Time to Fight Back, and How to Win When We Do

Paul’s post about the putative rightward shift in Iowa prompts tonight’s rant. I concede my thoughts are a mite inchoate, but it’s time to speak up. I’ll welcome comments from those who have a more organized take on it than I do, and my guess is there are quite a few of you.

Wokeness is a particularly insidious and evil cancer on American life. It’s so effective, and so dangerous, because it slyly plays on the conscience, goodness and generosity of the American people even while it denies that these things exist. We’re told that it’s hayseed small-mindedness just to be normal, such as by thinking that boys are different from girls, or even that we can say that there are boys and there are girls. How unfeeling! How unnuanced! We are likewise told that it’s racist to understand, much less say out loud, that some ways of living are healthier than others — for example, staying in school through graduation, getting married before you have kids, and working your way up even if your job at first is dull and annoying. 1619! White supremacy! Or, as the Lefties used to say in my college days, so bourgeois.

Good grief. Their noses are so far in the air you’d think they could touch the moon.

Everything gets turned upside down yet we’re supposed to bow down to it as the Greater Wisdom. “Equity,” we are directed meekly to agree, is taking goodies from people who earned them to give to people who don’t (but are today’s preferred identity group) (see also, any Democratic tax and spending plan). “Inclusion” is giving away yet more goodies based on identity and regardless of merit, most often to those with substandard credentials (this is why we need to do away with credentials at all, like test scores, class rank and grades). For that matter, it’s why we need to do away with the idea of merit, since, you know, that idea was rooted in slavery, or if not slavery exactly, hey, look, close enough so that you deserve to be shouted down if you say otherwise. And speaking of shouted down, “free speech” is defined in Wokespeak as yelling louder than the speaker someone who thinks differently from you invited to campus, so that his speaking becomes impossible to hear. If you’re missing the logic in this, it’s only because you’re in the KKK or the Proud Boys.

This is where we are. The Wokesters think they’re moving the Overton window, and in this deluded culture they are, but at an expense we can realistically hope will be visited upon them about 20 months from now. The Washington Post might look askance at those Middle America Iowa wahoos. But when you want tampons in the boys room and boys in the girls room, there will come a point when the political center — like, for example, the Iowa electorate — is going to have had enough.

This is one reason I’ve become more enthusiastic about Ron DeSantis. He’s willing to take on Wokeness — for example, but not limited to, his fight with Disneyland’s embrace of it. Donald Trump had the audacity to gobsmack the Establishment’s embrace of the political breeding grounds of Wokeness, but his self-absorption, vulgarity and free-lancing with both truth and important norms of law and governance make him the wrong person to take it on as it now needs to be taken on. DeSantis, by contrast, doesn’t have that baggage, and seems to have a more thoughtful grasp of what Wokeness is and how it should be confronted.

Here’s the deal: We don’t need to re-imagine America. We need to restore America. In particular, we need to restore America’s most basic premise — majority rule. Minorities, whether racial or sexual, deserve to be treated with dignity, respect and kindness, and for by far the most part (although not without some exceptions), they are. But they do not deserve to make the rules for everyone else. Still less do they deserve to make the rules in the mold of an Andy Warhol freak show or a drag queen extravaganza. Within constitutional bounds, the power to make rules is for the majority. We should exercise it with confidence and without apology.

There is one issue in particular where I think DeSantis could benefit from throwing down the gauntlet on Wokeness and one of its most prominent staples, race-huckstering. That issue is reparations. He should announce that, on his watch, there will be no reparations and no reparations commission, or whatever gadget the Left wants to invent to pave the way for reparations without, for the moment, calling them by name.

There are at least four reasons that taking a loud stand against reparations is wise. First, it’s the moral position. No one alive today either was a slave or owned a slave. The most basic moral premise I was taught is that you are responsible for what you do but you are not responsible for what someone else did that you were in no position to affect.

The case becomes crystal clear in the current reparations battle, which goes under the more digestible names of “affirmative action” or “diversity.” But it’s the same deal: A 17 year-old white kid (that is, someone born in 2006) is supposed to be denied admission to a good college in order to give the admission goodies to a less qualified black kid because of racial practices the white kid had nothing to do with and could not possibly have changed. It’s not a surprise that the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose such a thing, 63% to 36%, as found in this Washington Post poll. Biden and his administration are, by a huge margin, on the wrong side of this. Race huckstering and guilt tripping and 1619 and all that may go over big in such places as Stanford, Hollywood and Bethesda, but they’re big-time losers in America.

Second and relatedly, reparations identified as such are even less popular. This Pew poll taken less than four months ago shows that Americans oppose reparations 68% to 30%. They are opposed by every age and income grouping. DeSantis has lots to gain and essentially nothing to lose (except among those who will oppose him no matter what) by unequivocally denouncing reparations, and the Amerika-Is-Shameful thinking that lies behind them (and that Biden will be unable to decouple from even if he wants to (and can still understand by next year)).

Third, by focusing on reparations, DeSantis can showcase how crazy and unhinged the Woke/Left has become. Exhibit A is from that cutting edge Democratic citadel, San Francisco. The San Francisco proposal, described here, includes among numerous other items the following:

…paying each Black longtime resident $5 million [in a lump sum] and granting total debt forgiveness due to the decades of "systematic repression" faced by the local Black community….

The plan also calls on the city to supplement lower-income recipients’ income to reflect the Area Median Income (AMI), about $97,000, annually for at least 250 years. 

The plan also seeks to establish "a comprehensive debt forgiveness program" that clears each eligible person’s student and housing loans, credit card debt, etc.

You gotta love 250 years. And wiping out all debt. Mind you, these are Nancy Pelosi’s neighbors and soulmates.

But it’s not just Nancy Pelosi. She was the Democrats’ choice for Speaker for a reason, that being that she personifies where the Democratic Party is just now. That in turn illuminates the fourth reason taking on reparations is not just the right but the smart move for the Republican candidate: It shows in bold relief just how far the Woke/Left has taken over the intellectual (for want of a better word) leadership of the Democratic Party. When your opponent has gone nuts, and gone nuts in a way normal people (and hence big majorities, see supra) understand, all you need to do to win is make the campaign about that.

We can talk about the Woke crazies or we can talk about January 6. To me, this is not a difficult choice.