Wokeness is a problem and we all know it

[AnBr]

I called James Carville hoping to get his thoughts on President Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office.

He obliged — then, one question in, brushed aside the exercise to talk instead about why the Democrats might be poised to squander their political advantage against a damaged GOP.

His failure to cooperate may have been for the best since the first 100 days ritual can sometimes lead to dull, dutiful analysis. What Carville offered up instead was a blunt critique of his own party even after a successful 2020 election cycle — a sequel of sorts to his fulminations during last year’s Democratic primaries. The longtime Democratic strategist is mostly pleased with Biden, but it’s where much of the party seems to be going that has him worried.

“Wokeness is a problem,” he told me, “and we all know it.” According to Carville, Democrats are in power for now, but they also only narrowly defeated Donald Trump, “a world-historical buffoon,” and they lost congressional seats and failed to pick up state legislatures. The reason is simple: They’ve got a “messaging problem.”

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

www.vox.com/22338417/james-carville-democratic-party-biden-100-days

[Traveler]

No kidding. Dems got a major problem with their PC BS.

[Deleted]

Apr 28, 2021 13:16:19 GMT Traveler said:

No kidding. Dems got a major problem with their PC BS.

Not just linguistic problem. At a more fundamental level conceptual problem. 

[Traveler]

Yeah, yet they wonder why "normal" folks just despise them. Talk about holier than thou. As for why we are so polarized, Dems can also look at themselves in the mirror.

[LFC]

I think Carville is spot on. It's not that "wokeness" itself is really all that big of a problem. AFAIC it's an incredibly overblown screech point. Yes, it exists in some places. Yes, at times it's overwrought but then of course what it's in response to (racism, misogyny) is much, much worse. No, it won't take over the nation. I'm in the fin-tech industry and other than a handful of diversity initiatives I've seen nothing of it at all. (When I worked in industrial monitoring and control it was just brimming with troglodytes.) I talk to the young developers coming out of college and they all say that there was some diversity and respect initiatives but nothing crazy and nothing that really impacted them. Of course you can hunt out examples. Rod Dreher has made a career out of it. The attention it gets is just completely overblown to the threat that it poses.

The real problem, as he states, is that a minority of Democrats who subscribe to it are getting outsized coverage and the Republicans are successfully pinning it on the entire party. That's smart politics. As he points out for whatever reason sane but very far left Dems hurt their party vastly more than utterly batshit crazy and corrupt Republicans. One big question is, how do the Dems rein in that minority? The other big question, which Carville brought up and which we've been preaching for years, is when the F*** are Dems going to go balls to the wall on pounding the Republicans over their sins? The Jan 6 Republican Insurrection should be brought up every day until the crazies are gone (not likely) or the Republicans admit how bad it was (also not likely). The sexual issues need to be brought up repeatedly to grind down the hypocrisy of a segment of Christians that so far are able to ignore them. After all, that's how they crushed Roy Moore and that was in Ala-freaking-bama.

[Bact PhD]

Concur re Carville's analysis.

For decades, the RW noise machine has taken the most "loony left" individual (or saying) in the national conversation and held that person (currently AOC/ "defund the police") as the avatar for the group encompassing everyone to the left of Birchers, Dittoheads, and Drudge Report aficionados.

Of course, Carville mentions Flori-DUH (emphasis mine):

Look at Florida. You now have Democrats saying Florida is a lost cause. Really? In 2018 in Florida, giving felons the right to vote got 64 percent. In 2020, a $15 minimum wage, which we have no chance of passing [federally], got 67 percent. Has anyone in the Democratic Party said maybe there’s nothing wrong with the state of Florida? Maybe the problem is the kind of campaigns we’re running?

If you gave me an environment in which the majority of voters wanted to expand the franchise to felons and raise the minimum wage, I should be able to win that. It’s certainly not a political environment I’m destined to lose in. But in Miami-Dade, all they talked about was defunding the police and Kamala Harris being the most liberal senator in the US Senate. And if you look all across the Rio Grande Valley, we lost all kinds of solidly blue voters. And the faculty lounge bullshit is a big part of it.

Believe me when I say that Miami-Dade is its own world (the Cuban exile population really is its own entity and still holds outsized influence); things change radically when one passes north into Broward Co. However, I'm not sold on the idea that Miami-Dade is steering the ship when it comes to statewide electoral politics. GOP control of the Legislature (it isn't even close anymore), and the governor's chair (since the late 1990s), and most of the Cabinet seats (the last 2-plus decades), and both US Senate seats since 2019 (and at least one since Bob Graham retired)  suggests more than current messaging is a problem. The problem  is something that was in the making during Carville's heyday. I have maintained for a while that part of the difficulty here for the last couple of decades has been the failure to find and develop a strong "bench" at the local and regional levels capable of running strong statewide campaigns. FL Dems have been paying that price the last few election cycles.

As far as the "faculty lounge bullshit", if this area is an indication, it doesn't go over well outside of what we refer to as the "academic left" (but it's not even just academics who buy into it, nor do all with academic credentials espouse this stuff).

[Bact PhD]

Apr 28, 2021 14:25:10 GMT LFC said:

I think Carville is spot on. It's not that "wokeness" itself is really all that big of a problem. AFAIC it's an incredibly overblown screech point. Yes, it exists in some places. Yes, at times it's overwrought but then of course what it's in response to (racism, misogyny) is much, much worse. No, it won't take over the nation. I'm in the fin-tech industry and other than a handful of diversity initiatives I've seen nothing of it at all. (When I worked in industrial monitoring and control it was just brimming with troglodytes.) I talk to the young developers coming out of college and they all say that there was some diversity and respect initiatives but nothing crazy and nothing that really impacted them. Of course you can hunt out examples. Rod Dreher has made a career out of it. The attention it gets is just completely overblown to the threat that it poses.

Both Chem PhD and I worked our careers in academia. Oddly enough, we heard (and continue to hear) more of the "faculty lounge bullshit" from (1) a handful of actual "academic lefties" either of our acquaintance via social media or in the public sphere of the local rag's op-ed page (NOT from our workplace settings, outside of the SOP sexual harassment and diversity stuff) or mostly (2) the screeching in response to "wokeness," whether real or perceived. If anything, in our work settings the mindset was "just get your f***ing job done already." Dear Daughter actually got more of the "woke" stuff in her summer stock experience, rather than in her actual academic college classes. It turned out to be something of a culture shock for her.

[goldenvalley]

I fall in line with LFC's view on this. There is a lot of right wing screeching about it, way out of proportion with what is actually happening.  See for example the Biden ending beef, Dr Suess, Mr Potato Head.

Some of the language of woke is an expression of the rage felt after years of oppression and a feeling that incrementalism is just an excuse to do not much but give some lip service to the idea.  It is designed to make people uncomfortable and it works. Getting people's attention takes a lot of doing though in these days of captured and social media it takes less than it did in the 1960's.

However it will not do anything to change the minds or impressions of many people.  Racist, white supremacist...those are words most people associate with KKK, lynching, and general violence, things done by really bad people.  And those who hear the words think "I'm not one of those really bad people and I am offended because you say I am."  And they respond with anger rather than with some re-examination of the history of this country or of their own attitudes. So wokeness fails when it comes to them. 

I don't know what we do with humans.  In the Civil Rights era violence against Black Americans were broadcast into the homes of people in the North and West.  They were appalled and yet also probably patted themselves on the back that their sheriffs were not beating people up in their areas. (They probably were though) But when school integration came to the North, it was a whole different story.  Not my kids!  The idea was fine in the abstract but not if my kids were involved or my neighborhood.

In my volunteer work we grapple with this all the time.  A young woman called me out when I made a comment about the poet featured in the Inauguration. We were exploring the idea of her speaking at our event and when we learned of the fee being asked for that I said something about her cashing in on her 15 min. of fame.  That was taken as me suggesting that this young Black woman was "getting above herself" in asking the fee.  It wasn't what I meant, but I can see why it might be taken that way. In my strange way I thought I was pointing at capitalism. Lesson learned...be thoughtful about what I say because the people around me don't share my experiences or know me well enough to recognize that what I truly am.   

It will take some time for people to adjust and be thoughtful.  In the meantime we have to figure out how to deal with those who will never ever adjust.  Politics and everyday conversation will be fraught for a while and that will get in the way of progress.

[Traveler]

Well said GV. But for a good example of excess wokeness, check this out. www.inquirer.com/news/haverford-college-strike-division-racism-wallace-20210425.html (Next step is that I will learn to link here.) Classic case of a legitimate beef getting overblown. Students feelings getting hurt, but there was no overt racism to justify the totally PC response.  Pendulum swinging back too far and all that.

[goldenvalley]

Apr 29, 2021 12:10:04 GMT Traveler said:

Well said GV. But for a good example of excess wokeness, check this out. www.inquirer.com/news/haverford-college-strike-division-racism-wallace-20210425.html (Next step is that I will learn to link here.) Classic case of a legitimate beef getting overblown. Students feelings getting hurt, but there was no overt racism to justify the totally PC response.  Pendulum swinging back too far and all that.

We can't get to the middle until the extremes are defined. It's a stupid human need. Like we're all adolsecents forever and ever testing the limits.

[Traveler]

Problem is that this PC crap has been around for three decades already, since back when I got my masters in '93. I don't know why it is that PC in college kids is so strong. So I don't see as much pendulum swinging on the left as you might. If anything, it's the maggots that represent the swinging pendulum.

[goldenvalley]

May 1, 2021 13:28:35 GMT Traveler said:

Problem is that this PC crap has been around for three decades already, since back when I got my masters in '93. I don't know why it is that PC in college kids is so strong. So I don't see as much pendulum swinging on the left as you might. If anything, it's the maggots that represent the swinging pendulum.

Have you forgotten your college days?  College kids know everything; see everything for what it is; they aren't benighted by age like their parents and most of society is.  And there are always a few who think it's their job to inform and call out people who aren't as enlightened as they are.

[Bact PhD]

May 1, 2021 13:28:35 GMT Traveler said:

Problem is that this PC crap has been around for three decades already, since back when I got my masters in '93. I don't know why it is that PC in college kids is so strong. So I don't see as much pendulum swinging on the left as you might. If anything, it's the maggots that represent the swinging pendulum.

I can take it back in some quarters to the late 1980s, when That Jerk was getting his Master's, even though I don't remember hearing the term "Politically Correct" until some time in the 1990s. To hear some in the RW noise machine talk about it, it those damn higher education institutions and their ultra-liberal professors indoctrinating the young. And, TBH, that's a contributing factor, but somehow I doubt it's the entire story as to why the line of demarcation has shifted to where we talk about "microaggressions" and judging yesterday's art, literature, and behavior by today's standards of cultural sensitivity, a phenomenon I've heard termed "present-ism." Some of the loudest voices of "wokeness" these days seem to be the (to use a generalization) the Gen X-ers & late-stage Boomers.

By the same token, I concur that the MAGATs have been pushing things in the other direction and have been attempting it since the late 1970s. Thanks to a RW media ecosystem and the rise of social media, they have much more of a community nowadays than they did in our grad student days (coincidentally, Carville's heyday).

[AnBr]

Keep in mind that PC was not initially bad. It instrumental in making it not OK to call people "niggers", "wetbacks", "faggot" and other derogatory terms. The problem was in its over use and younger people used it as an excuse to display outrageous indignation and wear their wokeness on their sleeve. The road to hell and all. The right also ran with it to serve up their own righteous indignation, dismissing it all as over the top.

[Deleted]

The problems with wokeness are its ingrained anti-enlightenment and anti-liberalism strains. And worse, it's mind-numbingly tiresome.

[LFC]

This is what happens when discussions on race become trench warfare.

On Friday, employees had their chance to address these issues directly with Fried and his co-founder. What followed was a wrenching discussion that left several employees I spoke with in tears. Thirty minutes after the meeting ended, Fried announced that Basecamp’s longtime head of strategy, Ryan Singer, had been suspended and placed under investigation after he questioned the existence of white supremacy at the company. Over the weekend, Singer — who worked for the company for nearly 18 years, and authored a book about product management for Basecamp called Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters — resigned.

Within a few hours of the meeting, at least 20 people — more than one-third of Basecamp’s 57 employees — had announced their intention to accept buyouts from the company. And while many of them had been leaning toward resigning in the aftermath of Fried’s original post, the meeting itself pushed several to accelerate their decisions, employees said. The response overwhelmed the founders, who extended the deadline to accept buyouts indefinitely amid an unexpected surge of interest.

This account is based on interviews with six Basecamp employees who were present at the meeting, along with a partial transcript created by employees. Collectively, they describe a company whose attempt to tamp down on difficult conversations blew up in its face as employees rejected the notion that discussions of power and justice should remain off limits in the workplace. And they suggest that efforts to eliminate disruptions in the workplace by regulating internal speech may cause even more turmoil for a company in the long run.

This is a divide that Republicans have been riding to political power for decades, lately with Putin's help, and the swingback is getting harsh in some places. The question is where are the lines between racist, reasonable, and "woke?" That, as in all things, gets negotiated by society but it's clear right now that they sometimes resemble battles more than negotiations.

[goldenvalley]

Here's the opposite of wokeness.  I think it's called successful trolling.  The bold is mine.

Two months ago, an allegation emerged that a white student at Boise State University was demeaned in class during a discussion of “structural inequality.” That led to the suspension of a required course. Now an outside law firm retained by the university has found no evidence to substantiate the accusation.

The law firm’s report was publicly released Monday.

“No students who participated in the investigation reported that they were ever forced to apologize for the color of their skin,” reads the report on the investigation, which was conducted by Hawley Troxell, a Boise law firm. “Nor did any student report being personally singled out for their skin color or being subjected to taunts, name-calling, or other degrading behavior from an instructor or other students based on their skin color, beliefs or ideas.”

On March 15, Boise State received a complaint from a “community leader” who is not a student at the school alleging that he had viewed a video on a friend’s phone that showed a white student being “forced to apologize … for being ‘white’ or for the student’s ‘white privilege,’ ” and being taunted by other students, according to the report.

A day later, the university suspended all 55 sections of a course entitled University Foundations 200, a required course that had nearly 1,300 students enrolled during the spring semester. In a statement, the school said it had been made aware that a student or students may “have been humiliated and degraded in class.”

This is more ridiculous than wokeness in my estimation...a decision made that affects 1300 students based on what might charitably be called hearsay/hearsee.

[LFC]

May 25, 2021 0:33:31 GMT goldenvalley said:

This is more ridiculous than wokeness in my estimation...a decision made that affects 1300 students based on what might charitably be called hearsay/hearsee.

It's right-wing cancel culture for a course they didn't like. I've long since reached the point where if there's a claim, ANY claim, of outrage from the right-wingers my go-to position is to not believe them. If that was graded as a course I'd have gotten an A.

[LFC]

This piece makes the case that at least some of this "wokeness" mania is nothing more than right-wing screeching over nothing. The term "the scourge of white whining" describes the right-wing analog to "wokeness" and I see it as a much more far reaching problem. Why? Because it is being pushed at lightning speed into law by Republicans. As always the accusations from the right really amount to a confession.

"The description of what "critical race theory" actually is compared to how the right-wing is defining is crucial to understanding what's real and what isn't. And the stats of how it has effectively become a meme for the right-wing noise machine should wake anybody up who isn't part of it.

But while Cooper's arrogance is truly next level, her playing-the-victim lawsuit is emblematic of a wave of white whininess that's crashing over the U.S. right now, as large numbers of white people — mostly, but not exclusively Donald Trump voters — convince themselves that it's not racism that is a problem in the U.S., but the bogeyman of white people being victimized by anti-racists.

Take, for instance, the surge of chatter about "critical race theory." If you have no idea what the hell your drunk uncle is talking about when he raves about this on Facebook, well, you're not alone. Critical race theory was, until this year, an obscure concept outside of the narrow confines of legal scholarship, used mainly by law professors to explain the historical reasons for ongoing racial inequalities baked into the legal system.

But "critical race theory" sure does sound scary to defensive white people who are sure the "woke" mob is going to find out about that racist joke they told at a poker game last year and "cancel" them, as Fox News keeps warning will happen. And so right-wing media has spent months making sure the term "critical race theory" is on the lips of every Donald Trump voter still mad that they "let" Philadelphia and Detroit vote in the 2020 election.

The idea that "critical race theory" is a widespread threat to white people was invented, whole cloth, by the right-wing media and then pumped out vigorously. As the Washington Post reported, mentions of "critical race theory" on cable news simply didn't exist prior to this year, but there's been an explosion of uses of that term on Fox News in recent months. A similar study from Media Matters shows that, by early May, the term had been used — inaccurately in most, if not all, cases — on Fox News at least 552 times in the past year.

The right would have you believe that it's the left that made "critical race theory" a thing, and they are merely reacting. But another study of Facebook posts by Media Matters found that pretty much the only people talking about "critical race theory" online are Republicans, with nearly 90% of the posts from political pages and 97% of the interactions coming from conservative figures.

To be certain, there is nothing wrong with real-life critical race theory, which is a valuable tool for academics analyzing legal and cultural issues. But right-wing media doesn't use the term accurately. It's just a stand-in for a generalized fear that "woke" culture is coming to get white people. And also, of course, as justification to silence — or, as one might say, cancel — any discussion or attempt to educate people, especially students, about the existence or history of racism in America.

The result has been an explosion of bills in red states that, under the guise of protecting white people from being discriminated against, are banning "critical race theory." But, as critics told Adam Harris at The Atlantic, the real purpose is to "effectively prevent public schools and universities from holding discussions about racism" — including, quite likely in many cases, teaching kids the truth about slavery and Jim Crow in history class.

So by all means call out [insert liberal university name of choice here] when they go overboard. Just don't let Faux News, Rod Dreher, or any of the rest of the right-wing noise machine drag you even an inch into their alternate reality. Here's the last paragraph but the whole thing is worth a read.

So sure, Amy Cooper's narcissism and self-pity may seem over the top, but the sad truth is she is just a particularly noxious example of a nationwide problem. Trump managed to get a shocking 74 million votes, more than any Republican candidate in history, after running a campaign that was a full-on right-wing fantasy about "cancel culture" more than about any real issues facing the nation. In 2021, the majority of white Americans would rather believe a fantasy where they're the victims, rather than admit, even just a tiny bit, that racism is still a real problem. And, like Amy Cooper, they're taking their self-pitying delusions out on everyone else.

[goldenvalley]

May 28, 2021 18:51:00 GMT LFC said:

This piece makes the case that at least some of this "wokeness" mania is nothing more than right-wing screeching over nothing. The term "the scourge of white whining" describes the right-wing analog to "wokeness" and I see it as a much more far reaching problem. Why? Because it is being pushed at lightning speed into law by Republicans. As always the accusations from the right really amount to a confession.

"The description of what "critical race theory" actually is compared to how the right-wing is defining is crucial to understanding what's real and what isn't. And the stats of how it has effectively become a meme for the right-wing noise machine should wake anybody up who isn't part of it.

 

Critical race theory is the new Communist! Socialist! Marxist! buzz word to get people to boo and hiss on cue.  

[goldenvalley]

The Federalist Society (of Snowflakes) at Stanford Law School did not think this was funny and went to some sort of Stanford disciplinary body to demand an investigation.  They wanted Stanford to cancel him. The student that wrote this almost didn't get his diploma but Stanford thought better of it and he will get the paper in hand.

[LFC]

Jun 3, 2021 22:19:32 GMT goldenvalley said:

The Federalist Society (of Snowflakes) at Stanford Law School did not think this was funny and went to some sort of Stanford disciplinary body to demand an investigation.  They wanted Stanford to cancel him. The student that wrote this almost didn't get his diploma but Stanford thought better of it and he will get the paper in hand.

Cheeses. You wonder how they'd handle a version of the old Harvard Lampoon showing up on campus.

[LFC]

Michael Gerson, who was an adviser to George W., compares the right's fear of "wokeness" to the left's fear of fascism. Care to guess which he views as the one being more based on reality?

Republican efforts to deflect from their authoritarianism and insurrection by arguing Democrats are actually worse was dealt a major blow in a new Washington Post column by former George W. Bush advisor Michael Gerson.

"The dreams of conservatives are currently troubled by 'wokeness' and critical race theory. As with most nightmares, there is a grain of truth within such terrors," he wrote. "In contrast, the nightmares of progressives are currently dominated by the growth of right-wing authoritarianism and fascism. In these fears, there is more than a grain of truth."

"Large elements of the American populist right mythologize the nation's past rather than face its failures. They dismiss real news as fake and embrace obvious propaganda. They are anti-intellectual to the point of denying lifesaving scientific truths. They fear diversity and target racial, ethnic and religious minorities for resentment. They cultivate a sense of victimhood by warning of arrogant elites and vast conspiracies. These are not isolated ailments; they are the textbook symptoms of a fascist political infection," he explained.

Reality matters in comparing each side's fears.

"In comparing the right's fear of extreme critical race theory and the left's fear of fascism, it is not really useful to ask which horror would be worse if implemented. Both ideologies are ultimately at war with liberal democracy — the pursuit of a common good, the practice of incremental reform, the cultivation of social trust and the acceptance of democratic outcomes. But it is crucial to ask which nightmare is currently most likely to be implemented. And here there is no question," he wrote. "Only one of these nightmares has taken over a major political party, which is in the process of purging all dissent. Only one of these delusions is the governing vision of a former president who just might be president again. Only one of these developments has turned the backbones of the minority leader of the House, the minority leader of the Senate and almost every other Republican leader into gelatinous goo. Only one of these ideologies produced a crowd that sacked the U.S. Capitol and threatened violence against political leaders. Only one of these movements is working in state legislatures across the country to make electoral systems more vulnerable to manipulation and mob rule."

"Right-wing authoritarianism is the force that could undo the American system. In a contest of nightmares, it is not even a contest," Gerson concluded.

[Traveler]

Yeah, well it's pretty well acknowledged that the "defund the police" mantra cost a ton of moderate votes, losing what would otherwise be Dem seats. Sullivan points out that the murder spike started right after the reactions to the George Floyd riots with cops resigning en mass. Cops got a lot to answer for, but the alternative of no cops is even worse. Major Dem failing. Refusing to address the lawlessness of looters and shooters.

[Bact PhD]

This piece in the Atlantic is making me go, Hmmmm.

www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/11/young-people-college-grads-wokeness/620674/

Essentially, according to their polling, the “wokeness” divide is more a function of age than of education. However, the author even acknowledged that one poll is not necessarily definitive.

But according to a recent Atlantic/Leger survey, no gap exists between people with college degrees and those without them on some of the hot topics most commonly associated with “wokeness.” Instead, neither group endorses the supposedly “woke” positions particularly strongly. Though the term originated in the Black community, woke now lacks a standard definition, and is sometimes used as a catchall label for a group of only loosely related ideas. People often use the term to describe neologisms that are more popular among progressives, such as pregnant people, as well as policy choices advocated for by some on the left, such as defunding the police. In our poll, we also included reverse-coded statements, meant to capture whether someone was the opposite of “woke,” by asking about common right-wing shibboleths such as political correctness, “cancel culture,” and critical race theory.

[snip]

What’s more, our “noncollege” group includes people who are still in college—that is, it includes the supposed social-justice warriors who are canceling their own professors. About 6 percent of American adults are currently undergraduates. Indeed, the biggest differences in attitudes toward these questions appear to break along age lines: People over 50 were significantly more likely than those ages 18 to 29 to agree that “America is becoming too politically correct”; that “critical race theory is a serious threat to public schools, workplaces, and the federal government”; or that “affirmative action has become so prevalent that white people now face reverse discrimination in hiring.” Fully 68 percent of people over 65 said America is too politically correct. Meanwhile, the greatest support for the tearing down of Confederate statues, for the use of gender-neutral pronouns, for defunding the police, and for saying “Latinx” or “pregnant people” was among respondents under 40—yet these views still represented a minority of overall respondents. “The more ‘woke’ attitudes, respecting pronouns—those are really things being driven by a younger generation,” says Natalie Jackson, the director of research at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).

Interesting that *none* of the “woke” positions received overall majority support.