Wokeness’ defeat in Virginia ends an era of guilt in America. By Jason Morgan.
There are many ways to parse the Republican upset over a Democrat party boss in Virginia this November. …
But as the hours wore on and the warm rush of dopamine — which always comes from watching glum, defeated liberals mope on the TV — wore off, I began to think that Democrat strategist James Carville’s pithy assessment captured the moment best. It was “stupid wokeness,” my fellow big-mouthed Cajun noted, that hung like an albatross around Democrats’ necks. That’s the ticket right there. Woke croaked this month.
Americans are not going to be told anymore that we are all racist, evil, oppressive goons ruining the lives of every blessed minority in creation. That asinine fable, which many on the left apparently believe, is not going to sway the electorate any longer.
We have long been a guilted people. But the Guilted Age is over. The insufferable woke punditry and academic-bureaucratic complex are going to have to find some other high hobby horse to ride.
By “guilted” I mean the knotted, clotted rage of the left against pretty much the entire country. This rage has dominated the mediascape and institutional mood this past half decade. It has become the hobby, the very bad habit, of the elite to hector and browbeat all the little people going about their business in the workaday world, to blame us all for a whole rap sheet of offenses. …
Schools are where tomorrow’s voters are indoctrinated:
The insanity finally crested with public school teachers’ pushing the cultural-Marxist agit-prop known as critical race theory in class. (The Zoom year helped enormously by revealing to parents just how bad the public school curricula had become.)
In school board meeting after school board meeting across the country in 2020 and 2021, parents of every conceivable ethnic background took to the podium to insist that teachers stop telling kids that race war was a kind of Fourth Law of Thermodynamics. Black parents, white parents, Middle Eastern parents, Hispanic parents, Asian parents — everyone stood up and said to quit with the CRT already. Enough was enough.
But the left doubled down again. Apparently everybody is a white supremacist now …, and also a “domestic terrorist” to boot. Folks got fed up with this narcosis oddly known as “wokeness,” and threw out on his ear whichever politician happened to be within electoral reach. That politician, poetic justice would have it, was Terry McAuliffe. …
A real white supremacist:
I would guess that one of the reasons that both Carville and I have an allergy to this business of calling everyone a white supremacist is that, in our home state of Louisiana, we had an honest-to-goodness white supremacist run for public office: the execrable David Duke. It wasn’t too hard to tell that Duke was a white supremacist. You didn’t need the gurus on CNN to spell it out for you. I mean, Duke was given to praising Hitler and saying things such as, “White people are genetically superior,” and “Blacks and Jews are sub-human,” and other cloacal statements along that line.
White supremacists like Duke do not hide their views. They are anxious to show you their swastika collection and to explain to you how the Rothschilds control the world. If you ever encounter a white supremacist, you will know it in about three seconds. This is not “systemic racism.” Duke was, and is, an outright racist. “White supremacy” is not an abstraction or an atmospheric phenomenon. It is not a subtle art, my friends. It is glaring. You don’t have to suss it out of the interstices of a culture. …
Woke as a political strategy:
Woke is a broken-record guilt-trip. It is the left trying to pin existential guilt on everyone else, which is why the woke always go for indelible traits like race and sex, rough and easily-politicizable stand-ins for metaphysics. The ur-texts of this odd religion hold that there is something called “systemic racism,” another tumbledown metaphysical concept, and we (or at least those of us not in Manhattan, Washington, or Hollywood) are to blame for it. Just by breathing. Just by existing.
Of course, we could plead the woke’s favorite mantra, “Pride,” as a way to excuse ourselves from our guilt. But that doesn’t work. Because Pride is only for the woke. If you are not woke, you may not be proud. You may only be sorry. And even that is not enough, not even close. The elite-captured institutions now work only to shame the non-elite into accepting the guilt for all that has gone so horribly wrong. It’s like a spinning merry-go-round. You can’t get off. You can only hold on and feel dizzy and sick.
Truth be told, wokeness comes from deep in the American psyche, from places we don’t like to talk about at parties. We are still sinners in the hands of an angry God, it seems. It’s just that God is now Whoopi Goldberg. …
Americans are a good people:
America, that place so awfully racist that droves of people keep streaming in from around the hemisphere, is not what the left tells us it is. America is a good country, a country where goodness, in any given moment, has at least an even shot at shining through. …
Americans are good, and not despite their past but because of it. Lynchings, slave auctions, Manzanar, Native genocide. It’s all right there. Open any history book, open any newspaper for that matter, and the sins of our youth are before us. The left acts like it is some kind of secret, esoteric knowledge to say that America has often failed to live up to her ideals. But of course everyone knows the dark history. That’s why we so treasure the racial unity that we are finally beginning to achieve.
The left has dominated the political landscape for two decades just by calling every opponent a racist. That’s now escalated to “white supremacist”. Enough. The name-calling and bullying is no way to run a successful country.
In the Virginia election the only argument of the Dems was to call opponents “racist”. At last, it failed. Maybe this is the beginning of the end of that nonsense, though for the time being some are doubling down.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
