In a recent post, The Red Shift and What it Means, I updated readers on the partisan political situation (Republicans control the federal government and most state governments) and made some observations about what that means for America. I said this (and other things) about why voters abandoned the Democrats: “They don’t want indoctrination camps masquerading as educational institutions. They’re tired of cultural managers telling them how to think and feel about things.” The sentiment is thus, as I posted to X a few days ago: I am only obligated to tolerate those beliefs and practices that do not harm others or intrude upon their liberty. I am not obligated to accept or affirm the beliefs of others.
Today, on X, I ran across a CNN interview with Joe Manchin, the Senator from West Virginia, and founder of Enersystems, a coal brokerage company his family owns. He is leaving the Senate and, at a bar talking to a reporter, reflected on the state of the Democratic Party. In so many words, he said the same thing I just said. “The D-brand has been so maligned from the standpoint of—it’s just, it’s toxic.” He no longer considers himself a Democrat “in the form of what Democratic party has turned itself into.” The party has become toxic, authoritarian and censorious, contemptuous of ordinary Americans. “They have basically expanded upon the thinking: ‘Well, we want to protect you there, but we’re going to tell you how you should live your life from that far on.’” “They’re too extreme,” he says of the Democrats. They “go too far.” “The Republican says: ‘Oh, let the good times roll. Let anybody have anything they want.’”
What did this to the Democratic party? Woke progressivism. “Woke.” Blacks started using the term around the 1930s. Then, it strictly meant an awareness of issues affecting black people. Good enough. That was a useful exercise before the mid-1960s. What woke has come to mean is radically different from this original meaning. Today, it is the belief that there is a de facto hierarchy of oppression invented by various postmodernist epistemics (critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies) in which white straight people and adjacents (such as Asians and Jews) are the oppressors and all the rest of the people—black, brown, trans—are the oppressed. In this fallacious way of seeing the world, the oppressors are depicted as using free speech, individualism, perfectionism, rational thinking, timeliness, etc., as means to keep down the oppressed. The oppressed therefore must wield group power based on identity (imagined communities in a post-truth world) and feelings, and confront reason and speech with suppression and violence.
The woke are successful in this endeavor because the corporate elite have found woke ideology to be a powerful means for undermining political consciousness and class solidarity. For centuries, the ruling class used to use racism to divide the people. They still do. But racism does not fix the hierarchy. Woke progressives have flipped the hierarchy—and added to it an ever growing number of other oppressive groups. It’s the way kings maintained control of the territories they claimed. It’s an old model updated for our times. We thus see the perversity of woke in its atavistic, primitive, and tribalism notions of collective and intergenerational guilt and responsibility. As such, woke is antithetical to the democratic-republican and classical liberal foundations of the American Republic. The ethos of the United States is autonomy, individualism, free conscience, privacy, publishing, speech, and many other wonderful things.
Manchin denies ever having been on the woke progressive side. If you listen to the principles he espouses, he’s a liberal and a republican. His critique of the Democratic party’s stance on social issues: “First of all, as an American, and as someone in the Senate, and I’m going to take the Constitutional Oath, the Constitution that I take very, very, very, very seriously, I’m going to help every human being pursue the pursuit of happiness life in their life, pursuit of happiness. I don’t care who they are. I don’t care what color. I don’t care any of the things, live and let live, just do it and that’s you, and I’m going to make sure you have that opportunity in life to live your life. Just don’t make your life, if it might be on the extreme, or in the minority of few, make me believe that’s the norm or make me and my family believe, or my children believe or this or that. No, I will protect you. Just don’t try to mainstream it. And the Democratic party, the Washington Democrats, have tried to mainstream the extreme.”
This is essentially my view. Here’s the video:
freedom and reason 