After America entered into a racial awakening – or nightmare, depending on your perspective – following the George Floyd affair in the summer of 2020, replete with a sudden demand for universal fealty to the previously marginalized Black Lives Matter and urban violence on a scale unseen since the 1960s, it was fair to assume the nation was entering a new era of racial reckoning and progressive ascendancy.
Some 18 months later, whatever favorability might have been gained by the forces of wokeness, cultural Marxism and marauding anti-racism activism have all but vanished. Longtime Democratic operative James Carville said it best when placing the blame for his party’s dismal showing in this month’s elections where it belonged, on “stupid wokeness.” In fact, the word of the year in 2020, wokeness, may become a dirty word for the 2022 midterm election campaign – an insult instead of a badge of honor.
Boy, that was quick.
The moment of death for full-strength wokeness likely arrived when the president and the loudest voices among Democrats, reeling from Election Day 2021, chose to descend into full-on denial. Even after the Virginia earthquake, their near-death experience in New Jersey, and a resounding repudiation of their party in local races across the land, Democrats implied, or stated outright, that the overwhelmingly one-sided results were not a (seemingly obvious) rejection of their party’s increasingly woke left-wing agenda, but actually the product of Trump-style white identity politics. Their failure to see outside of their own extreme agenda signals a total unwillingness to adapt to political reality, a common trait of radicals.
What is inexplicable at most every level is how Democrats are taking the good hand they were dealt by Trump – the vaccines, the fast-recovering economy, the secure border, the stable foreign policy – and squandering it by bowing to a socialist agenda that frightens the American people. Given that progressives were beaten by moderates in most every intra-party primary this year, If Democrats were serious about winning, they would marginalize, if not ostracize, the far-left. But even Joe Biden continues to sing from their failed songbook.
When Biden actually compared Virginia gubernatorial candidate (and current Governor-elect) Glenn Youngkin to the Capitol rioters, saying extremism can also come in the form of a smile and (Youngkin’s signature) fleece vest, it affirmed the total bankruptcy of the Democratic Party circa 2021. All the left had to offer was Trump-spooking, scaring the voters into thinking moderate or conservative Republicans were actually raging white supremacists, and they were upbraided rudely by the scattered electorate.
Apparently, these Democrats have not seen or heeded the auto-themed political warning: Objects in the mirror – in this case disgruntled voters – are closer than they appear. Indeed, despite the warnings issued far and wide – prominently here at Liberty Nation – about the Dems’ plans to pull a bait and switch – present their feckless default candidate as a centrist and then intimidate him into governing as a quasi-socialist – enough people were apparently fooled into believing Joe Biden was anything more than a frontman for the socialist wing of the party to put him in the Oval Office. The only public resistance to Biden’s leftward lurch since inauguration has come from two senators – Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Krysten Sinema (D-AZ), who have spoken out forcefully against the socialist agenda – and a number of House moderates who have remained all but silent as the tortuous process of crafting a utopian wish list of socialist objectives known as a reconciliation bill continues to crumble.
Their chickens have come home to roost in the form of electoral repudiation, but progressives are not stupid. They were coming down from their sugar high of last summer, and cognizant that deception would be the only way to ram through the type of socialist reforms now being batted back and forth in the hilariously named and incredibly shrinking Build Back Better bill of goods. But every attempt to close the deal on that reckless spending spree – now an even more ludicrous idea with inflation up over 6% – has failed. And Sen. Manchin may be close to single-handedly shutting the whole thing down. If Biden was as politically savvy as most would assume him to be in his 32-year journey to the White House, he would have danced with the one who brung him, as they used to say. And that would be the moderate voters who now hardly recognize the man in the Oval Office who promised unity uber alles and dishes out the opposite day after day. Biden’s approval has thus tumbled, according to a trio of recent polls, into the 30s.
(Photo by Hauke-Christian Dittrich/picture alliance via Getty Images)
But before we rightly celebrate the death of wokeness as a political force and dismiss the Democrats’ argument about the reasons for their failure at the ballot box, don’t they deserve more than just the back of the hand for labeling those who voted against them as essentially back-door racists? I’m sure those famously fickle white suburban women who put Biden into office, and then spanked him a year later, will be glad to know they have unwittingly fallen victim to those nasty white nationalists who so repulsed them just last year.
Let’s be honest. Wokeness would have long ago been laughed off the stage if the left did not control the media in this country. But even after shamelessly standing aside as great cities burned, milking a deadly pandemic for maximum political advantage, hiding their candidate, and flipping voting laws to their massive advantage in 2020, the turnabout of the electorate in 2021 demonstrated afresh the problem that will always be faced by hardened leftists functioning in a center-right country: They can’t control the voters.
~ Read more from Tim Donner.
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