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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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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.

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.