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This post is mostly correct, but feels like it's 6 years old. This was definitely going on during High Woke during Trump 45, but it's become less prevalent now. It's still occurring in a few areas, but D's have largely understood they've shot themselves in the foot and are backpedaling.
Here in Europe, I actually think it’s worse than ever. Maybe it’s the war atmosphere our media and elite are desperate to drum up.
It was never that bad in Europe in the first place - primarily because we have both laws and norms against firing an employee based on a social media campaign by their political opponents.
Yes - we don't have as strong protections against government censorship as the US. But a court appearance and three-figure fine (which is what happened to most of the people "arrested for posting memes") is actually less damaging that losing your income and health insurance.
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Not sure about that. I'd say it has been worse.
I think overall people are just more insecure than they used to be. Trump getting reelected, right-wing parties gaining more support, war making a comeback in Europe, the whole goddamned pandemic episode, Überfremdung (increasing numbers of foreigners) becoming noticeable to normies - all of that shook people, one way or another. The instinctive desire to take the moral high ground and preach remains, but it seems that most of the regular people who would turn into opportunistic preachers are sufficiently unsure of the world right now that they're much subdued compared to a few years ago.
I think I should have been more specific - I'm not really talking about wokeness or cancel culture as it's existed in the past decade per se, I agree that's it's on a downward trend and that many people are now much more comfortable with opting out of progressive discourse or openly critiquing it. Especially today, "cancelling" someone carries much less weight than it did years ago, because there's now a massive contingency of the population that considers being "anti-woke" as it's own social identity and relishes in provoking and triggering the progressive project. You can quite literally make a career off being cancelled today, and the only ones who seem to truly suffer from cancellation anymore are left-liberal people enmeshed in progressive media and activism (which in turn gives the anti-woke crowd even more incentive to keep the siege atmosphere within the Left going and watch them tear each other apart).
What I'm trying to get at feels more like a kind of bitterness or "lashing out" of the liberal project towards its supposed own subjects. The pretence of being a self-justified, End of History blueprint for civilisation that wins based on the superior civic and economic model it offers compared to the dark and tyrannical systems of "the past" seems to be evaporating - all they still offer is the rhetorical comfort of being on "the good side" and how this fulfils some supposed higher historical purpose. They no longer have a believable hegemony in assuring a high standard of living, personal liberties (I think they truly do not understand how much of an anti-system awakening the pandemic was for many people), or embodying the will of the people (Migration being the most obvious case, but also Von der Leyen being weaselled into the leadership of the EU despite not being on the ballot) - so being on "the good side" seems to have next to zero actual advantages aside from validating bourgeois sensibilities and assuring you'll be invited to the next dinner party.
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I live in a deep blue area, I can confirm that while there is some renewed understanding of reality, its penetration has been very nonuniform.
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Months, maybe. No backpedaling was happening until Trump won again, and I'm still not convinced it's happening.
Don Lemon was on Maher’s podcast and argued that character’s like AOC hold the future of the Democratic Party in their hands. I’ve seen this sentiment echoed elsewhere from other well connected democrat-operatives within the media.
It galls me that someone would believe that the democrats lost because they ran with candidates that cynically pushed woke talking points and instead the party’s future will be saved by candidates that actually believe those same woke talking points.
Whilst cynicism is always an ugly trait when trying to win hearts and minds, it was actually a point in favour in comparison to genuinely promoting wokism - at least from the perspective of your average voter.
The steelman of their theory of the case is that people like AOC combine both economic leftism with the identity politics.
So it's more the idea that the other wing of the party uses idpol cynically to appear more left-wing because it's not economically populist enough("will breaking up the big banks end racism?") to win. AOC meanwhile will deliver on the bread and butter issues people care about while soothing the idpol wing of the Democrats.
This theory might have made sense for Hillary. But Biden did subscribe to everything bagel liberalism and failed in spite (or because) of his economic populism.
Ultimately I think it's an attempt by Democrats to have their cake and eat it too. They have no real way to untangle themselves from their identity politics. It's the belief system of too many educated, politically engaged liberals. Bernie bent to it because you can't run a campaign if the Voxs of the world are attacking you for being anti-immigrant because you think they lower blue-collar wages and all of the people who volunteer, who donate and call in all have the same politics.
So the theory is to simply bypass the problem: if Democrats provide healthcare, housing and jobs they won't have to choose and can just drag the working class along with them. The culture war is a "distraction", in the sense that their views should not be compromised on but that the opposing views are obviously not as important to their opponents as material conditions.
Obvious problems are that this is assuming that their cultural beliefs don't hurt their ability to deliver (@johnfabian has pointed out the issues in left-wing urbanism which simply needs to resolve its issue with things like endless vetos and crime to go anywhere). And that their very refusal to bend on these issues gives the lie to the idea that it's all just ephemera. If they won't bend despite the incentives to do so, why should their opponents?
It's some cargo cult attempt to recreate an FDR coalition in an age of identity politics with pseudo-Marxist handwaves that no one actually consistently holds to.
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She’s enough of a snake that when it comes time to embrace a different message she will not skip a beat.
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