Tag: woke

a new moral majority

An aside in a recent Scott Alexander comments post caught my eye. The “this” he refers to in the first sentence is conflict theory:

The most famous example of doing this well was the Reagan coalition, where powerful business interests got to stay rich and powerful, and Moral Majority Christians got to have prayer in school or whatever. But the modern Democratic coalition works too – powerful class interests get to stay rich and powerful, and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever. This honestly seems like a pretty good deal for the Democrats, coalition-building-wise, and I’m not sure they can do better.

I had never thought about it in this way before, but as I become more critical of the identarian/”woke” wing of the left, this seems to ring true to me. Just as I strongly believe all of the culture war material on the right (Satanic panic, LGBT issues, euthanasia, stem cells, and above all else, abortion) has long been a convenient giveaway by economic elites in order to get everyday conservative voters to support an economic agenda that largely benefits the wealthy, I believe the same dynamic is increasingly at work on the left. These woke issues suck up a lot of time and energy and attention among progressive activists, and while they may in some ways be important, they also distract from economic issues that would be mire widely attractive to working class voters and harmful to elite interests. This kind of cultural distraction is very useful to those in power. The left would do well to re-embrace a class-focused progressivism, instead of allowing itself to fall into the trap of becoming a moral majority of the left.

Excerpt #17

“Left but not woke” was how commentator David Frum once described Bernie Sanders. In his 2016 bid for the Democratic nomination, Sanders’s economic platform was decidedly ambitious and his rhetoric indisputably populist. In an era of small-government austerity and technocratic solution in, Bernie often sounded like a New Deal dinosaur, blissfully unaware that history had ended in the 1990s, or that Democrats had become a party of right-thinking college graduates rather than blue-collar workers. He offered a worker-centered economic agenda, without the alienating cultural aesthetic that dominates liberal media and the universities.

No one can deny Sanders’s influence on the future of the US left. His platform has upended the policy consensus on Capitol Hill, and his talking points are now regularly imitated by down-ballot candidates across the country.

Yet many of his most outspoken disciples fail to embody his unique appeal. Instead of the single-minded focus on working class issues, they often embrace the liberal culture war while peppering in some of Bernie’s popular programs.

[…]

Progressives and socialists are now pairing ambitious and urgently necessary proposals like Medicare for All with wildly unpopular and sometimes counterproductive policy positions. Further, progressives have embraced a racial used worldview that reduces whole populations to their skin color. “Woke” ideology has prevented many on the Left from grasping the possibility that a Mexican American may care more about health care than immigration, that a woman might be more motivated by economic promises that electing a first female president, or that Trump might be able to improve his vote share among working-class black voters.

Even the political style of the Left seems designed to turn away potential new recruits. Far from signaling a commitment to vital social causes, being “woke” has become synonymous with an embrace of niche cultural attitudes found only in higher educated urban districts and among Twitter users – 80 percent of whom are affluent millennials. The Sanders campaign attempted a break with the online consensus when it rejected the fringe term “Latinx” in its historically successful efforts to court Latino voters. And while Sanders failed to win over infrequent, rural, and small-town voters, he recognized how important it was craft a majoritarian message that could appeal to them.

Dustin Guastella, “Everyone Hates the Democrats” in Jacobin no. 40