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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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