Jacobin: Wokeness Is Hurting Democrats

Wokeness consistently narrows the appeal of everything it touches. It subtracts working class voters from the Democratic coalition and adds them to the Republican coalition. Along with immigration, wokeness has become such an intensely polarizing culture war issue that it has become a new “grand issue” that is driving the realignment of the two parties. The woke mindset spills over into virtually every aspect of public policy and has made coexistence impossible.

Democrats like to trivialize and dismiss the issue as rightwingers being upset about silly things like Dr. Seuss books. Would they feel the same way about violent mobs of rightwingers burning down their cities while the FBI and DOJ made the point to look the other way? How would they respond to us deplatforming Joe Biden and censoring them on the internet? How about mobs of rightwingers who go around destroying the reputations and careers of people for expressing socially liberal opinions? Should the government have the power to label them “domestic extremists” and purge them from the military and law enforcement and erect a police state to go after them on the basis of their political opinions?

The Left doesn’t grasp how the use of these no holds barred woke tactics – demonizing Whites on the basis of their race, mob violence, doxxing, censorship, weaponizing the intelligence agencies, economic blackmail and punishment by corporate elites, impeachment and so forth – to attack the fundamental constitutional rights of people on the Right whether it is their First Amendment or Fourth Amendment rights is playing out on the Right. There has been a radical change in mood over the past year.

White people are getting anxious and assertive with Joe Biden as president. They are less and less cowed by “antiracism.” This wasn’t the case even when Trump was president, but there has been an unmistakable change in tone. We’re starting to see White people talk about things which they wouldn’t have dared broach in public even two or three years ago. The fact that normies stormed the Capitol, not the so-called “extremists,” but ordinary people is a sign of just how radically things have changed.

To their credit, the socialists have been more aware of this than other leftwing factions. Ben Burgis, one of their top guys, recently wrote a whole book lamenting these people and their bad optics. There is nothing to be gained from burning down cities. Anarchists like Sadie Farrell who tend to be the woke bastard spawn of PMCs are constantly surveilling and accusing the socialists of “class reductionism.” The Left has alienated and driven away so many working class voters with this type of middle class cultural extremism that nearly half of Trump voters are populists on economics now. PMCs are now so concentrated in Joe Biden’s Democratic Party that it is easier to imagine the already substantially weakened Republican establishment crumbling under the impact of a working class revolt than the Democratic establishment because the class profile of the two parties is more favorable on the Right. The modern Left is far less interested in improving material living conditions for workers than in policing thought and transforming consciousness. The former takes a backseat to the latter. The always multiplying laundry list of -isms and -phobias is making practical politics impossible. No one can “collaborate” with “white supremacy” or “nativists” or “transphobes” to accomplish mutual goals.

Policing thoughts and words are far more important than anything else. If you use the wrong word or have the wrong take, your life should be destroyed.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

3 Comments

  1. HW sayeth: “The Left has alienated and driven away so many working class voters with this type of middle class cultural extremism that nearly half of Trump voters are populists on economics now.”

    I’ve noticed that the middle class has been increasingly in your crosshairs of late. Curious why, as I don’t perceive who I consider to be middle class to be part of the PMC. Rather, I see the middle class as comprised mostly of experienced laborers, self employed in whatever, vanilla staff accountants, your average plant manager at a factory, a foreman of a construction company, or basically anybody that mows their own grass still and scrubs their own toilets. More or less, people far too busy being productive to have extra time to spend trying to jawbone everybody else into performing whatever ritual stupidity that passes for virtuosity on an ever changing basis in the corporate landscape of suburbia.

    For the sake of clarity, would you mind elaborating on who you consider to be the middle class and how they have contributed to the cult of woke?

    • Simple.

      The toxic busybody mentality of scolding people and policing words is a middle class pathology. It is present to some degree throughout the middle class, but PMCs take it to a pathological extreme

      • The middle class people I know mostly fit the Ironic Sock Account profile, albeit these people are more accurately lower middle-class. They, too, are feeling in the “crosshairs” for simply being White. Maybe my area is an outlier. Heavily Catholic and working class, with some professionals sprinkled in. And yes, one ridiculous BLM sign on an all White street, in a mostly White city. The worst here are the Catholic church leaders, sober signatories to the woke agenda.

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