As I've been noting there are quite a few liberal and progressive voices who recognize the danger posed to America by Woke theology. The frustrating part for me is seeing excellent analysis that most of the time turns away from what is needed politically to stop this freight train from destroying our society. For more on why it is such a danger, read the other posts in my Your Future series.
Below are three examples of this phenomenon of those who would rather engage in wishful thinking.
Andrew Sullivan has written eloquently of the threat posed by Wokeism to liberal democracy and he was forced to leave New York Magazine because of it. But he remains delusional about what his options really are in his recent essay, Dreaming Of A Landslide - a landslide for Joe Biden and the Democrats, that is. Why he thinks giving Democrats control of all branches of government is a good idea, given the party now has a paramilitary wing; stood by while cities burned and crime rates have soared over the past few months; is intolerant of dissent; supports Critical Race Theory which denies our common humanity; supports revoking anti-discrimination laws; and has cadres of like-minded apparatchiks ready to fill thousands of positions in a new administration, is absolutely baffling. He is dreaming, he is dreaming in a dream world.
I was going to write a critique of Sullivan's specific points, but Micky Kaus, an eccentric Democrat from California beat me to it, so I will liberally quote from him:
1. Sullivan argues a Trump shellacking would have a big impact. "Bush’s loss to Clinton, in turn, solidified the hard right’s control of the GOP from Gingrich through to Trump." Huh? The Republicans’ next four nominees were Bob Dole, George Bush's son George Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney. None are hard right.
2. Sullivan seems to entirely blame Trump for "tribalism" and "polarization," which is why Trump needs to be expunged and cauterized etc.. Trump certainly hasn't cured those problems — or even tried — but given the Democrats' inability to come to terms with his 2016 victory, their immediate full-on opposition, their ongoing attempts to reverse the election’s result— plus the pre-Trump ascendance of Critical Race Theory (critqued most accessibly by Sullivan himself) and the eruption of Black Lives Matter protests (against police brutality, not Trump's policies), it seems as if at least some percentage of the blame should fall on Democrats who'd feel vindicated by a landslide.
3. "[Trump] has worsened social and economic inequality, when a reformist conservatism would seek to ‘level up’ a society wracked by hyper-global capitalism." But this ‘leveling up’ is exactly what was happening until the pandemic hit this year, with wages at the bottom rising faster, than the wages of higher-paid Americans, thanks to both tight labor market (helped by restrained immigration) and minimum wage hikes in many states. The pandemic probably reversed these gains, and maybe Trump's partly to blame for the pandemic. But it's hard to say he needs repudiation as an innate enemy of ‘leveling up’ when he made things better for 3 years.
4. "A landslide matters because it gives Biden a much bigger mandate to govern from the center.” Really? Compared with, say, a narrow Biden win that suggested voters were wary of leftish Dem ambitions? Seems like wishful Brit leader-writer thinking to me. It’s much more likely that a big win would give the left a bigger mandate, no? -- a mandate to end the Senate filibuster, add states, pack the Supreme Court, to name the current hotly discussed changes. Also to use any new procedural leverage to help pass an ambitious health care plan, a "card check" program of unionization, various cash programs that approach a UBI, added race-preference mandates, etc. Not saying these are all necessarily bad things, but they ain't centrist.
5. Andrew approves Republican populism:
The Republican move toward defending the unskilled, protecting working families, guarding entitlements, resisting urban wokeness, checking free trade absolutism, restraining overseas intervention, and curtailing mass immigration is one that need not be abandoned. Its time has come.
Hard to square this confident hope in the future of Trumpish policies with Sullivan’s claim that a landslide “would say to posterity: we made this hideous mistake, for understandable reasons, but after four years, we saw what we did and decisively changed course.” Hideous mistake or “time has come.” Pick one.
More practically, curtailing mass immigration won't be possible if Democrats succeed in passing something like the old Gang of 8 bill that would double legal immgration, legalize virtually all current illegal immigrants, and practically invite a new influx of economic migrants posing as "asylum" seekers to overwhelm our legal system. Sullivan’s landlslide — giving Democrats conrol of the Senate — is what would enable Democrats to very quickly do this, shaping the electorate for the rest of American history and thereby making many of Andrew's other, anti-woke goals, unattainable. You’d think he would face up to this.
You would think, but he won't. This is not the Joe Biden, nor the Democratic Party of the Clinton years. That is gone. What is left is a radicalized party that also controls the major institutions of our society. Do not expect mercy if they control the federal government on top of that.
George Packer is a writer for many prestigious liberal publications including The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine and a standard issue progressive so his October 2019 piece in The Atlantic, When The Culture War Comes For The Kids, must have startled some of his regular readers. Living in New York City, Packer and his wife fell into the educational pressure cooker regarding their children but ultimately forsook private school for public education in city schools.
My wife and I are products of public schools. Whatever torments they inflicted on our younger selves, we believed in them. We wanted our kids to learn in classrooms that resembled the city where we lived. We didn’t want them to grow up entirely inside our bubble—mostly white, highly and expensively educated—where 4-year-olds who hear 21,000 words a day acquire the unearned confidence of insular advantage and feel, even unconsciously, that they’re better than other people’s kids.
He sees what is wrong with the focus on identity:
In politics, identity is an appeal to authority—the moral authority of the oppressed: I am what I am, which explains my view and makes it the truth. The politics of identity starts out with the universal principles of equality, dignity, and freedom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself—often a dead end, a trap from which there’s no easy escape and maybe no desire for escape. Instead of equality, it sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited one—a new moral caste system that ranks people by the oppression of their group identity. It makes race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance—as when Representative Ayanna Pressley said, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”
At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and displays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental constriction in progressive milieus, the self-censorship and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent—these are qualities of an illiberal politics.
It took me a long time to see that the new progressivism didn’t just carry my own politics further than I liked. It was actually hostile to principles without which I don’t believe democracy can survive. Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.
Packer regrets the civics is no longer taught:
By age 10 [his son] had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic.”
And he understands that what is going on is indoctrination, not education.
The fifth-grade share, our son’s last, was different. That year’s curriculum included the Holocaust, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The focus was on “upstanders”—individuals who had refused to be bystanders to evil and had raised their voices. It was an education in activism, and with no grounding in civics, activism just meant speaking out. At the year-end share, the fifth graders presented dioramas on all the hard issues of the moment—sexual harassment, LGBTQ rights, gun violence. Our son made a plastic-bag factory whose smokestack spouted endangered animals. Compared with previous years, the writing was minimal and the students, when questioned, had little to say. They hadn’t been encouraged to research their topics, make intellectual discoveries, answer potential counterarguments. The dioramas consisted of cardboard, clay, and slogans.
De Blasio’s schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let them “silence” him. As part of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million. One training slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture.” It included “Perfectionism,” “Individualism,” “Objectivity,” and “Worship of the Written Word” among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the name of exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.
Finally, Packer's son revolted against this mockery of an education:
“Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading,” he asked us one day, “not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?”
His conclusion?
Watching your children grow up gives you a startlingly vivid image of the world you’re going to leave them. I can’t say I’m sanguine. Some days the image fills me with dread. That pragmatic genius for which Americans used to be known and admired, which included a talent for educating our young—how did it desert us? Now we’re stewing in anxiety and anger, feverish with bad ideas, too absorbed in our own failures to spare our children. But one day the fever will break, and by then they’ll be grown, and they will have to discover for themselves how to live together in a country that gives every child an equal chance.
Of course, we have the ritual denunciation of Trump but Packer can't put two and two together. He can't understand why this horrible turn has happened in education. He doesn't seem to understand that foundational and influential groups within the Democratic Party - teachers unions, school administrators, higher education, our country's largest foundations - are the very reason this disaster is unfolding. He thinks the "fever" will magically break and all will be well. It won't break on its own unless people like him face into what is necessary to break the fever.
Bari Weiss left the New York Times earlier this year after many of its staffers found her brand of traditional liberalism offensive in these Woke times. She recently published an essay in Tablet, "Stopped Being Shocked" with the subtitle "American liberalism is in danger from a new ideology - one with dangerous implications for Jews".
It's worth a read. Bari starts with a bang:
The confusion - and there seems to be a good deal of it these days - is among American Jews who think that by submitting to ever-changing loyalty tests they can somehow maintain the old status quo and their place inside of it.
Did you see that the Ethical Culture Fieldston School hosted a speaker that equated Israelis with Nazis? Did you know that Brearley is now asking families to write a statement demonstrating their commitment to “anti-racism”? Did you see that Chelsea Handler tweeted a clip of Louis Farrakhan? Did you see that protesters tagged a synagogue in Kenosha with “Free Palestine” graffiti? Did you hear about the march in D.C. where they chanted “Israel, we know you, you murder children too”? Did you hear that the Biden campaign apologized to Linda Sarsour after initially disavowing her? Did you see that Twitter suspended Bret Weinstein’s civic organization but still allows the Iranian ayatollah to openly promote genocide of the Jewish people? Did you see that Mayor Bill de Blasio scapegoated “the Jewish community” for the spread of COVID in New York, while defending mass protests on the grounds that this is a “historic moment of change”?
After a ritual denunciation of President Trump, Ms Weiss concludes her opening barrage:
And unlike Trump, this one has attained cultural dominance, capturing America's elites and our most powerful institutions. In the event of a Biden victory, it is hard to imagine it meeting resistance. So let me make my purpose perfectly clear: I am here to ring the alarm. I’m here to say: Do not be shocked anymore. Stop saying, can you believe. It’s time to accept reality, if we want to have any hope of fixing it.
She goes on to discuss Woke theology and Critical Race Theory with an emphasis on what it means for Jews:
By simply existing as ourselves, Jews undermine the vision of a world without difference. And so the things about us that make us different must be demonized, so that they can be erased or destroyed: Zionism is refashioned as colonialism; government officials justify the murder of innocent Jews in Jersey City; Jewish businesses can be looted because Jews “are the face of capital.” Jews are flattened into “white people,” our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely “white on white crime.”
This is no longer a fringe view. As the philosopher Peter Boghossian has noted: “This ideology is the dominant moral orthodoxy in our universities, and has seeped out and spread to every facet of American life— publishing houses, tech, arts, theater, newspapers, media,” and, increasingly, corporations. It has not grabbed power by dictates from above, but by seizing the means of sense-making from below.
It is why California attempted to pass an ethnic studies curriculum whose only mention of Jews was to explain how they, along with Irish immigrants, were invited into whiteness.
It is why a young Jewish woman named Rose Ritch was recently run out of the USC student government. Ms. Ritch stood accused of complicity in racism because, following the Soviet lie, to be a Zionist is to be nothing less than a racist. Her fellow students waged a campaign to hound her out of her position: “Impeach her Zionist ass,” they insisted.
She then proceeds to castigate Jewish leaders from refusing to face into the situation. But so does Bari Weiss.
The radicals play on liberal guilt which prevents them from effectively opposing their lunatic and divisive schemes and on liberal's reflexive revulsion at Republicans which prevents them from creating alliances to fight the biggest danger we have faced since the Civil War.
However repugnant you find Donald Trump, unless he prevails (and right now I think he will lose) and the GOP retains control of the Senate, there will be no institutions in our society resisting the Woke. It will be over. Time to face reality, however unpleasant, and do the right thing.
At times like these I am reminded of Frodo and Gandalf's conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
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