior of some (not even a majority) liberals on social media.
But there's more going on here. A lot more.
This shit is real to us. Very real. One trans woman I know got so scared she just moved to England. Not everyone can do that.
So, am I an example of that evil liberal? I'm pretty fucking angry, after all. But it's personal, right? It's a threat to me and mine. Wouldn't you be angry?
I would be. I’ve been getting a lot of pushback like this. I’m taking it on and trying to use it to revise my thinking. But as worrying as I find Trump, I still don’t think the left will be ready to take him on until they can grapple with what Trump is a reaction to. I get that a lot of liberals didn’t like woke. But they were the only ones who could have really stopped it and they (we) failed to. I’m a big believer that we all own the excesses of our groups. Woke is on us, even if we weren’t its real supporters. So for now, and from me, the whole left stays on blast. I hope your kid is okay.
I like this reponse. I want to be someone who tries to invite people to hang with me and try out living the way I live. I want to be part of a group that invites people to hang with me and try out living the way we live.
Shaming does not accomplish this. It pushes people away. it is often done by people on the thesis that they are pure. However, I'm clear that nobody is pure.
And one type of exercise I have observed is a rather appropriative pattern. The shaming is executed by people who don't have any skin in the game. A white girl is shamed for being racist by other white girls. This is a phenomenon that is tightly associated with social media, where people attempt to gain status in the form of likes and clicks by ferreting out "bad" behavior and shaming it.
I mean, if someone is demeaning black people, find the black people who are complaining about it and amplify them, and what they say. Point to them and say, 'me too'. By the way, what is your opinion of #metoo?
Oooooo…BIG question. On #metoo, the very short answer is that I was initially supportive, later skeptical, and now think it has been a force for mostly good even if it was imperfect. I think it should have happened sooner, and that my younger self definitely engaged in some douchey behavior that I could have ceased if there’d been a social movement to point out to me how douchey it was. I do think there have been some excesses, and it took on a worryingly take-no-prisons approach to the accused (you will never convince me that Al Franken or Garrison Keillor did anything wrong). I think the standards for male behavior are probably set in a better place now, though I worry it weaponized the concept of safety in ways that could have some unfortunate and unintended side effects. What’s your take? Do you think it’s helped?
A great piece of work that makes clear to me something that I've felt in an defined manner for a long time. Thank you for the effort you put into the wonderful prose.
One point about the difficulty of engaging with leftists is that so many of those people don't just believe things, they *are* their beliefs...ie their sociopolitical beliefs define their essential humanity. This means that when you disagree with them, it's not seen as a difference of opinion, it becomes an attack on their identity as a human being, and people don't respond well to that.
I have acquaintances in various groups I belong to who are of this nature, and I know that if I were to contradict their readily expressed views I would soon be cancelled and ejected from the group.
Identity politics poisons everything.
I’m hardly the first to this party, but the best framework I’ve found for understanding woke is the religious one. Once you understand it as a religious movement, the pieces - really without exception - fall into place. And the church of woke takes its communion on social media, so when you try to point out, online, that a woke person is wrong about something, what you’re effectively doing is standing next to the altar on Sunday morning explaining to penitents that “actually, God isn’t real.” Just a doomed strategy.
Faulting the woke culture for the disregard of moral conviction in choosing a leader is worth considering but also worth considering is a perspective from someone who doesn’t have a bottomless piggy bank of white male privilege.
I did enjoy your word storm despite likely possibly being on your naughty list. I invite you to read a different angle of this from a minority who has patiently (mostly) endured discrimination from these people my whole life. But first, I think it’s important to acknowledge the clear separation of MAGA and the other people who voted for Trump. I’ll make a sweeping generalization on the later and simply consider it a complete lapse in judgment for the confusion a master of lies and manipulation can create and the power of the manipulation of religion and money. MAGA seems to know the depth of his putridness and want that. Somehow they’ve missed that he is indiscriminately putrid and they will sink along with the rest in either the literal sense and/or further moral depravity of continued support of worsening cruel actions and policies. Look at the comments here. Hurting people “is glorious.”
Asserting that being woke is responsible for the “fed up response” of hiring of a felonrapist, profoundly immoral man but I assert that it’s really that we fought back. Woke is clawing or paving the way up a couple rungs of that elusive ladder to equal ground and that progress was resented for taking absolute power and privilege and sharing it. They chose a felonrapist because we lamented that white guys start on the 50 yard line of a 100 yard dash and we stopped accepting it as our cross to bear. They chose a felonrapist because we refused to continue to quietly endure the centuries long torture of intimidation and self supposed supremacy over women, gays, minorities etc. They chose a repulsive reprehensible individual in response to being called out for being douchey as if it canceling people who cancel people is the oppressed people’s moral failure. We gave back a little taste of their own medicine that’s been liberally dished out for ages and that was just a step too far. The the ruin of an equal opportunity nation by a ruthless sick authority figure falling squarely on the shoulders of the uppity for their intolerance of intolerance is deeply telling.
I personally don’t know the way out of this mess other than motivating the 1/3 who did nothing this last election. The ones who are full on maga cult like following trump are fed up with what the woke fed up have felt for centuries and they have the champion of all champions of obsolete fragile white males empowering them.
If you’ve never been the target of a jealous white man in the business world you can never fully appreciate the depth of rot being a woman who performs better than that man can reveal.
"We gave back a little taste of their own medicine that’s been liberally dished out for ages." This, I think, explains the problem. The medicine wasn't given back to the folks who'd initially dished it out, it was given to their grandkids and great grandkids. If I hit you, and you hit me back, we're square. If you hit me because someone else hit you...all I know is that you hit me.
This doesn’t address what I’ve asserted. I/we have been hit every day of our lives by these people. It was their grandfathers but it’s also them.
You’re describing woke as a vehicle for social advancement for the historically marginalized (if I’m understanding you correctly) and I guess I just don’t see that value being realized. I regard it as a top-down enforcement tool for a narrow set of illiberal beliefs about identity. On its best day, it was never going to liberate anyone. And most of the people who used it to seize power were in the managerial class, which is to say, they had it already.
Perhaps you don’t see that value being realized because you never experienced it yourself. I felt every woke step forward and every step back.
Well, I certainly didn’t feel the value myself, but of course I didn’t. The movement was quite expressly not for people like me. How did the steps taken move you forward though? What did they earn you?
Every step forward changed my life significantly. Some of which can only be described as energy. I could feel energy shifts going from one friendly state to another not so friendly state-people are quite easy to read when you constantly have to assess the threat level in every encounter. We finally didn’t have to hide our relationship with every new situation until the threat was assessed. It took many years but that was a remarkable shift. Not being acutely aware of body language, tone, energy frees you from the burden of that distraction, fear and focus-imagine working and knowing someone there is out to cause you harm-that effects more than just your performance. Huge changes from being granted marriage rights and protections, financial protections, anti discrimination employment protections-I was targeted in jobs-my boss was told I couldn’t work with the girls because she suspected I was gay and that automatically made me a sexual threat, adoption and fostering became an option-we fostered teens, exposure and representation which helps remove soften the stigmas etc. There’s so many just for being gay without going into all the other marginalized groups. My first professional job my boss sat me down and said you have three things going against you every time you walk into a patient room. You’re short, you’re young, you’re a woman. You have to first figure out how to overcome those before you can start helping the person with why they’re here to see you.
Love this mild pushback. I mean, a look at the comments here will reveal there is no shortage of liberals who largely agree with the author. “Liberals” did not all conspire to create cancel culture, and most of us feared it. People lost their jobs because corporations were afraid of woke mobs then, just as they are afraid of Trump now. Today, youthful online mobs don’t have that kind of power. Peak wokeness was several years ago.
This author is right about a lot, but I’m tired of blaming liberals for what conservatives support and do. They chose Trump. They see him ripping up democracy, and love it. That’s somehow on us? We don’t have that kind of power, Mr. Scott.
I hear that, but I'm unlikely to let up on liberals for a good while. Conservative politics are still very much in blacklash mode, which means that understanding the recent behavior of the left is vital to understanding the motivations of the right. This will shift eventually, and yelling at woke people will become less useful, but I don't think we're there yet.
Oops I meant to address “Mr Scott” to the original author!
Haha! I was trying really hard to work that through. Thanks for clarifying
Geez, can we move on? Really, how many more times are we going to read about why people who like Trump like Trump? The house is on fire and we’re arguing about who started it?
Yes. And we’re going to keep arguing about it until we correctly identify who started it, because who started it is a pretty damn important consideration. Only two groups are capable of stopping Trump: anti-Trump Republicans (of whom there are approximately two) and Democrats. Democrats are useless right now, and will continue to be, so long as they remain confused about why everyone hates them. I get that you don’t like this part, but it’s necessary if we’re ever going to have a functional, left-leaning party again.
Very insightful article. What worries me most is that every one is focused on their side winning and not on the compromises necessary for the country to succeed. Yes I’m one of those damn moderates!
Darn you reasonable compromisers!
I remember a friend of mine posting something like “how can you hear trump say these racist things and still vote for him? You must be a racist.” I remember thinking, this person has no racist family members or acquaintances. Which, you know, good for them. But in many places you will absolutely be exposed to those people over and over, and at some point you have to accept that you can’t keep telling your coworkers and uncles and husbands-of-friends that they are racists. I mean, maybe you should, but you’d never be doing anything else. So you learn to interact with them over other things, and mostly you get along. And then when trump says these things, it’s not that it’s ok, it’s just not that jarring, and you don’t necessarily assume that disqualifies everything he says.
Is this nice or right? Maybe not. But that is the reality that some people live with, and I feel like that is hard for many liberals to understand
By the way, didn’t vote for trump, not an American. Just a horrified spectator :-)
Yeah, I’m in the same boat. And I think this is right on. Not everyone is in an ecosystem where challenging every problematic utterance is the done thing. In Trump’s first term, the biggest complaints about him were functionally about style: he’s rude, he’s vulgar, he’s racist. I think his critics didn’t fully grasp how many could ignore that so long as he wasn’t breaking things (which he very much is now).
The paradox through is that the Full MAGA Jacket crowd then delights in their own hypocritical version of anti-virtue signaling and intolerance of dissent from inside the house. 🫤
Oh yes they do! And if anything, I think they’ll wear people out even faster because they have even less impulse control than the left.
Thanks for this insightful piece. I think you’ve nicely captured what’s gone on here.