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I've previously discussed why I'll be voting for Trump, but I want to put forward another reason that I don't believe has been sufficiently discussed here. It rather obviously extends from some rather tired discussion points, but bear with me I promise I'm going somewhere with it.
The Democrats are, in my view at least and without attempting to consensus build, the party of woke both in function and in form. Function is of course, obvious. Democrats are pro Diversity Equity and Inclusion, pro affirmative action, pro reparations, and are at the point where they're just straight up handing out racial spoils in the form of cold hard cash. It's not soft spoils anymore, wherein people are given a leg up at work, or an open door at an elite institution they otherwise may not have qualified for, but literal actual money. Form, equally obvious. Kamala Harris did not become Vice President because after a sober and serious discussion it was believed by the Biden campaign staff that she would be best suited to carry on his vision of the country should anything happen to him. She became Vice President because she's a woman of color to use the same terminology.
Trump is, for whatever reason, the avatar of anti-wokeness. He is where the anti-woke have dug their trenches, and fortified their positions. They are, for lack of a better option, my team. And yes, politics should not be a team based sport. It should be a contest between ideals and views for the future of our country that we want to share together. It should be disagreements about a bright future we both want, and just are uncertain how to achieve. It's not. Or maybe it is and the issue is that the Democrats view of a Bright Future is so radically different from my own that the two can no longer be reconciled. Further ink on this topic should be spilled by those who have the wit and intelligence to do so eloquently, as I unfortunately do not.
The only way, the only way to convince the Democrats that wokeness is Not Okay is to rub their noses in it like a dog. Smack them on the snout with a rolled up newspaper and proclaim "BAD!" in a thunderous shout. In a perfect world this would never have been required. In a better world they would have learned the lesson in 2016. We do not live in those worlds, we live in this one, and in this one they are still on the woke train. So I will vote for the man whose re-election constitutes the philosophical equivalent of smacking the Democratic Party on the nose with a rolled up newspaper before grinding it into the stain on the carpet. I have no other recourse left to me, or at least no other recourse I am willing to take. I do not hold the ear of any DNC staffer, I am not the son of a billionaire who could get a meeting with the President only by asking. I am Joe Schmoe the average voter, and my vote is the only weapon I can wield. So I am going to, or rather already did (thank you mail in ballots), vote for Trump, and I am going to pray that he wins because another four years of wokeness in the White House is only going to further destabilize this country.
If you're worried about wokeness, you should honestly be voting Democrat. When Trump was elected, the idea of wokeness was relatively new and was foreign to much of the Democratic party. By 2020 it had metastasized to become an overarching narrative, even as the party's nominee tried to distance himself from it. I remember on the old SSC board a number of people said they were voting for Trump in 2016 for similar reasons as you outline above, namely that a Trump victory would smack down this nascent wokism once and for all. Of course, it had quite the opposite effect; wokism was much more pervasive and much more mainstream at the end of Trump's term than it was at the beginning. Most of the perceived excesses of the movement, such that it existed, were more a direct reaction to Trump's election than to any overarching policy goals of the Democratic party.
Hillary Clinton wasn't woke in the slightest; anyone who could be remotely described as such was already in the tank for Sanders. Had Clinton won, it would have been a direct repudiation of the more radical elements of the party, and it would be at least 8 years before the wokes would get another crack at mainstream influence, if they still even existed. Trump's victory, however, allowed them to create a narrative that the party's loss was due to Clinton's intransigence when it came to social issues and more radical leftist policy. If Sanders had been the candidate, he would have trounced Trump and led America into a new era of prosperity. But the Democratic party insisted on running as a continuation of an Obama presidency that leftists had soured on and that conservatives had unfairly demonized. Add in the fact that no one really liked Hilary Clinton and Trump's victory seemed inevitable.
So now there is a large contingent of the left that is now stuck living with a Trump administration that, by the day, seems to be trying to outdo itself with how inept it can be, and with a president who is confirming all the suspicions they've had about the latent racism among a large part of the electorate. The presidency is a lost cause, but there are other routes. The Squad comes to power. The non-governmental institutions controlled by the left take a more active stance in promoting their ideology, or at least putting up guardrails against Trump's policies. By the time the absolute explosion in woke rhetoric happens in the summer of 2020 Trump has been in office for four years. His administration had an entire term to prevent what they saw on the horizon in 2016, and they failed absolutely miserably. The thing that irks me the most about right-wing complaints about wokism is that the most egregious examples of it — COVID policy, defund the police, riots, DEI — all happened under Trump's watch.
And then, as soon as Biden was elected, things started to cool down. Two members of The Squad were voted out of office this spring, and AOC has become a mainstream Pelosi acolyte. DEI people are being laid off. Robin D'Angelo is unemployed. Ibram X. Kendi hasn't published anything in years. Kamala Harris still has some vaguely woikish things in her arsenal, but she's backtracked on most of the woke positions she took in 2019. Republicans are criticizing her for this. Republican complaints about wokism seem anachronistic at this point; the only time most of these policies even come up is when Republican candidates mention them.
If Trump gets elected, what do you think is going to happen, that his opponents will just shut up? No, we're going to left-wing opposition to absolutely every one of his policy proposals, regardless of whether these proposals are actually right-wing or not. The entire Democratic apparatus will shift into a mode of limiting the damage as much as possible, and this will include protests, and resistance to policy changes and all the other bullshit that happened during the first Trump term. And Trump will be about as effective in stopping it as he was in his first term, unless he wants to turn the country into a full-on police state. I'm not saying you shouldn't vote what you feel, but if you seriously think that a Trump presidency will put an end to whatever woke bullshit you're concerned about, I have some swamp land in Jersey that's for sale.
This is the opposite of my memory of 2016. Hillary was the candidate of Institutional Woke and Sanders was the last stand of the Old Left fighting to keep the focus on class issues instead of identity politics.
A key HRC quote that was credited with knocking Sanders out of her way
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That is my recollection as well. Bernie was essentially the last gasp of the labour-oriented non-idw left and now the Teamsters are voting Republican.
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I suspect the Mistake Theorem for this is that wokism's flows and ebbs are on a time lag irrespective of who's President.
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This is just the reversed version of arguing that we should vote for Trump because of the possibilty of another Jan 6th type event.
One can't be held hostage. Even if it's utilitarian true it has too much moral hazard.
Utilitarianism doesn't work when you're playing an intelligent opponent.
The better formulation is "utilitarianism doesn't work if you're an idiot, because then you can't properly calculate utility". Second-order effects like this are supposed to be included in utilitarian calculations; the fact that a lot of people are too stupid to do this doesn't make the theory wrong, just a bad fit for them.
True - Utilitarianism doesn't work even in theory, because it instantly succumbs to combinatorial explosion once you have to account for multiple orders of consequence. The way utilitarians get around this in practice is adding greebles and epicycles until they're effectively back to deontology/virtue ethics/common sense with a quantitative flavour.
I was never much concerned with this kind of argument. Make a reasonable attempt to determine outcomes. That does not involve perfect knowledge or unbounded computational problems. Using a small bit of thought and your best understanding of the situation, you can make a reasonable approximation.
OK, but once you abandon the philosophical consistency of the system and the arguments that justify it, you're left with common sense with some inspiration from utilitarianism. Nothing wrong with that, it just means you're not really that much of a utilitarian (and has the amusing corollary that you'll become a better utilitarian by reading Aristotle than you will by reading Bentham). Of course, this is what the most intelligent utilitarian in history (Mill) did pretty much immediately on thinking seriously about the theory, it just took him a nervous breakdown to get there.
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This sounds like 'if you kill your enemies, they win' but for politics.
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If something straightforwardly helps your opponent and harms you, any claims from him about the opposite are concern trolling or motivated reasoning. The straightforward effect of supporting a side that is more woke is to increase wokeness.
This isn't a real argument at all. It's a sop to blue tribe "rationalists" (and others of similar beliefs) who can see all the problems with their preferred team, but cannot bring themself to consider voting for the other team. This kind of argument gives them a "rational" reason to keep voting Democratic. They fall for it every time, because they want to believe it. We saw it pushed for Biden too, where it had a somewhat better fig leaf. It turned out not to be true (right Admiral Levine?), but that doesn't matter; whatever gives permission to keep voting for Democrats is fine.
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Ah, the old "don't try to win because if you win the backlash will be worse" strategy.
By the same token, if you want open borders you should probably vote Republican right? Or does it only work one way?
This line if reasoning about backlash drives me crazy, depending on the speaker it’s inevitably either dishonest or hopelessly misguided.
I voted against Trump in 2016 for reasons they turned out to be false, and for him in 2020 specifically because of the high probability of a horrendous backlash.
I saw his enemies slip the mask after 2016, I wanted much much more of that. I wanted his enemies to reveal how psychotic and narcissistically hateful that I knew they were, for everyone to see. That way when they popped their heads up to scream ghoulishly for blood, the body politic could (rhetorically) bash their fucking skulls in with whatever was handy (in Minecraft).
Sometimes you have to induce a fever to kill a disease.
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Wokeness was on the upswing in Obama’s 2nd term.
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You are looking for a schmuck to play heads I win, tails you lose here.
There really isn't a point with giving in to people who act like this. The correct treatment to people who make such demands is to understand their open hostility and treat people who are hostile to your agenda and try to manipulate you into losing, as people who are in fact hostile to your agenda, and are just using arguments as soldiers and willing to play dirty. The later is important information that justifies a stronger and more decisive reaction.
It is of course insulting. By offering this blatantly bad self destructive advice you are telling the right and the people you are discussing with, not without any reason since this arrogance has been cultivated by much of the political space uselessness and spinelessness against the left, that you think they are enormously gullible.
This escalation is helpful since it helps clarifies even more so the uselessness of appeasement. This tactic of lose, or we will massively overreact and you have to give in, or we will make things far worse, does not work on people who have a modicum of intellectual courage, aren't highly gullible, and so I think you chose a poor strategy. In addition to it being a disreputable tactic. It actually is going to piss off your targets that you think so low of them, that you can manipulate them in this manner.
Yeah, the world doesn't work the way that this poster imagines.
In game theory, if you hurt someone and they continue to support you, then the obvious thing to do is to hurt them even more.
There's even a word that starts with C for people who ingratiate themselves to those who harm them.
I don't know what it is, but this attitude fills me with more contempt than actual woke people. Woke people are pretty upfront about what they want: an explicit hierarchy with white men at the bottom. It's evil, but at least its an ethos.
But white men who support this agenda disgust me. The most contemptible thing a person can do is not defend their own rights. Who would ever want to be brothers or friends with a person who hates themselves? Who would want someone in their tribe who would cry tears for strangers but not for their own family?
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Repetition and italics are no substitute for an argument for a claim as strong as the one you are making here. Not only can't you think of any other way, but you are also convinced that the rolled up newspaper would work? On what basis?
Do you think that with the tables turned, it works on you? Does the cultural strategy run by progressives for the past n years, with your candidates dragged through courts and media, your adherents marginalised from work and education, and your cultural artifacts vandalised, not amount to repeated blows with a rolled-up newspaper to the nose of anti-wokes? I assume that their doing of this is based on a very similar sentiment as yours, so why is it not working for them? Why are you not convinced yet that anti-wokeness is Not Okay?
It has largely worked for the woke. A large portion of the population has gone from fervently supporting color blindness to fervently supporting affirmative action, and so on for every other social issue. It doesn’t convert everyone. It doesn’t have to.
This seems to be saying that beating anti-wokes with a newspaper convinced those who were already members of the progressive coalition to get with the program and update to a different sub-ideology in their camp, not that it had any effect to dissuade those who were targeted by it. You could argue that there was a similar pool of proto-allies that merely needed to be scared into backing a promising new strategy when Trumpism first came around and had to fight against older schools of conservatism in the Republican coalition, but by now that pool seems to have been largely exhausted.
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They did learn a lesson from 2016; Biden the 2020 candidate was considerably more moderate. The problem is that Biden the 2021-2024 President, or rather his administration, wasn't moderate at all, because apparently the lesson they learned was "fake being moderate on the campaign trail and then exploit it once in power".
I think your only hope on this path is that the Democratic machine politicians are pragmatic enough to be willing to appeal to the centre and far-sighted enough to realise that tricking them is not a long-term solution and powerful enough to force the SJer groundswell into line; I'm not rating that very highly.
I think the ultimate way to deal with this has to include shattering all of SJ's walled gardens, so that they get to start seeing rightists first-hand as people, and so that their Authority foundation stops locking onto HR ladies and similar types. This, admittedly, does require power, and lots of it.
It's worth calling out that this was the lesson they learned from Obama. Obama campaigned as a moderate then, twice, betrayed the expectations of people who wanted a moderate. He was expected to do things like help heal racial divisions, not just by being a black man in power, but by actively holding the door open to black Americans to enter the political mainstream. Instead he said Trayvon Martin looked like he could be his son. He was expected to reform American healthcare (a very key issue at the time, when lots of people were losing access to employer provided health insurance during the Great Recession) but ended up creating (what was perceived as) a complex and expensive left wing boondoggle.
This pissed a lot of people off, but only people who were paying close attention. Republicans cleaned up in the House in 2010 and in the Senate in 2014 because only the people who care about politics enough to pay attention voted in mid-terms. Democratic strategists noticed and they started to reconsider the Clinton strategy of actually being a moderate and thought about, instead, just looking like a moderate in election season. They felt like the learned the wrong lesson from 1996, where Bill's hard turn right had led to him recovering his popularity and resoundingly beating expectations after becoming the first Democratic President to lose Congress in half a century. Gore, despite his obsession with global warming, was nevertheless one step above a Blue Dog in a lot of ways and Kerry was considering an acceptably moderate alternative to John Edwards. It was only when Obama swept in 2008 and then still won re-election 2012 that it was decided that actually being moderate wasn't what mattered.
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Right, wokeness took the class of credentialed expert Democrats consider suitable for appointment to government positions by storm. Democratic appointees will be woke by default. Having a moderate at the top of the ticket isn't enough to produce a non-woke Democratic administration. You'd need someone at the top of the ticket who understood wokeness and was actively against it.
Even then, against the present backdrop of elite ideological opinion they'd have a very hard time sourcing non-woke appointees and staffers; they'd constantly be fighting woke flareups in their own administration, and the woke are masterful at causing PR nightmares or internal organizational strife when they don't get their way.
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Well, more specifically, Biden couldn’t be moderate because the available people to staff his admin aren’t. For similar reasons republican admins have to be pro-life.
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