I will not spend too much time rehashing my view of President Donald Trump for the umpteenth time. I do not like him, but I also do not despise him. I see him for what he is. I also understand how he was created. That has made dealing with the topsy-turvy nature of the past eight months a bit more manageable.
Like it or not, there are a LOT of people who felt that government and the media were teaming up against them for the past two generations or so. They felt that both entities regarded them with contempt. In 2016 they found a Champion for their grief in Trump.
Of course COVID then happened, and the timing produced a longing for normalcy in a good part of the electorate. They found normalcy not in the mercurial Trump, but in a way-past-his-prime Democratic warhorse Joe Biden.
Instead of governing as a moderate and reuniting a fractured nation, Biden (or more likely, his inner circle) chose to double down on the same posturing and policies that created the Trump phenomenon in 2016. Miraculously, they created a climate where a now-convicted Trump could do the impossible, win a Presidential election after losing one and not accepting the results. Wow!
I opined last fall that the election was shaping up (for better or worse) as a Referendum on Woke. That worried me. Because Woke might win.
For definitional purposes…Woke is more than your standard left-leaning beliefs. Wokeness is the pseudo-religious doctrine which teaches that all inequality (real or imagined) is the result of past culpability, not contemporary personal behavior or conduct. There is no chance that personal choices, individual health, or one’s character plays any role. It is a nefarious and poisonous philosophy and worldview that divides all of humanity into a collective binary of noble victims and demonic oppressors.
Woke insists that people be judged by the color of their skin and not the content of their characters, or the merits of their achievements and abilities. Woke demands that a confused man be allowed to share locker room and other intimate facilities with women---and the women who question it are the bad guys.
Wokeness flies in the face of crucial assumptions of liberal democratic politics — the tradition of toleration, the morality of individual freedom, the separation of public and private, the idea that legislating morality is wrong.
Our choices in November perfectly reflected the Pass/Fail Society we created. We were offered the option of fully embracing wokeism and all of its poisonous tenets...or rejecting them in favor of something that was perhaps a bit mean.
I trust the message got through.
Most people will silently put up with woke shit in everyday life, but only if it remains in the halls of academia or Starbucks lobbies. Oh, they may chortle and/or roll their eyes, but they will otherwise be undaunted and uninterested.
But if you force them to choose, you will not like the outcome.
A lot of people in the middle saw Trump and his associated BS as merely distasteful. They also saw Wokeness and it's allies as incompatible with their view of this nation.
Last fall’s surprising election result had a lot to do with the fact that Kamala Harris was utterly talentless as a national political candidate. California should have been her ceiling.
But she was also (correctly) viewed as the DEI candidate. Her very existence on the ticket owed itself to the principles of DEI. If you don’t like that, then you can blame Biden, who made no secret that he was selecting his running mate based primarily on immutable characteristics. It was the perfect distillation of the limitations of woke ideology.
The election post-mortems have shown Gen Z men turning for Trump in a BIG way. That is entirely unsurprising.
How did they expect young men to react to constantly being told their ancestors were the source of all evil in the world? That the best they could aspire to was being an “ally” and tearing everything down and replacing it with a system that STILL held them in utter contempt?
Two generations of liberal women and woke men posing as teachers and school administrators and other leaders of youth wanted to shape the next generation in their images…but instead ended up repulsing them and creating staunch opponents.
Many of these guys came of age during COVID lockdowns. Some had to endure DEI struggle sessions where everything they valued was denigrated and called “progress.” They were constantly pestered with pronoun demands, chided for so-called micro-aggressions, heard silly and vapid land acknowledgements.
After a while, they stopped fearing being cancelled and said, “screw it.”
Donald Trump was the vessel they chose to express their political and social frustrations. Whatever else Trump may be, he was NOT another adult instructing them to “check their privilege,” or “be less white,” or to do something about their “toxic masculinity.”
I am increasingly seeing the Trump Presidency as a national course correction that HAD to happen. DEI and its bastard cousins are simply incompatible with any notion we have of liberal western democratic government ideals and ideas. They cannot co-exist. I think we came quite close to the edge.
Now at some point over the next three-plus years Trump will grossly overstep and make a ton more unforced errors, giving the Democrats a viable shot at taking Congress in 2026 and maybe more in 2028.
But I truly think the worst of Woke is behind us. The Democratic Party seems to be slowly shedding this poisonous cloak...and we will all be better off once they do. It would be nice to have a Presidential election where we didn’t all have to collectively hold our noses as we fill in our ballots.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.