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Notes -
We Won
On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.
Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.
The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.
It's really just another way of saying that people misread the mandate they actually had and overreached into nonsensical and unpopular areas. For example anti discrimination rules against racial minorities are pretty well supported (even if I think they're unnecessary and illiberal), where as discriminating against white applicants to boost minority groups is not. Some of the people riding the waves of the first push into the second and trigger a rebound.
The same thing I've been talking about what the GOP is doing now. Securing the border and kicking out bad criminal immigrants is popular, shoving a gun in the face of the friendly abeula who lives across the street or kicking out a hard working farm assistant is not.. Greg Bovino might literally believe there needs to be 100 million deportations, but the general public does not. That's why putting Bovino in charge of deportations was stupid and why he inevitably created major backlash. There's a natural ebb and flow to the stupidity back and forth. A very recent example, vaccine mandates violated people's rights to body autonomy, so now we have a retarded antivaxxer in charge of public health recommendations instead.
Things are looking to flow back to the Dem side pretty soon so let's hope woke 2 won't be as stupid as before. It will be, they're still playing the same incentive and signaling games everyone else is, and they'll cause a right wing backlash which will cause a left wing one and so on and so forth as people refuse to learn the lesson that bathing in the excesses of your idealogy is not actually a good way to maintain support, but who knows. Maybe someone will finally learn to moderate their actions for once and tell their sides extremists to fuck off.
I remember one alt-right argument that was skeptical of Trump from the beginning, namely that he is likely to antagonize, further radicalize and energize the Woke but at the same time is rather unlikely to render any direct or indirect assistance to the struggle against them, or to their victims. Of all the criticism directed at Trump from anywhere, I was sure that this has the strongest legs to stand on and will also have severe consequences down the line. From a rightist perspective, one’d think that radicalizing the leftists only makes any sense if you’re planning to use that as a pretext to crack down on them. If you’re unwilling to do that, there’s no point in it at all.
I always thought this argument deserved a longer take-down because it was so common and so-often taken for granted. (I remember having this argument on The Motte, in fact.)
I think though, after ten years of Trump, we've seen how the fight goes and time makes more converts than reason. Personally I think we gained a lot more than we lost by fighting even if this radicalized many in opposition.
True. But I don't think the choice is merely between fighting and not fighting at all.
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