So...this is a nice gotcha I see that keeps coming up. Some people will say that the democratic party is too woke, but then the democrats explicitly avoided all associations with wokeness this election cycle, knowing it's unpopular, so why do people keep insisting it's too woke, why do we do that? isnt it one or the other?
Well, to be fair, in my case, I've been explicitly doing my own autopsy on the democrats since 2016. I was thinking of implementing it with my book idea, but I'm SO verbose on the subject I could literally write a book just on all of that.
But to summarize, one of the things the democrats did wrong in 2016 WAS wokeness. Wokeness was mostly a terminally online thing pre 2016. I mean, when I came over to the left, it was pretty new. You had elevatorgate in the atheist community, you had atheism+. And then a couple years later you had gamergate. But in all of these situations, it WAS mostly just a terminally online thing. And it was kind of easy to avoid if you wanted to avoid it. It didn't become ubiquitous until the 2016 election cycle.
Let's think about 2016 for a minute. What was Clinton's strategy. "For every working class voter blah blah blah you know the thing." Basically, screw working class voters in the rust belt, she had this grand idea for a coalition based on upper class suburbanites and identity groups that benefit from wokeism. So Women, minorities, the LGBT+ community, etc. She leaned HARD into it. She literally demonized bernie supporters as "bernie bros" and lambasted us for being privileged. her supporters would constantly lecture us about how we dont get black people, and how we're sexist, and blah blah blah. And then they acted surprised when a lot of us eventually found our way over to trump. I didn't, because i was innoculated against the GOP's BS, but I do understand why, going from 2016 to 2024, we're seeing the rise of the "bro" demographic going to trump, because if democrats showed us anything, it's that we weren't welcome in the democratic party. You act hostile to entire groups of people based on their identity, and they...won't vote for you. Imagine that.
In 2020, the democrats still leaned into this stuff. BLM was a thing, and there's still backlash from democrats like Biden and Harris shifting left on issues like defund the police that many critics and skeptics of harris still brought up even now. The thing is, she pivoted left to those guys in 2020, and now she's seen as a flip flopper where people don't know what she thought. But yeah. In 2020, the social justice people gained so much power, literally everyone was forced to pay fealty to them and their concerns. bernie pivoted hard left too, after his identity blind message flopped in 2016 specifically because of the above, and I've heard critics of bernie who used to be supporters say the same thing, "he became woke." Again, this doesn't matter to me much. As long as "wokeness" doesnt get in the way of my own concerns, im not necessarily as hostile as I often am. I'm hostile to those guys primarily because they DO get in my way and they ARE pushy, evangelical, and toxic toward people who don't like their stuff. And they are polarizing. And I do think a lot of that independent appeal bernie had in 2016 was lost in 2020.
In the Yang Gang, Yang himself didn't lean into that. And look at where that got him in 2020. he got 2% of the population, because in 2020, democratic voters wanted the woke crap. And they would punish anyone who didn't pander to it.
In 2021, when Yang ran in his mayoral campaign, he also didn't lean hard into the woke stuff. And if anything I saw some interesting dynamics there that seem relevant in 2024. I saw a lot of asian americans love yang for being asian, and themselves push obnoxious asian identity politics, but they also seemed to resent the black identity politics that adams was using, and because blacks outnumber asians in NYC, adams won and yang didn't. The dynamic between blacks and asians is worth noting because I've heard someone say in recent days post election that there's a similar dynamics between Latinos and blacks as far as idpol goes. And how the Latinos resent being treated like crap because they don't rank as highly in woke suffering olympics as black people do. I've heard latinos online SAY this sort of stuff in doing their own autopsies for why trump won. And that's why latinos are turning on the democratic party. Because they themselves resent wokeness. They hate the suffering olympics dynamics where they themselves are treated as second class citizens simply for not being as oppressed as other races, and they also hate the white policing over the "latinx" crap. Imagine the movement against cultural appropriation basically telling people how to properly speak their own language. You can see why these guys are like "will you people f off already?"
And in 2024, let's be real. Yes, the biden-harris campaign did tone it down. BUT, this stuff is still ubiquitous in left wing social circles, and it's kinda unavoidable. If you mention not being totally in the tank for harris online, you were often met with OMG DONT YOU CARE ABOUT THE WOMEN AND THE MINORITIES AND THE LGBTQIABCXYZ AND BLAH BLAH BLAH, and again, it's insufferable. Yes, harris dialed it down herself, but this stuff is still this common glue holding the left together and that ethics system has become the left's guiding light to the point that people will question your ideological credentials if you DONT toe the line on this stuff.
I mean just look at how badly the left is treating Ana Kasperian at times. I'm not saying she doesn't deserve some flak sometimes (yes, Ana, Trump IS a fascist, you are WRONG), but honestly? A lot of her "leaving the left" seems to have come from this insufferable ethos of wokeism in TYT's communities, causing her own fan base to eat her alive over comments related to the whole "birthing persons" nonsense and the whole being raped by a homeless person thing. I mean, the left has this toxic culture of social policing and even if the campaign itself toned it down, it's clear the left has a huge "wokeism" problem even now. It's a cultural problem. They dont have to even lean into it any more for it to be a liability, just it existing seems to be an issue.
And to be fair, the campaign did kind of lean into it at times too unknowingly. They went ALL IN with the abortion narrative and even were making cringey ads about men "voting for their wives and daughters" and those cringey ads about women not voting with their trump loving husbands in the voting booth. I've heard people (mostly trumpers) saying democrats dont know how to cater to men, and while sometimes i think they exaggerate the issues, sometimes they do seem to have this hello fellow kids vibe toward men where they...just dont understand men.
I'm not saying they should lean into toxic masculinity either, and quite frankly, I hate a lot of the right wing mentalities toward masculinity and being a man, I dont personally relate to that stuff despite having the right equipment, but it does seem obvious that a decade of wokeness has lost a lot of goodwill with demographics like men, latinos, etc., and this all came around.
Harris herself tried to lean away from wokeness, but I dont think she could truly escape the ideological legacy it has left on the democratic party or its culture, and that stuff is still very alive and well in 2024. If anything, the chickens are finally coming home to roost and i think it's clear, YES, WE HAVE A WOKENESS PROBLEM. I really really do. And it's gonna be hard to fix. Because how do you convince an entire segment of the country that doesnt wanna listen that they're wrong and alienating people, you don't. Honestly, I think wokeness went mainstream as part of a psy op by the clinton campaign to unite the democratic base behind social issues. But it was such a paradigm shift and the propaganda was so successful the left has lost their way and doesn't even know how to talk to people any more. Because their entire ideology has been rewritten around this ideology. And I myself butt heads constantly on the left as someone who is an "older" leftie with an "older" ideology (secular humanism). Like, I'm a pre 2016 progressive at this point. Someone whose views were cut from a different cloth and doesn't share the current left's value system. And honestly, I kind of understand why the modern democratic party is so offputting. Because we HAVE been realigning, and I can say it, we have been going the wrong way. 2024 confirmed this for me, and between my own preconceptions and listening to people, which, if anything, seems to be confirming my preconceptions, we made some huge mistakes, and we're just...realigning wrong. 2016 was a realigning year or at least the beginning of a realignment. It's now 8 years later, and it seems like much of the country has gone in one direction, others have gone the other, and here I am, largely having kept my pre 2016 views intact and I'm just freaking out at the state of things. The democrats have screwed up HARD, and again, maybe I'm biased, but I feel like everything I've been fearing for years about the direction of this country in general has been coming true.
I'm not even sure if we could even run a bernie 2016 campaign and be successful at this point. The left doesnt seem to want that any more as they are so fixated on insular cultural issues while being economically centrist, and the people who used to be "my people" are all becoming trumpers. Because they shifted the other way in reaction to this toxic democratic party culture, and they seem to have drank the trump kool aid.
It's saddening to me. All of this was unnecessary. The democrats screwed up and caused all of this. And we might suffer for an entire generation because of the original sins of 2016. I wish I had better news, and was more optimistic, but that's how I feel about this.
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