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Can anyone explain to me this chain of Trump primary victories? Normally I find myself pretty in the loop and things make sense, but I'm having trouble here. Trump as we all know has approval ratings in the doldrums and that extends even to a decent amount of historical loyalist, electorally - recent surveys show his endorsement is a drag in general elections in battlefield states. He also has a mixed at best record of picking primary winners. Yet he's scored several notable wins recently.
He has endorsed former Texas AG Paxton (and dogged by significant simmering corruption allegations), endangering the Texas Senate seat and going against sitting incumbent Sen. Cornyn. His pick for Kentucky Senate seat won the primary despite opposition from both Rep. Massie and retiring incumbent Sen. McConnell (notably, opposite wings of the party despite being somewhat anti-Trump). Rep Massie himself, they are reporting, has lost a primary as well (the most expensive House primary in history, in fact, drawing both Trump and AIPAC opposition) despite drawing support from other somewhat Trump-skeptic but influential right-wingers such as Tucker Carlson, MTG, and Boebert. Trump-opposed incumbent Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy finished third and didn't even make the runoff. In Georgia, perennial enemy (of 2020 election fame) Brad Raffensperger lost the primary for governor. Trump even took out five state senators in Indiana merely over their refusal to jump in the redistricting fight!
So why amid generalized disaster is Trump scoring so many primary victories?
Recent events have peeled off some of Trump's Republican support, but generally speaking Republicans still love him. He bestrides the Republican party like a colossus.
But why now, when during Trump I and even the Biden Interregnum he was dealt quite a few defeats? I mean I'm well aware of what Trump means to the GOP and how he's exerted sustained pressure over the last decade but typically you'd at least expect recent events to provide more of a counterbalance, right?
Take Massie. His most notable stances are anti-Israel and holding administration feet to the fire about budgets and Epstein stuff. These are all issues where Republicans are, theoretically, quintessentially sympathetic (small government, anti-secret liberal cabals, non-interventionism). All of which are basically more popular now than any time in the past 10 years, right? Well, maybe not small-government spending priorities, but you get the idea.
For many, perhaps most Republicans, Woke demonstrated that the present crisis is existential. It is common to see arguments that "woke is over"; rarely do people making such arguments explain their understanding of exactly how "woke" "ended". The only remotely plausible answer I can see is that Trump was re-elected.
Arguments that Woke is over and therefore it's time to move on from Trump are self-defeating if Trump is the only coordination point powerful enough to actually deliver meaningful setbacks to the woke coalition. If we had compromised and not pushed Trump in this last election, even a non-Trump Republican victory would likely have resulted in unbroken Woke advances, simply because very few of the plausible Republican candidates are willing to do what is necessary to contest the culture war, and none to the degree Trump brings to the table.
And it should be emphasized that the sauce here isn't, for the most part, Trump himself or the choices he personally makes. It's Trump as a Schelling point for war rather than surrender. Sell him out, and the people coordinating our end of the sale will absolutely, obviously sell us next. Republicans like myself stick with Trump because we see no viable alternative.
[EDIT] - an amusing note for Massie in particular is that his campaign apparently sent out an advert today, using an old endorsement given by Trump in 2022 to try to fool voters into thinking that Trump was endorsing him now, rather than his opponent. One plays the cards one has, I suppose.
I don't think that woke is over. However, I do think that woke has been dealt serious body blows in the last few years and is much weaker than many people here thought it would be at this point.
It's not just that Trump won despite being widely considered both by wokes and non-wokes to represent a repudiation of wokism.
It's also that woke failed to censor the Internet. Non-wokes successfully created myriads of their own websites. Woke didn't even manage to destroy 4chan. Non-woke took over X. Race realism, actual racism, anti-immigration stances, and open misogyny are now common on mainstream social media. Even on Reddit a few non-woke positions can be seen: for example, being against mass immigration is common on /r/europe, even while the sub sticks to woke positions on all other major issues.
In addition to this, woke overreached on policing and affirmative action. It is now common to see Trump-hating Democratic Party voters on city subreddits support strong policing against street crime and vagrancy. City residents noticed the 2020 crime spike.
Even back in 2020, California Proposition 16, which would have made certain banned kinds of affirmative action legal, failed to pass. In San Francisco in 2021 a public backlash caused the school board to scrap a plan to rename a bunch of schools for woke reasons.
Woke also overreached on trans issues. Peak trans activism is over. Woke pronouns are starting to seem like a brief, now-dated fad. Still in use, but much less talked about these days, and they seem to be of a certain time period.
None of this is to say that woke has been defeated. It will probably rise again in some form, and relatively softer versions of woke continue to have strong influence in institutions. But woke has not overwhelmed the country like many feared, nor is it likely to do so even after Trump is gone.
To be fair, one of the reasons why woke is much weaker than many people here thought it would be at this point is precisely because many people all over the place who thought that it would become overwhelmingly powerful took action to try to stop it.
That was a bit of a fluke though. It wouldn't have happened if a mentally unstable billionaire didn't start musing about buying it, and porgressives haven't committed unforced error of actually compelling him through court to buy it, because they thought that will own him somehow.
I'm also anxious about how long it will last. The EU is constantly seething over it. Right now Musk is safe because he's in the US, but if the administration changes, they'll likely go after him, and could easily cause twitter to fall back to friendly hands again.
Sure, but "peak trans activism" was an absolute blitzkrieg, were they could roll into any institution unopposed. Now they're finally getting pushback, but that doesn't mean they lost.
This is something that drives me crazy about the discourse about wokeness. In the blitzkrieg era we were met with denials that anything is happening to begin with, "Woke/SJW is just a boogeyman", etc. They took over essentially every major institution during that time, and now that they stumbled and had to slow down somewhat, the same people who were denying their existence are now declaring the fight to be over.
Seen this thread, out of curiosity?
No, somehow this one has not popped up on my feeds.
Not surprising, for my part I've seen an interview with a Ukrainian mother that moved to California because of the war, and had her daughter put into foster care and transed. Blue states are still full steam ahead with this stuff.
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