Not all progressives are narrative-bound wokies, clinging to clearly wrong-headed policies to avoid being 'wrong'. Some are simply--newslessly clueless
I think this article hits the nail on the head. Regular people who are on the left don’t really know what the leaders and activists on the left are doing these days. They think they are simply fighting for equality and justice as liberals used to to do in the past few decades. They don’t realize how the left has been hijacked by woke radicals. They no longer fight for equality they now fight for special rights and special treatment for minority groups and to ignore reality in the name of some misguided sense of righteousness. This is not to say the right doesn’t have problems of its own. Oh! So many problems! Their draconian stance on abortion, opposition to birth control and LGBT rights, their propensity for book banning, their alliance with their religious cousins, pushing a free market healthcare system when we know based on the data that won’t work, urging us to abandon public education, the desire to subjugate the Palestinian people in the name of revenge, etc. But the left are no angels either. I’m a Rockefeller Republican who’s not particularly a fan of either party. But this much I can tell you the GOP warts and all, are doing quite well for themselves. The Democratic Party is a train wreck that keeps shooting itself in the foot over and over. The woke radicals mentioned above are the reason why and your average Democrat or liberal doesn’t know it. Furthermore, what the left needs to realize is you’ll never get people on your side or persuade them or get them to vote for you if you just immediately assume them to be dumb or demonize them as racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc. Nor can you achieve you’re goals when you’re out of touch with the majority of Americans, on the wrong side of common sense and science and focus on trivial stuff and non-issues while ignoring and letting slip through the cracks, real issues. Even Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian from TYT are now beginning to recognize this. These are the lessons progressives and their supporters must learn. In order to starting winning and accomplishing social change again the Democratic Party and the Social Justice Movement in the United States must find better leadership, reach out to people who disagree with them, be open-minded, and excise wokeness from their ranks. Not to mention focus on bread and butter issues that effect everyday people’s lives. Getting a good understanding of history would be a big help too. We actually as Americans across the political spectrum agree on a lot, so let’s build on that! The left also needs to declare a truce with the right on the culture war and admit there are things they’ve gotten wrong. For instance gender-affirming care for minors is bad, Trans people should not compete on the same field or court with biological women, mass immigration is not a good idea, taking down statues of the founding fathers and the Confederates is Orwellian and wrong, censorship is not how you fight bad speech but rather with good speech, colorblindness and universalism are better than identity politics and race essentialism, etc. Also, the left needs to adopt a more balanced view of American history and stop vilifying America as an evil, imperialist monster which exists purely to inflict suffering on minority groups and people around the world. They also need to stop repeating historical myths that just aren’t true. No, slavery didn’t build any part of America’s wealth. It enriched individuals, businesses and colleges but not the South or the nation as a whole. In point of fact as the great Thomas Sowell has shown, slavery slowed the South’s economic growth. The free states were richer than the slaves states. Fredrick Douglass once wrote that he met “free blacks in the North who were more prosperous, kept a better house, ate at a better table and knew more about the Constitution than 8 out of 10 slave owners in his hometown of Aberdeen, Maryland.” In the days when America was a British colony, Virginia was the wealthiest state in the union. In 1860c on eve of the Civil War, Pennsylvania had surpassed it as the wealthiest state in the union. On another note, America is not a stolen country nor did it commit genocide against its Indigenous population. While there certainly were instances of white settlers stealing individual pieces of land from Native peoples through chicanery and trickery, most of the land in this country was conquered in war or legal purchased in peaceful trade with the Native people. While the Native Americans were certainly victims of atrocities, injustices and forced displacement, there was never any large-scale genocide against them or an plan by the United States government to genocide them. The U.S. government sought to get them onto reservations, take their land and assimilate them but not to kill them. To be sure, the American Indians were treated very poorly by our government but there was never any intention to exterminate them. The same is true of the indigenous peoples of South America. Furthermore, if the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were victims of genocide, why are they all still here? Also, why are there more Native Americans alive today than ever before? If there was a genocide it didn’t workout very well. Also, we need to stop playing into the noble savage trope and acting like the Native Americans lived in a peaceful utopia and spent all day dancing until the big bad white man came along and ruined everything. Give. Me. A. Break. They had been fighting each other in bloody wars and conquering each other’s land long before the white man arrived on the continent. By the way they also practiced chattel slavery, sex slavery, torture, scalping, cannibalism, human sacrifice, and gender discrimination. That’s right, they weren’t environmentalist feminist Communists as leftists like to portray them as. They believed in private property, they had rigid gender roles and took women from other tribes and white women as sex slaves to boot, they did mass environmental destruction like controlled burns of forests and running herds of buffalo off cliffs, etc. They were just as human as the rest of us! Stop deifying the Native Americans! They could be just as savage to whites as we could be to them.
I don't think the Democrats are the only ones who don't know what's going on on their side, I suspect a lot of Republicans are just beginning to wake up to the same ;P
I live in a deepest-blue town in a blue state; so pretty much everyone has a knee-jerk response to identify as "very liberal" or even "progressive." But most of them don't really understand what progressives are up to these days.
The people in my town are generally older, very well educated and upper-middle-class. It's a tiny town full of quiet, well-behaved sorts of people, so we don't experience the increases in crime and lawlessness (though if you travel down the line a few miles to the next town over, which is not quite so wealthy and well-behaved, you immediately notice that all the toiletries in CVS are now behind lock and key, and that there are a lot of homeless people ranting on streetcorners, and that there's a lot of people walking around who are clearly abusing narcotics, and you'd best roll up the windows and lock the doors...).
People like to put up all the "It doesn't matter where you're from, we love you because you're our neighbor" signs (with the text repeated in Spanish and Arabic), but with the price of a modest home hovering in the $600K range, we don't get a lot of undocumented immigrants moving here. I mean, we would certainly welcome them with open arms, if only they could afford to live here...
And everyone is very accepting of trans people; because they assume that the trans folx will be just like the nice gay couple that owns a shop downtown; or the other nice gay couple that adopted four children and are pillars of the community. It is starting to get a bit disconcerting how quite a few girls at the high school suddenly decided to cut their hair short and identifying as boys, especially since we've all known them their whole lives and they always liked princesses and My Little Pony and acted like normal girls up until the moment they rather suddenly decided they were actually boys...but we just won't think about that right now because that would be transphobic and only horrible people are transphobic.
As far as everything else...well, of course everyone voted for Kamala, because people like us always vote blue no matter who - we aren't like those disgusting people who voted for Trump, who didn't go to college and have crappy jobs and put ketchup on their steak. Anything that we hear that sounds like those people might have a point about certain things is obviously misinformation, because stupid ketchup-on-steak types of people are dumb and racist and sexist and xenophobic, so they can only have incorrect opinions. There's no need to think about it any further than that!
It’s all so autocratic, and it’s true that a lot of these people just don’t know what ‘progressives’ have been up to. They really believe transwomen are much more harmless than male-identified men; that no transwoman ever assaults a woman in a public private area, and they don’t question the trans epidemic. I suspect many of them will cling stubbornly to their beliefs to the very end, rather than acknowledge to themselves how duped they’ve been and how guilelessly they’ve accepted some pretty heinous policies. Rather a lot like the Nazis sitting in a South American jungle somewhere swearing to their dying breath that they did the right thing and regret nothing.
I think this article hits the nail on the head. Regular people who are on the left don’t really know what the leaders and activists on the left are doing these days. They think they are simply fighting for equality and justice as liberals used to to do in the past few decades. They don’t realize how the left has been hijacked by woke radicals. They no longer fight for equality they now fight for special rights and special treatment for minority groups and to ignore reality in the name of some misguided sense of righteousness. This is not to say the right doesn’t have problems of its own. Oh! So many problems! Their draconian stance on abortion, opposition to birth control and LGBT rights, their propensity for book banning, their alliance with their religious cousins, pushing a free market healthcare system when we know based on the data that won’t work, urging us to abandon public education, the desire to subjugate the Palestinian people in the name of revenge, etc. But the left are no angels either. I’m a Rockefeller Republican who’s not particularly a fan of either party. But this much I can tell you the GOP warts and all, are doing quite well for themselves. The Democratic Party is a train wreck that keeps shooting itself in the foot over and over. The woke radicals mentioned above are the reason why and your average Democrat or liberal doesn’t know it. Furthermore, what the left needs to realize is you’ll never get people on your side or persuade them or get them to vote for you if you just immediately assume them to be dumb or demonize them as racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc. Nor can you achieve you’re goals when you’re out of touch with the majority of Americans, on the wrong side of common sense and science and focus on trivial stuff and non-issues while ignoring and letting slip through the cracks, real issues. Even Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian from TYT are now beginning to recognize this. These are the lessons progressives and their supporters must learn. In order to starting winning and accomplishing social change again the Democratic Party and the Social Justice Movement in the United States must find better leadership, reach out to people who disagree with them, be open-minded, and excise wokeness from their ranks. Not to mention focus on bread and butter issues that effect everyday people’s lives. Getting a good understanding of history would be a big help too. We actually as Americans across the political spectrum agree on a lot, so let’s build on that! The left also needs to declare a truce with the right on the culture war and admit there are things they’ve gotten wrong. For instance gender-affirming care for minors is bad, Trans people should not compete on the same field or court with biological women, mass immigration is not a good idea, taking down statues of the founding fathers and the Confederates is Orwellian and wrong, censorship is not how you fight bad speech but rather with good speech, colorblindness and universalism are better than identity politics and race essentialism, etc. Also, the left needs to adopt a more balanced view of American history and stop vilifying America as an evil, imperialist monster which exists purely to inflict suffering on minority groups and people around the world. They also need to stop repeating historical myths that just aren’t true. No, slavery didn’t build any part of America’s wealth. It enriched individuals, businesses and colleges but not the South or the nation as a whole. In point of fact as the great Thomas Sowell has shown, slavery slowed the South’s economic growth. The free states were richer than the slaves states. Fredrick Douglass once wrote that he met “free blacks in the North who were more prosperous, kept a better house, ate at a better table and knew more about the Constitution than 8 out of 10 slave owners in his hometown of Aberdeen, Maryland.” In the days when America was a British colony, Virginia was the wealthiest state in the union. In 1860c on eve of the Civil War, Pennsylvania had surpassed it as the wealthiest state in the union. On another note, America is not a stolen country nor did it commit genocide against its Indigenous population. While there certainly were instances of white settlers stealing individual pieces of land from Native peoples through chicanery and trickery, most of the land in this country was conquered in war or legal purchased in peaceful trade with the Native people. While the Native Americans were certainly victims of atrocities, injustices and forced displacement, there was never any large-scale genocide against them or an plan by the United States government to genocide them. The U.S. government sought to get them onto reservations, take their land and assimilate them but not to kill them. To be sure, the American Indians were treated very poorly by our government but there was never any intention to exterminate them. The same is true of the indigenous peoples of South America. Furthermore, if the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were victims of genocide, why are they all still here? Also, why are there more Native Americans alive today than ever before? If there was a genocide it didn’t workout very well. Also, we need to stop playing into the noble savage trope and acting like the Native Americans lived in a peaceful utopia and spent all day dancing until the big bad white man came along and ruined everything. Give. Me. A. Break. They had been fighting each other in bloody wars and conquering each other’s land long before the white man arrived on the continent. By the way they also practiced chattel slavery, sex slavery, torture, scalping, cannibalism, human sacrifice, and gender discrimination. That’s right, they weren’t environmentalist feminist Communists as leftists like to portray them as. They believed in private property, they had rigid gender roles and took women from other tribes and white women as sex slaves to boot, they did mass environmental destruction like controlled burns of forests and running herds of buffalo off cliffs, etc. They were just as human as the rest of us! Stop deifying the Native Americans! They could be just as savage to whites as we could be to them.
I don't think the Democrats are the only ones who don't know what's going on on their side, I suspect a lot of Republicans are just beginning to wake up to the same ;P
I live in a deepest-blue town in a blue state; so pretty much everyone has a knee-jerk response to identify as "very liberal" or even "progressive." But most of them don't really understand what progressives are up to these days.
The people in my town are generally older, very well educated and upper-middle-class. It's a tiny town full of quiet, well-behaved sorts of people, so we don't experience the increases in crime and lawlessness (though if you travel down the line a few miles to the next town over, which is not quite so wealthy and well-behaved, you immediately notice that all the toiletries in CVS are now behind lock and key, and that there are a lot of homeless people ranting on streetcorners, and that there's a lot of people walking around who are clearly abusing narcotics, and you'd best roll up the windows and lock the doors...).
People like to put up all the "It doesn't matter where you're from, we love you because you're our neighbor" signs (with the text repeated in Spanish and Arabic), but with the price of a modest home hovering in the $600K range, we don't get a lot of undocumented immigrants moving here. I mean, we would certainly welcome them with open arms, if only they could afford to live here...
And everyone is very accepting of trans people; because they assume that the trans folx will be just like the nice gay couple that owns a shop downtown; or the other nice gay couple that adopted four children and are pillars of the community. It is starting to get a bit disconcerting how quite a few girls at the high school suddenly decided to cut their hair short and identifying as boys, especially since we've all known them their whole lives and they always liked princesses and My Little Pony and acted like normal girls up until the moment they rather suddenly decided they were actually boys...but we just won't think about that right now because that would be transphobic and only horrible people are transphobic.
As far as everything else...well, of course everyone voted for Kamala, because people like us always vote blue no matter who - we aren't like those disgusting people who voted for Trump, who didn't go to college and have crappy jobs and put ketchup on their steak. Anything that we hear that sounds like those people might have a point about certain things is obviously misinformation, because stupid ketchup-on-steak types of people are dumb and racist and sexist and xenophobic, so they can only have incorrect opinions. There's no need to think about it any further than that!
It’s all so autocratic, and it’s true that a lot of these people just don’t know what ‘progressives’ have been up to. They really believe transwomen are much more harmless than male-identified men; that no transwoman ever assaults a woman in a public private area, and they don’t question the trans epidemic. I suspect many of them will cling stubbornly to their beliefs to the very end, rather than acknowledge to themselves how duped they’ve been and how guilelessly they’ve accepted some pretty heinous policies. Rather a lot like the Nazis sitting in a South American jungle somewhere swearing to their dying breath that they did the right thing and regret nothing.