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Here’s what I think. I think that people are looking at their grocery bills, their rent, masking toddlers, shutting down schools, crime in their neighborhoods, chaos on the border, and they’re wondering why everyone they used to trust is still screeching about January 6th like it was Pearl Harbor and Trump like he’s still in charge, and then they finish up by reminding their readers that they’re horribly privileged racists.

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Sigh. Right below your excellent piece in my inbox is the latest Anne Helen Petersen post, an interview with someone who wrote a book titled The Trouble with White Women. As you can imagine, according to the author, we are just the worst. We are exclusionary, hag-like agglomerations of Amy Cooper, Karens, and Sheryl Sandberg. And yet the only contemporary example the author offers of these oppressive white women is Sandberg, who is in fact the target not of most women’s admiration but rather of our censure for her “let them eat cake” attitude toward woman’s problems in the workplace. Otherwise, the only specific examples of oppressive white women are Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Betty Friedan (who committed the sin of giving Paulie Murray a job as her assistant when no one else would). Has the author actually talked with any of the rest of us? It’s pure straw-womanning.

We on the left can’t afford to exclude our allies. We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I write this from Minnesota, where yesterday set a new heat record (55F), and today we’re under a tornado watch. In December. Climate change and economic pressures on regular people are more important than identity politics—I’m sorry, but they just are. If we can get help from people whose souls are flawed, yes, even from middle-aged white ladies like me, then we should take it. And we should stop letting Trump live in our heads. There is work too be done.

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It seems pretty clear to me that 2008 and 2012 were driven more by Obama’s charisma than by actual policy. This explains the wild swings between midterms and general elections better than the vague theory that the emerging majority was too lazy to turn out more than once every four years, and the centrality of the candidate’s personality also explains 2016 and 2020: anti-Clinton feeling was strong enough to enable the equally hated Trump, and anti-Trump feeling was strong enough to enable the non-compelling Biden.

Part of the reason we can’t let Trump go is no Democratic politician with a national profile is anywhere close to as compelling as Obama (or Trump), so all we’ve got is the anti-Trump argument from 2020. The general woke thesis is also a lot easier to advance when you can personify the forces of bigotry in an actual political figure, so that dynamic becomes self reinforcing as well.

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Ah. That was cathartic. Good show, sir.

I remember when I was all-in on Woke thought and vocabulary from about 2013-2016. Trump's election was the first jolt that made me back away from all that. And then my liberal friends started losing their minds and going into a daily moral panic, which only further alienated me.

I'm glad Trump is not running the country, but damn it I am so tired of hearing about him and January 6. It's over. I swear the people obsessing about him actually want him back so they have a cartoonish Big Bad Guy to fight.

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I worked on the Clinton campaign until the Comey report then voted for Howie Hawkins. I have not thought about DJT one bit since 2020.

To me, right now, the Nation and MSNBC are as far away as the moon.

My number one concern is that Julian Assange is not extradited. If it is illegal to demonstrate that our governments act illegally we lose it all.

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Both parties remind me of 80s televangelists, allegedly vessels for the divine yet absolutely focused on Satan-more of your cash to fight Satan! Once your entire political project is defined by contempt for the other (instead of policy or, like, collective spirit), what’s the end game? Try as I might, I just can’t believe that the Democratic Party is trying to win elections anymore.

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“politics is a zero-sum game where marginalized groups can only get ahead if others suffer”.

A while ago a meme was going around saying essentially, share the privilege! Giving someone else some doesn’t mean you get none! This isn’t pie! This isn’t kindergarten!

Then an activist I followed starting tentatively saying “but what if it DID require you [white people] to give something up?”

And just yesterday I saw a screen-grab of a tweet by some academic saying (paraphrasing, but pretty close): what I wish folks understood [because everyone is now “folks” as though that word cancels out all the incomprehensible jargon around it] that equity is not an action, it is a way of being.

That part is literally what she said: equity is something you are, not something you do. Making the test of who is your political ally even narrower because nothing one “does”—support a policy, say—says anything about what one is, inside, in their heart.

Oh my actual god.

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Trump won 2016 by about 55,000 votes across three states. He lost in 2020 by an even smaller margin, about 44,000 votes across another three states. Any result that close is essentially a tie.

I can't speak to Hayes specifically but I suspect that a lot of the angst on the left is because of that result. If Trump lost he was supposed to lose so decisively that a comeback was unthinkable. Instead there is every possibility that he will be back in 2024.

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I agree with much of this, but I do think you fall prey to the same thing you're critiquing Mr. Hayes on.

The concern isn't, was January 6th the greatest threat ever to the republic (no, it wasn't, we had a civil war). But what was it? And was it bad? Good? A failed coup attempt?

Putting my cards on the table, I tend to agree with Bret Deveraux that what we saw was a failed coup attempt, which was farcical only because it failed (https://www.thebulwark.com/ancient-insurrections-and-ours/). And that we underestimate that at our peril.

More broadly however, the problem is what do we do about it and there I don't have a great answer.

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People generally want the agenda Trump ran on: no more pointless foreign wars, a somewhat protectionist economy, sensible immigration reforms - all of it. The voters held their noses to vote for Trump not because they like him personally (being an asshole is his most notable character trait, after all, and always has been), but they wanted those actual outcomes. Ron DeSantis will almost certainly be president in 2025, because he's the best vessel to offer the parts of the Trump agenda so many people wanted, without the weirdness of Trump himself.

You can see how this notion of listening to what voters want and promising to give it to them if he is given the political power to do so both confused and terrified the Clinton campaign, who as Freddie accurately notes, is as mystified by blue collar voters as it is repulsed by them.

The Democrats will continue lurching towards being the boutique party of the Professional Managerial Class, even as that class repels more and more normie voters. The results of that are pretty predictable in the end, but it's probably the only way they'll ever learn.

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I’ve been puzzling over why this analysis doesn’t quite hang together for me, and I think it comes down to this: if ideologically extreme “screaming activists” are the beating heart of the Democratic machine, how is Joe Biden president? Those two points seem mutually incompatible.

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Harry Reid is the one who actually represents the Democratic Party. Notice that his message is about escaping the deep poverty of his hometown, not about doing anything to help it. No matter your background, you can get to the top but make sure you pull up the ladder on your way.

Your focus on what's happening in elite humanities departments shows you're in the same bubble as the people you criticize. Most people wouldn't give a shit about that stuff if the Democrats were actually willing to implement broad social programs to help everyone. It could quietly coexist in the background, like it always has, and doing plenty of good along the way. To the extent anyone has been able to paint run of the mill corporate Democrats like Biden and McAuliffe as emblematic of woke extremism, it's because they don't stand for anything at all so CRT or whatever can fill the void. That's the problem, the inability to offer large swaths of the country anything at all, not what's going on on Twitter or Slack.

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Dec 16, 2021·edited Dec 17, 2021

"They would like very much to not get dragged into any particularly complex conversations about immigration, racism, or trans rights, thank you"

I think immigration and racism are widely and deeply debated across media but trans rights are rarely looked at in any complexity whatsoever beyond "TWAW" vs "they're not".

I think this substack reflects the mainstream media landscape in that regard. Happy to weigh in on immigration and racism with in-depth dedicated pieces, but more caution about debating the trend for gender based rights to supplant sex based rights.

YouTube seems to be the place where this debate plays out (ignoring the bile fueled wastelands of Twitter). Contrapoints, Gender a wider lens and Exulansic go into great depth on the subject for example. It's a subject bypassing many demographics entirely, with only a single 60 Minutes segment coming to mind as a major network show having given voice to doubters of affirmation and speaking to detransitioners.

The BBC podcast series on Stonewall - Nolan Investigates - was the best overview of the debate from a mainstream outlet yet.

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I know it's not the point of your article but Republicans were 100% correct not to reshape who they were because the 2012 post-mortem was "be the Democrats and court the emerging demographics, only less convincingly." Republicans will win by winning the White vote and by peeling off small percentages of non-Black minorities who are dissatisfied by the Democratic circular firing squad - exactly as happened in 2016 and what wasn't that far away from happening in 2020. (You were, to my knowledge, among the first with a national profile to sound the alarm about the Rio Grande Valley, which flipped the script in ways hardly anyone saw coming, except those who try to understand the electorate.)

Trying to be the diet Democrats just alienates actual Republicans, the ones who show up to vote. The value proposition here is that when Republicans can feign normality long enough to at least pretend to care about bread-and-butter concerns, their policies are remarkably palatable to regular people. And when, as you have correctly pointed out, the opposing vision of the country is a depressing* hellscape of ethnic grievances and zero-sum tribalism, no wonder ham-and-eggers will go with the guys who don't say Latinx.

The Sailer strategy is, like it or not, the long-term road to success for Republicans. Democrats have their work cut out for them to oppose it because even the downfall of race-and-Trump liberals won't fix the inherent instability of their electoral coalition, which even more than the post-1970s Republican mix of wealthy blue-bloods and left-behind Whites is a marriage of convenience with no uniting prospect beyond a mutual enemy.

*Depressing but accurate. Multi-ethnic societies are better understood by their censuses than their elections. But it's still better not to treat it as the be-all end-all of human existence.

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We start from very different political philosophies, but I come here because I am also someone who could be considered "elite" that has distanced myself from elite ideas and behaviors.

To speak to left-of-center liberals, your are going to have to be able to see things from their point of view.

I don't label wokesters as Left-of-Center; many speak about Marxist ideas and have a lot in common with you! I don't see them as only elite, I see their collective, decentralized power on social media as populism. So I don't think wokesters have distanced themselves from populism. Its just not your populism. I think populism is much more alive among blue checks on twitter than it is among ordinary citizens that aren't terminally online (at least on the left).

Its likely that neither of us will get ahead - working-class advocates or left-of-center thinkers - if we try to label these things in a way to make the other responsible for them.

Everything that is happening now is a new combination of old components. The old categories don't apply. 40% of Americans have a college degree and that's not some small elite group of people. Twitter is elite and popular politics at the same time.

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A spin onthat old Voltaire quote, "If Trump did not exist, it would be necessary for liberals to invent him.". They cling to Trump so tightly because it's the only way their politics make any sense. He upholds their internal narrative, and confirms everything they want to be true about their enemies. Namely that anyone not on their team is hopelessly bigoted and not worth listening to. Same goes for COVID really, they've used COVID as a cudgel to beat conservative America since day one of the pandemic and everyone knows it. If COVID goes away they lose that weapon...same as Trump.

The important thing to remember about US politics is that it's almost exclusively a circus sideshow where no actual power ever changes hands. They just want you to think it does. Sound and fury signifying nothing.

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