The Democrats must wake up about the woke
The Democrats must wake up about the woke
Remove identity politics and cancel culture and the progressive agenda becomes surprisingly popular
Progressives and moderates are blaming each other for this week’s Democratic setbacks in Virginia and elsewhere. With the midterms coming up, it’s essential to figure out which side is right. Above it all hovers a fundamental question of our time: How can patriotic Americans vote for the Republicans anymore?
After all, the GOP’s big ideas these days are tilting elections through voter suppression and gerrymandering, agitating against institutions like the FBI and the military and ferociously contesting elections they lose. Thanks to them, the world no longer sees America as a solid democracy.
So absurd has it become that few seemed shocked to learn that Donald Trump had a concrete plan for Mike Pence to try to overturn 2020 by attempting to invalidate key states’ results. Indeed, these antics are popular among many and possibly most core Republican voters. That’s why party figures praise fake democracies like Poland and Hungary, with their domesticated judges, journalists and opposition.
Given this lunacy, it is reasonable for many Democrats to consider it critically important to keep Republicans away from power, for bigger reasons even than policy. And they might be scratching their heads at the fact that Republicans are even competitive at all. Don’t the voters like their freedoms — not to mention science and civility?
Election results, opinion polls and conversations with people who value democracy but might vote Republican all point in the same direction: Beyond the standard concerns about high taxes, what truly animates them, what makes them capable of supporting the increasingly authoritarian right, is fear of what they perceive as the authoritarian left.
There is, in the American center, visceral distaste for the cultural war stoked by the woke project: that zone of thought and activism stretching from “defund the police” and trigger warnings to gender pronoun inflation and complaints about “cultural appropriation,” from summary firings of the guilty-if-accused and “cancellation” of the “inappropriate.” Perhaps most profoundly, for the identity politics that replace individualism and free expression with the assignation of speaking rights by unchosen group affiliation.
In the Virginia governor’s race, won by Glenn Youngkin, what probably tilted the balance was the Republican’s clever tapping of discomfort with “critical race theory” in schools — which many voters see as the notion that nothing in America is untainted by inherent racism and therefore, essentially, everything from the NFL to the SATs must be remade if not destroyed. This is not in fact taught in Virginia’s schools — but colorful lies are more effective than boring facts in the algorithm.
A 2018 NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll showed 52% of the public was “against the country becoming more politically correct and upset that there are too many things people can’t say anymore.” Just 36% were “in favor of the United States becoming more politically correct” and wanted people to be yet “more sensitive in their comments about others.” In a May 2021 Pew poll, 57% agreed that “people today are too easily offended by what others say” while just 40% said “people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others.” An Axios-Ipsos poll from May found 70% opposed to the “defund the police” idea while just 27% supported it.
If the Democrats were able to contain the damage being done by this, they might be able to exploit their strong advantage on core policy issues.
It is not just that most Americans want more gun control, do not want to ban abortion, do not want to deny COVID science or global warming and think the country — which leads all advanced nations in inequality — should distribute its wealth more equitably. There is even strong support for specific economic policies generally considered to be left of the moderate Democratic center: A CNBC poll found 84% support for paid maternity leave, 75% support for government-funded child care, 57% support for tuition-free public college and 54% support for Medicare for all. A 2019 Marist/ NPR/ PBS NewsHour poll found 63% supporting a Green New Deal (details aside).
And for all the agitation over taxes, a Fox News poll from May showed that 47% of registered voters said the Biden administration is proposing too much of an increase in government spending, while 17% said not enough, and 33% chose just about the right amount. In other worse, a narrow majority favored the spending.
The challenge for the Democrats is to stand up for genuine liberalism without losing the support of progressives, who are certainly capable of handing Republicans the country by voting for leftist third parties or not voting at all. The way to do this is to give them that part of their agenda that the Republicans never would and which has also broad support: the economic one. So popular is redistribution and deficit spending in the industrialized world today that many such policies are being adopted by the Tories in Britain.
In America, this could bust up the current paradigm that gave Trump the second-highest number of votes in history last November.
It is a little unfair, because the progressives have been made a caricature of by the Republican spin machine. But under America’s crazy system, the Democrats have no room for error (since they need to win by huge margins to take the Senate and presidency). If they continue to be associated with the idea that meritocracy is systemically racist, they will lose next year’s midterms, and the Republicans might retake the White House in 2024 even without needing to cheat.
(First published in the New York Daily News)