Hear, hear. Weiss's Free Press seemed to begin life as a worthy check on progressive excess. I cheered that, because I thought such excess was wrong on its own merits but also because it enabled the likes of Trump. I never thought that it would become a quasi-pro-Trump outlet itself. It's very disappointing; it's the worst example of a smart "heterodox" figure losing the plot.
A lot of the Free Press readership will vote for Trump because of the appalling stance on Israel so prevalent among the woke. This is evident from the comments sections. Trump policies have been far more pro-Israel and wiser in my view. I still won't vote for him (who knows what he'll do tomorrow), but if he wins I'll take comfort in the fact that the vacuous Harris has lost, and perhaps the Democratic party will begin putting the woke in their proper place.
I agree with the author that hoping for an anti-woke corrective in the wake of a Trump win seems misguided. Experience should lead us to expect the opposite. Wokeism feeds on Trump. I date the rise of wokeism to Trump and Floyd, which seemed to break a lot of brains. With Harris, I think we have reason to expect woke forces to be akin to those much feared and ballyhooed Palestinian protests at the DNC: small, locked out, and dismissed.
Wokeism (or critical studies) began infecting academia long before Trump was even a gameshow host. It metastasized from there to the systemic problem it is now. It will plague us until the woke indoctrination is somehow turned back. I think without this virulent ideology, Trump would have gone nowhere as his base arose largely from hatred of the woke left. Now counter-animosity fuels the woke and MAGA in a spiraling cycle.
My sixth grade science teacher once asked us to perform an experiement - to pick any common word and begin repeating it in our minds, over and over and over. As he knew, and we soon found out, the word became simply a meaningless sound, lacking any connection to whatever object or reality it had once had.
As an American of nearly 80 years and a life-long Independent, I’ve collected a basket of words common to American political discourse that have long since fallen into that category of meaninglessness. They include woke, Marxist, communist, socialist, libertarian, progressive, fascist, Republican, Democrat, conservative, Christian, Muslim, radical, atheist, and liberal among others. Now I can add ‘garbage’.
And no, I'm not saying that any of those words don’t have actual dictionary meanings - they all do - but in our public discourse they have all too often become political, social, and often religious weapons rather than letter collections with specific meanings. Too often they apply to whoever we like or don’t like rather than to strict dictionary meanings.
What matters here in our present political, social, and religious madhouse is not buzz words, but character. What matters here are actions, not just the avalanche of words repeated so often without regard to what they actually mean.
In any measure of character and action, Donald Trump and JD Vance fall far below Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, andTim Walz.
Ms Harris is not perfect - no human being ever born was or is But she does have the well-being of the country she loves at the heart of her campaign. She isn’t sure how to achieve that well-being (I know of no one who really does, despite all the rhetoric flying around), but she does intend to try. Donald Trump does not. He intends only his own well-being. He does not love this country, only himself. He does not love or honor his fellow Americans, only himself.
Everyone and his brother and sister and sibling and neighbors and everyone else with a media presence is busy predicting a Harris presidency for better or for worse. But the fact is, and it is well proven, that predicting what a candidate will do once in the Oval Office is a very risky endeavor. The office puts its own stamp on those very few Americans who have occupied it because one cannot know for sure what the reality of that increasingly awesome responsibility will do to all the campaign rhetoric or to the character of the one actually faced with it.
But we have the advantage of knowing what Donald Trump has already made of that responsibility. He shirked it, as he did the responsibility of military service to the country he claims to so love. His occupancy of that office was all about himself, not the country. For him, the presidency was just one more publicity stunt, a cash cow, and a way to thumb his nose at all those whom he felt had not given him his due amount of respect and admiration.
Unfortunately, too many people (who've been derided by the Establishment and the Clerisy as ignorant plebians) identify with the nose-thumbing by that parvenu from Queens -- overlooking the fact that (unlike them) he's the heir to a real estate empire (i.e., a landlord) who grew up in a mansion in Jamaica Estates. Too bad Bernie's so old; he'd have been far better suited to carry that populist torch. (Unfortunately, the Establishment and the Clerisy had other ideas.)
Thumbing one's nose at the Establishment -- in and of itself -- is not a problem (and, IMO, is richly deserved). Those who dismiss it as "puerile" or "adolescent" are the sorts of snobs that got us into this electoral pickle in the first place.
The Free Press is becoming a big disappointment. Very pro-Trump, at least the commenters are and many of the writers. Yes, I detest "WOKE" and know it won't go away easily. Harris might be less woke than the Biden team. BUT, Trump is exponentially more extreme, and the venom against women (and Harris herself) is astounding. Plus he is deeply flawed and corrupt in so many other dimensions. The double standard at the Free Press is repugnant.
The left work ideology is mainstream Democrat. The right white male supremist ideology is fringe... very fringe... so fringe that writers here like Cathy have to really scrape the bottom of the barrel to try and draw any moral comparison.
Come on you 3rd wave radical postmodernist cultural Marxist feminists. Find another hobby instead of trying to beat down real men because they would not take you to the prom. Rejoice in your success at creating gender equality... and start working on the problem of increased depression and mental health issues for women in general.
Meanwhile, the meritocracy is wonderful, fantastic, fundamental and not going anywhere. No shortcuts in line because you are a member of some self-defined woke victim group. Just get out there and show the bosses you can kick ass better than your male peers, and the bosses will gladly given you the promotion and raise.
One last point... I am working to provide interview questions that identify the level of woke ideology injected into the brains of candidates so that they don't get hired where they will spread their toxic grievance-based parasitic mind virus on the work culture. There is a lot of woke purging going on (Musk got the ball rolling). The woke kids better REALLY wake up soon, or their economic futures will be in tatters.
I don't support purging for ideological reasons unless the ideology is a threat to the work culture. This is all business... and a business can be destroyed by just a few employees with a grievance mindset.
This is in fact the fatal flaw in woke. It attempts to dismantle the meritocracy based on a lie that today there are people with group identity that are oppressed and thus deserve to be placed at the head of the line. And if they are not placed at the head of the line, they have a grievance they will file. That type of thing can be implemented in government jobs and some non-profits because productive efficiency isn't needed for the organization to survive. But in the private sector of hyper competition because the same fools pushing woke have pushed corporatist globalism, business cannot survive unless the employees are focused on performance on the job and only performance on the job.
If that's so, you need to change the grievance procedure to excise the very locus of such frivolous and counterproductive escapades. Management needs to eliminate the dysfunctional bureaucracies where these travesties take root -- entire departments if need be (by function, not by targeting specific personnel) -- that are sapping the strength of the overall organization. That's a matter of husbanding resources -- eliminating waste, plain and simple.
If the bureaucracies are already so entrenched that they can't be eliminated, let the talented people leave and start their own enterprise -- in effect, purge themselves. At that point, how long are the wokesters who remain behind (whine as they might) likely to stay in business?
If the enterprise is already too large (and too well-established and heavily capitalized) for this to be possible, you have a larger problem -- and it won't be solved by a blacklist.
See Joseph Schumpeter on how capitalism devolves into (and is supplanted by) managerial bureaucracy. Welcome to the Era of Stagnation!
The question is, how does a free society emerge from this predicament without imposing authoritarian measures (ultimately developing its own brand of autocratic bureaucracy) -- thereby cutting off its nose to spite its face?
That's not how Communism was defeated. We need an Eisenhower or a JFK, not a Joe McCarthy (a Gorbachev, not a Putin). We're at a very tricky juncture, and it's crucial that we get this right.
(For variations on this theme, also see (e.g.) Michael Lind, Joel Kotkin, Musa al-Gharbi, Yascha Mounk...)
I see things being a bit more simple to explain I think. I will preface my opinion on this with the point that I understand the history of American politics and the fact that it has often been rancorous and the nation has faced many seemingly nation-killing conflicts among its people. I think we evolved from all of that evolving to a certain national consensus that served a relative peace until today. Call that the Great Consensus. The Great Consensus is explained as a list of traditional American values and truths that became ubiquitous in the minds of the vast majority of Americans. This, like for almost any nation, becomes the glue that holds the nation together.
I think the problem today is that there are some that still reject that national consensus and others, young people, that don't understand it well enough. Of course too we have increased the percentage of immigrants and have thus overwhelmed the nation's ability to assimilate these people into the national consensus. And thus we are back at the nation-threatening conflict. However, I see the conflict being more easy to diagnose and solve than previously (where real civil war was required).
Today the primary conflict comes from two powerful self-serving cults against the Great Consensus. One is the cult of Wall Street and corporate greed. These are people that pray to a God of corrupted capitalism... where the pursuit of profit and investment returns at any cost to society is justified and right. Note that this isn't capitalism as practiced, it is corporatism or worse. The other cult is of our social and economic malcontents. These people pray to the God of radical system disruption (because they feel that the current system as designed does not serve them well enough). They have always existed and never really bought into the great consensus because they feel they deserve more, but we have more of them today for a couple of reasons. One reason is the changes to our domestic economy where economic opportunity to achieve the American Dream has been diminished by the actions of the corporatist cult. Another reason is that we have over-educated the population and set too many irrational expectations for achieving high social and economic status.
Now, what has happened is that the first cult has co-opted the second cult to given it more power an voice as a way to distract from the developed understanding of the threat of the first cult. That threat is the bigger one.
There have been at least three events over the last 30 years that should have been crucibles of national consensus reeling understanding. One was the tech stock collapse in the late 90s. The other was the Great Recession. The most recent was the global pandemic. All of this was the cult of corporatist greed showing us their faces and cards. All three of these things, along with the decades of the slow killing of middle class economic opportunity from the offshoring of American jobs, should have been enough to cause the uprising of lower 80% to say enough is enough.
But revolutions to take back a country from the tyrants take time to energize. People are fearful of losing what they have, and that is the key to how tyrants control them. Slowly they people get looted by the tyrants... they own less and less over time... which makes them clutch more tightly and protect the little that they do retain. Eventually the masses wake up to the need to risk their declining possessions to combat the tyrants.
The tyrants knowing this employed the second cult as a distraction. If the masses could be made to combat the malcontent radicals, they would forget about the corporatist looters and thus the looting could continue.
The two cults are a minority. The majority is comprised of people that understand and support the Great Consensus, and a younger cohort that is missing the lessons. However, the younger cohort is waking up. We see examples all over the world like the recent defeat of the German ADf party (the party comprised of those same two cults in Germany).
From my perspective we are one the edge of defeating the power that the tyrants hold over us.
Now, once we return to government by the people, of the people and for the people and not government by the ruling class, of the ruling class and for the ruling class... we will have some work to do to dismantle the power of the tyrants. I hope Trump retains Lina Khan as the Federal Trade Commission chief. Her ideas are key... too much corporate consolidation... too much destruction of small business... too much Wall Street ownership. The key to getting us back to a healthy country in compliance with the Great Consensus is to bring back capitalism to what it has always been designed to be... an economic system that serves the domestic population not just the globalist elite.
I agree with much of the above comment: In fact, I could sum it up succinctly by saying (as I have in the past), "As we pick each other to pieces over 'Pronouns' and 'Privilege,' the oligarchs keep laughing all the way to the bank."
My concern is with the danger of a cure that's worse than the disease. I don't see Trump expunging the oligarchs, but -- rather -- closing ranks with a faction of them that choose to be his cronies, thus putting the looting on steroids. I see plenty of indications to that effect, and little to the contrary.
Meanwhile, based on historical precedent (in the US and elsewhere), I'm wary of the tendency for opposition to "globalism" to morph into scapegoating (especially Diaspora) Jews. (See Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," not to overlook the history of Nazi Germany.)
I'm not carrying water here for George Soros and his ilk -- but when the pitchforks and torches come out, the mobs generally don't turn out to be as discerning as you might have us believe. (See also, Charlottesville.)
To escape their wrath, when will I need to remove the mezuzah from my door?
PS: FWIW, I voted for Bernie (as a California write-in, in preference to Nurse Ratched) in the 2016 general election -- but I (among others) also feared the very sort of antisemitic scenario I've described if he'd run against Trump.
I see you explaining the extremes as being the threat when the middle is big and powerful and moderate. The problem is that the middle has been asleep and unmotivated, or put in a mode of fear or distractions overwhelming its collective movement to demand an end to the meddling of the extremes.
The pitchforks will come out if it gets bad enough, but it isn't that bad. I think there is more reason to fear the guns and flamethrowers will come out from the armies of minority extremists enabled and encouraged by the Regime. We saw it during the pandemic with the BLM and Antifa riots.
I have more faith in the middle because of the Great Consensus. I have more faith in moderate power in this country. We have a constitution and bill of rights. I don't see any real risk of sliding over and back to real fascism or that form of collectivism that is the same reported rise of the proletariat against the bourgeoise. In reality those uprisings were never really any ground-up revolt, they were a conflict of two factions of elites with one exploiting soft brains of youth and corrupted brains of malcontents. We do see that from the Democrats. The We Will Resist protests along with the BLM movement which was 90% political in support of the Democrats... as was all the Antifa violence in Portland and other cities. However, these are still fringe groups doing this. The American middle is strong. The only thing preventing it from upwelling to correct the problems of the extremes is that the youth is brainwashed and just waking up. But they are waking up. And they are slowly grasping the principles of the Great Consensus.
It is US against THEM... THEM being the globalist establishment power. US being the American public. Trump is the only candidate on the stage that is anti-establishment. That is why they have tried to take him out with every means possible including assassination.
I would never NEVER vote for Mr. Trump. But he may well win this election, and if he does, I am wholly convinced that his win should be attributed almost entirely to the excesses of the Woke Left. Its most extreme advocates have much to answer for.
I am always on the edge of unsubscribing to The Free Press, and then they come up with an excellent article or video, and I don't I find the anti anti Trump stance tiresome, and I am not sure if I can put up with this poor judgment much longer.
This is great on detailing the journeys of several public figures from anti-woke to pro-Trump (or anti-anti-Trump). Too bad they can't follow the example of Sam Harris, Steven Pinker and other true classical liberals. The deeper problem is the hardcore Trump base. This base might not exist if the woke problem hadn't gotten so bad. The Trump base hates the woke attitude so much that they love Trump for "fighting" it. Wokeness is the reason we may have another Trump term, and the primary reason we had a first one.
Woke is toxic femininity. Think of a 'White Fragility' group whining, weeping, and pumping up guilt to show how compassionate they are, how they feel. Or the endless political activity in support of all the disadvantaged and oppressed. The suppression of speech is more of the same: be nice, don't say nasty hurtful things. And the response to it by MAGA is toxic masculinity.
The current political polarization is the battle of the sexes--at their worst.
Let me be very clear. If elected, Donald Trump will do all he can to shred the Constitution, destroy our Republic, and establish an autocracy controlled by him. No sane citizen should vote for him.
Having said this, I certainly understand why many people are deeply alienated by Kamela Harris’ Democrats. Especially people like me; white, male, straight, and reasonably successful. Woke liberals go to great lengths to stereotype straight white males as privileged oppressors, whose lives are built on the suffering of their intersectional victims and who are driven by an uncontrollably toxic masculinity. We are, in other words, the enemy. We should not vote for Trump, but it is insane to expect us to jump with both feet into Kamela’s wagon.
I'm "white, male, straight, and reasonably successful". So is Doug Emhoff. I don't think any mainstream democrat would think me their enemy. The campus left and BLM types will be increasingly marginalized. I fear not the woke.
This is an absolutely superb article. It is a mistake to think a person or even a party holds up these two dangerously illiberal attitudes. MAGA and WOKE will not disappear if either the Trump or the Bernie Squad disappears. These insidious undercurrents are not new; they always within us, WOKE and MAGA are a disease like shingles always there silently until the body becomes weak. A vote for Trump is not a vote against WOKE in the least. Nor is a vote for Jill Stein or Kamala Harris a vote against MAGA. America has a broken heart. And brokenhearted people can be extremely hateful. What broke our heart as a nation? Nobody deeply in love would join either the Wokish or the Magish. So why are we such a heartbroken people?
I heartily agree with the sentiment of this article -- but "the Bernie squad"? Bernie was never "woke"! (Remember when he was assailed by those BLM protestors?)
Unfortunately, times have changed -- and (notwithstanding Bernie's support) the Squad are a very different matter.
It's so easy to fall into the trap of believing that all danger/evil/whatever you want to call it comes from a single source, even though it should be overwhelmingly obvious that life doesn't work like that. I suspect our religious heritage has a lot to do with it.
Why did Trump win? Because the dominant elites were wedded to a woke ideology that Americans can't (and won't) accept. Let me use one example:
Just before the election Glenn Kessler gave Donald Trump 4 Pinocchio’s for claiming that Imane Khelif was/is a man. So much for fact checking. How about runaway media/elite bias? In real life, D. Trump was right and G. Kessler was wrong. The French endocrinologists who examined Imane Khelif found that he was/is male. The Bicetre hospital report leaked.
Public employees have become a major constituency of the Democratic Party. This should bother you. It threatens to turn government of the people by the people for the people into government of the people by the government for the government.
The IRS becomes noticeably more nasty under Democratic administration, often aimed at the administration’s political opponents.
Bank regulators pressure financial institutions to follow Democratic policy priorities. Obama wanted to cut gun manufacturers off from the financial system. It’s a clear run around the second amendment.
At the same time agencies mount lame brained operations, confident that the administration will cover for them.
It is difficult to change a bureaucracy’s direction, but Republicans have more difficulty. A Trump administration can’t count on the same kinds of support the Democrats get.
There are two disjoint lines of criticism against the strain of illiberal progressivism that gets short-handed to "woke".
The first is focused on its illiberalism: the primacy it ascribes to racial and gender identity; its authoritarian impulse to restrict speech to what is "objectively" correct; its Manichean division of the world into oppressors and oppressed.
The second line is rooted in a radically inegalitarian model of human nature, in which human ability and performance are almost entirely genetic in source, as are all outcome differences between races, national origins, and genders. In this view, group inequalities are a natural state, and efforts to redress them are misguided: the best use of government and culture is to protect and preserve established hierarchies, and to resist efforts by disadvantaged groups to try to climb the greasy pole and grab more than their fair share.
The transition we see some of the "anti-wokers" make is that they start with the first line of criticism, then gradually decide they're happier with the second one. That is where they go off the rails.
Hear, hear. Weiss's Free Press seemed to begin life as a worthy check on progressive excess. I cheered that, because I thought such excess was wrong on its own merits but also because it enabled the likes of Trump. I never thought that it would become a quasi-pro-Trump outlet itself. It's very disappointing; it's the worst example of a smart "heterodox" figure losing the plot.
A lot of the Free Press readership will vote for Trump because of the appalling stance on Israel so prevalent among the woke. This is evident from the comments sections. Trump policies have been far more pro-Israel and wiser in my view. I still won't vote for him (who knows what he'll do tomorrow), but if he wins I'll take comfort in the fact that the vacuous Harris has lost, and perhaps the Democratic party will begin putting the woke in their proper place.
I agree with the author that hoping for an anti-woke corrective in the wake of a Trump win seems misguided. Experience should lead us to expect the opposite. Wokeism feeds on Trump. I date the rise of wokeism to Trump and Floyd, which seemed to break a lot of brains. With Harris, I think we have reason to expect woke forces to be akin to those much feared and ballyhooed Palestinian protests at the DNC: small, locked out, and dismissed.
Wokeism (or critical studies) began infecting academia long before Trump was even a gameshow host. It metastasized from there to the systemic problem it is now. It will plague us until the woke indoctrination is somehow turned back. I think without this virulent ideology, Trump would have gone nowhere as his base arose largely from hatred of the woke left. Now counter-animosity fuels the woke and MAGA in a spiraling cycle.
I agree. A big disappointment.
My sixth grade science teacher once asked us to perform an experiement - to pick any common word and begin repeating it in our minds, over and over and over. As he knew, and we soon found out, the word became simply a meaningless sound, lacking any connection to whatever object or reality it had once had.
As an American of nearly 80 years and a life-long Independent, I’ve collected a basket of words common to American political discourse that have long since fallen into that category of meaninglessness. They include woke, Marxist, communist, socialist, libertarian, progressive, fascist, Republican, Democrat, conservative, Christian, Muslim, radical, atheist, and liberal among others. Now I can add ‘garbage’.
And no, I'm not saying that any of those words don’t have actual dictionary meanings - they all do - but in our public discourse they have all too often become political, social, and often religious weapons rather than letter collections with specific meanings. Too often they apply to whoever we like or don’t like rather than to strict dictionary meanings.
What matters here in our present political, social, and religious madhouse is not buzz words, but character. What matters here are actions, not just the avalanche of words repeated so often without regard to what they actually mean.
In any measure of character and action, Donald Trump and JD Vance fall far below Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, andTim Walz.
Ms Harris is not perfect - no human being ever born was or is But she does have the well-being of the country she loves at the heart of her campaign. She isn’t sure how to achieve that well-being (I know of no one who really does, despite all the rhetoric flying around), but she does intend to try. Donald Trump does not. He intends only his own well-being. He does not love this country, only himself. He does not love or honor his fellow Americans, only himself.
Everyone and his brother and sister and sibling and neighbors and everyone else with a media presence is busy predicting a Harris presidency for better or for worse. But the fact is, and it is well proven, that predicting what a candidate will do once in the Oval Office is a very risky endeavor. The office puts its own stamp on those very few Americans who have occupied it because one cannot know for sure what the reality of that increasingly awesome responsibility will do to all the campaign rhetoric or to the character of the one actually faced with it.
But we have the advantage of knowing what Donald Trump has already made of that responsibility. He shirked it, as he did the responsibility of military service to the country he claims to so love. His occupancy of that office was all about himself, not the country. For him, the presidency was just one more publicity stunt, a cash cow, and a way to thumb his nose at all those whom he felt had not given him his due amount of respect and admiration.
So the choice seems utterly clear to me.
In fact, your excellent characterization of DJT’s reactive “nose thumbing” seems as puerile a victimizing stance as Mr. Kendi’s.
Unfortunately, too many people (who've been derided by the Establishment and the Clerisy as ignorant plebians) identify with the nose-thumbing by that parvenu from Queens -- overlooking the fact that (unlike them) he's the heir to a real estate empire (i.e., a landlord) who grew up in a mansion in Jamaica Estates. Too bad Bernie's so old; he'd have been far better suited to carry that populist torch. (Unfortunately, the Establishment and the Clerisy had other ideas.)
Thumbing one's nose at the Establishment -- in and of itself -- is not a problem (and, IMO, is richly deserved). Those who dismiss it as "puerile" or "adolescent" are the sorts of snobs that got us into this electoral pickle in the first place.
The Free Press is becoming a big disappointment. Very pro-Trump, at least the commenters are and many of the writers. Yes, I detest "WOKE" and know it won't go away easily. Harris might be less woke than the Biden team. BUT, Trump is exponentially more extreme, and the venom against women (and Harris herself) is astounding. Plus he is deeply flawed and corrupt in so many other dimensions. The double standard at the Free Press is repugnant.
Well f**k no... excusing my French.
The left work ideology is mainstream Democrat. The right white male supremist ideology is fringe... very fringe... so fringe that writers here like Cathy have to really scrape the bottom of the barrel to try and draw any moral comparison.
Come on you 3rd wave radical postmodernist cultural Marxist feminists. Find another hobby instead of trying to beat down real men because they would not take you to the prom. Rejoice in your success at creating gender equality... and start working on the problem of increased depression and mental health issues for women in general.
Meanwhile, the meritocracy is wonderful, fantastic, fundamental and not going anywhere. No shortcuts in line because you are a member of some self-defined woke victim group. Just get out there and show the bosses you can kick ass better than your male peers, and the bosses will gladly given you the promotion and raise.
One last point... I am working to provide interview questions that identify the level of woke ideology injected into the brains of candidates so that they don't get hired where they will spread their toxic grievance-based parasitic mind virus on the work culture. There is a lot of woke purging going on (Musk got the ball rolling). The woke kids better REALLY wake up soon, or their economic futures will be in tatters.
Be careful before you start compiling blacklists or running purges! Two wrongs don't make a right.
I don't support purging for ideological reasons unless the ideology is a threat to the work culture. This is all business... and a business can be destroyed by just a few employees with a grievance mindset.
This is in fact the fatal flaw in woke. It attempts to dismantle the meritocracy based on a lie that today there are people with group identity that are oppressed and thus deserve to be placed at the head of the line. And if they are not placed at the head of the line, they have a grievance they will file. That type of thing can be implemented in government jobs and some non-profits because productive efficiency isn't needed for the organization to survive. But in the private sector of hyper competition because the same fools pushing woke have pushed corporatist globalism, business cannot survive unless the employees are focused on performance on the job and only performance on the job.
If that's so, you need to change the grievance procedure to excise the very locus of such frivolous and counterproductive escapades. Management needs to eliminate the dysfunctional bureaucracies where these travesties take root -- entire departments if need be (by function, not by targeting specific personnel) -- that are sapping the strength of the overall organization. That's a matter of husbanding resources -- eliminating waste, plain and simple.
If the bureaucracies are already so entrenched that they can't be eliminated, let the talented people leave and start their own enterprise -- in effect, purge themselves. At that point, how long are the wokesters who remain behind (whine as they might) likely to stay in business?
If the enterprise is already too large (and too well-established and heavily capitalized) for this to be possible, you have a larger problem -- and it won't be solved by a blacklist.
See Joseph Schumpeter on how capitalism devolves into (and is supplanted by) managerial bureaucracy. Welcome to the Era of Stagnation!
The question is, how does a free society emerge from this predicament without imposing authoritarian measures (ultimately developing its own brand of autocratic bureaucracy) -- thereby cutting off its nose to spite its face?
That's not how Communism was defeated. We need an Eisenhower or a JFK, not a Joe McCarthy (a Gorbachev, not a Putin). We're at a very tricky juncture, and it's crucial that we get this right.
(For variations on this theme, also see (e.g.) Michael Lind, Joel Kotkin, Musa al-Gharbi, Yascha Mounk...)
Great comment.
I see things being a bit more simple to explain I think. I will preface my opinion on this with the point that I understand the history of American politics and the fact that it has often been rancorous and the nation has faced many seemingly nation-killing conflicts among its people. I think we evolved from all of that evolving to a certain national consensus that served a relative peace until today. Call that the Great Consensus. The Great Consensus is explained as a list of traditional American values and truths that became ubiquitous in the minds of the vast majority of Americans. This, like for almost any nation, becomes the glue that holds the nation together.
I think the problem today is that there are some that still reject that national consensus and others, young people, that don't understand it well enough. Of course too we have increased the percentage of immigrants and have thus overwhelmed the nation's ability to assimilate these people into the national consensus. And thus we are back at the nation-threatening conflict. However, I see the conflict being more easy to diagnose and solve than previously (where real civil war was required).
Today the primary conflict comes from two powerful self-serving cults against the Great Consensus. One is the cult of Wall Street and corporate greed. These are people that pray to a God of corrupted capitalism... where the pursuit of profit and investment returns at any cost to society is justified and right. Note that this isn't capitalism as practiced, it is corporatism or worse. The other cult is of our social and economic malcontents. These people pray to the God of radical system disruption (because they feel that the current system as designed does not serve them well enough). They have always existed and never really bought into the great consensus because they feel they deserve more, but we have more of them today for a couple of reasons. One reason is the changes to our domestic economy where economic opportunity to achieve the American Dream has been diminished by the actions of the corporatist cult. Another reason is that we have over-educated the population and set too many irrational expectations for achieving high social and economic status.
Now, what has happened is that the first cult has co-opted the second cult to given it more power an voice as a way to distract from the developed understanding of the threat of the first cult. That threat is the bigger one.
There have been at least three events over the last 30 years that should have been crucibles of national consensus reeling understanding. One was the tech stock collapse in the late 90s. The other was the Great Recession. The most recent was the global pandemic. All of this was the cult of corporatist greed showing us their faces and cards. All three of these things, along with the decades of the slow killing of middle class economic opportunity from the offshoring of American jobs, should have been enough to cause the uprising of lower 80% to say enough is enough.
But revolutions to take back a country from the tyrants take time to energize. People are fearful of losing what they have, and that is the key to how tyrants control them. Slowly they people get looted by the tyrants... they own less and less over time... which makes them clutch more tightly and protect the little that they do retain. Eventually the masses wake up to the need to risk their declining possessions to combat the tyrants.
The tyrants knowing this employed the second cult as a distraction. If the masses could be made to combat the malcontent radicals, they would forget about the corporatist looters and thus the looting could continue.
The two cults are a minority. The majority is comprised of people that understand and support the Great Consensus, and a younger cohort that is missing the lessons. However, the younger cohort is waking up. We see examples all over the world like the recent defeat of the German ADf party (the party comprised of those same two cults in Germany).
From my perspective we are one the edge of defeating the power that the tyrants hold over us.
Now, once we return to government by the people, of the people and for the people and not government by the ruling class, of the ruling class and for the ruling class... we will have some work to do to dismantle the power of the tyrants. I hope Trump retains Lina Khan as the Federal Trade Commission chief. Her ideas are key... too much corporate consolidation... too much destruction of small business... too much Wall Street ownership. The key to getting us back to a healthy country in compliance with the Great Consensus is to bring back capitalism to what it has always been designed to be... an economic system that serves the domestic population not just the globalist elite.
I agree with much of the above comment: In fact, I could sum it up succinctly by saying (as I have in the past), "As we pick each other to pieces over 'Pronouns' and 'Privilege,' the oligarchs keep laughing all the way to the bank."
My concern is with the danger of a cure that's worse than the disease. I don't see Trump expunging the oligarchs, but -- rather -- closing ranks with a faction of them that choose to be his cronies, thus putting the looting on steroids. I see plenty of indications to that effect, and little to the contrary.
Meanwhile, based on historical precedent (in the US and elsewhere), I'm wary of the tendency for opposition to "globalism" to morph into scapegoating (especially Diaspora) Jews. (See Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," not to overlook the history of Nazi Germany.)
I'm not carrying water here for George Soros and his ilk -- but when the pitchforks and torches come out, the mobs generally don't turn out to be as discerning as you might have us believe. (See also, Charlottesville.)
To escape their wrath, when will I need to remove the mezuzah from my door?
PS: FWIW, I voted for Bernie (as a California write-in, in preference to Nurse Ratched) in the 2016 general election -- but I (among others) also feared the very sort of antisemitic scenario I've described if he'd run against Trump.
I see you explaining the extremes as being the threat when the middle is big and powerful and moderate. The problem is that the middle has been asleep and unmotivated, or put in a mode of fear or distractions overwhelming its collective movement to demand an end to the meddling of the extremes.
The pitchforks will come out if it gets bad enough, but it isn't that bad. I think there is more reason to fear the guns and flamethrowers will come out from the armies of minority extremists enabled and encouraged by the Regime. We saw it during the pandemic with the BLM and Antifa riots.
I have more faith in the middle because of the Great Consensus. I have more faith in moderate power in this country. We have a constitution and bill of rights. I don't see any real risk of sliding over and back to real fascism or that form of collectivism that is the same reported rise of the proletariat against the bourgeoise. In reality those uprisings were never really any ground-up revolt, they were a conflict of two factions of elites with one exploiting soft brains of youth and corrupted brains of malcontents. We do see that from the Democrats. The We Will Resist protests along with the BLM movement which was 90% political in support of the Democrats... as was all the Antifa violence in Portland and other cities. However, these are still fringe groups doing this. The American middle is strong. The only thing preventing it from upwelling to correct the problems of the extremes is that the youth is brainwashed and just waking up. But they are waking up. And they are slowly grasping the principles of the Great Consensus.
It is US against THEM... THEM being the globalist establishment power. US being the American public. Trump is the only candidate on the stage that is anti-establishment. That is why they have tried to take him out with every means possible including assassination.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-31/boeing-dismantles-diversity-team-as-pressure-builds-on-new-ceo
I would never NEVER vote for Mr. Trump. But he may well win this election, and if he does, I am wholly convinced that his win should be attributed almost entirely to the excesses of the Woke Left. Its most extreme advocates have much to answer for.
I am always on the edge of unsubscribing to The Free Press, and then they come up with an excellent article or video, and I don't I find the anti anti Trump stance tiresome, and I am not sure if I can put up with this poor judgment much longer.
A wonderful piece! Pair with David Snyder’s ideas on “negative freedom” — “i’ll be free only when…”
This is great on detailing the journeys of several public figures from anti-woke to pro-Trump (or anti-anti-Trump). Too bad they can't follow the example of Sam Harris, Steven Pinker and other true classical liberals. The deeper problem is the hardcore Trump base. This base might not exist if the woke problem hadn't gotten so bad. The Trump base hates the woke attitude so much that they love Trump for "fighting" it. Wokeness is the reason we may have another Trump term, and the primary reason we had a first one.
Woke is toxic femininity. Think of a 'White Fragility' group whining, weeping, and pumping up guilt to show how compassionate they are, how they feel. Or the endless political activity in support of all the disadvantaged and oppressed. The suppression of speech is more of the same: be nice, don't say nasty hurtful things. And the response to it by MAGA is toxic masculinity.
The current political polarization is the battle of the sexes--at their worst.
Let me be very clear. If elected, Donald Trump will do all he can to shred the Constitution, destroy our Republic, and establish an autocracy controlled by him. No sane citizen should vote for him.
Having said this, I certainly understand why many people are deeply alienated by Kamela Harris’ Democrats. Especially people like me; white, male, straight, and reasonably successful. Woke liberals go to great lengths to stereotype straight white males as privileged oppressors, whose lives are built on the suffering of their intersectional victims and who are driven by an uncontrollably toxic masculinity. We are, in other words, the enemy. We should not vote for Trump, but it is insane to expect us to jump with both feet into Kamela’s wagon.
I'm "white, male, straight, and reasonably successful". So is Doug Emhoff. I don't think any mainstream democrat would think me their enemy. The campus left and BLM types will be increasingly marginalized. I fear not the woke.
This is an absolutely superb article. It is a mistake to think a person or even a party holds up these two dangerously illiberal attitudes. MAGA and WOKE will not disappear if either the Trump or the Bernie Squad disappears. These insidious undercurrents are not new; they always within us, WOKE and MAGA are a disease like shingles always there silently until the body becomes weak. A vote for Trump is not a vote against WOKE in the least. Nor is a vote for Jill Stein or Kamala Harris a vote against MAGA. America has a broken heart. And brokenhearted people can be extremely hateful. What broke our heart as a nation? Nobody deeply in love would join either the Wokish or the Magish. So why are we such a heartbroken people?
I heartily agree with the sentiment of this article -- but "the Bernie squad"? Bernie was never "woke"! (Remember when he was assailed by those BLM protestors?)
Unfortunately, times have changed -- and (notwithstanding Bernie's support) the Squad are a very different matter.
"Anarcho/tyranny"? We have a new oxymoron!
It's so easy to fall into the trap of believing that all danger/evil/whatever you want to call it comes from a single source, even though it should be overwhelmingly obvious that life doesn't work like that. I suspect our religious heritage has a lot to do with it.
Why did Trump win? Because the dominant elites were wedded to a woke ideology that Americans can't (and won't) accept. Let me use one example:
Just before the election Glenn Kessler gave Donald Trump 4 Pinocchio’s for claiming that Imane Khelif was/is a man. So much for fact checking. How about runaway media/elite bias? In real life, D. Trump was right and G. Kessler was wrong. The French endocrinologists who examined Imane Khelif found that he was/is male. The Bicetre hospital report leaked.
Public employees have become a major constituency of the Democratic Party. This should bother you. It threatens to turn government of the people by the people for the people into government of the people by the government for the government.
The IRS becomes noticeably more nasty under Democratic administration, often aimed at the administration’s political opponents.
Bank regulators pressure financial institutions to follow Democratic policy priorities. Obama wanted to cut gun manufacturers off from the financial system. It’s a clear run around the second amendment.
At the same time agencies mount lame brained operations, confident that the administration will cover for them.
It is difficult to change a bureaucracy’s direction, but Republicans have more difficulty. A Trump administration can’t count on the same kinds of support the Democrats get.
No shit, Sherlock.
There are two disjoint lines of criticism against the strain of illiberal progressivism that gets short-handed to "woke".
The first is focused on its illiberalism: the primacy it ascribes to racial and gender identity; its authoritarian impulse to restrict speech to what is "objectively" correct; its Manichean division of the world into oppressors and oppressed.
The second line is rooted in a radically inegalitarian model of human nature, in which human ability and performance are almost entirely genetic in source, as are all outcome differences between races, national origins, and genders. In this view, group inequalities are a natural state, and efforts to redress them are misguided: the best use of government and culture is to protect and preserve established hierarchies, and to resist efforts by disadvantaged groups to try to climb the greasy pole and grab more than their fair share.
The transition we see some of the "anti-wokers" make is that they start with the first line of criticism, then gradually decide they're happier with the second one. That is where they go off the rails.