Domestic Politics

As valued commenter Kay has pointed out, self-proclaimed wingnut messaging guru Christopher Rufo‘s “war on woke” as a GOP electoral strategy didn’t resonate with voters much outside of already red states like Florida. But is the anti-woke crusade spent as a cultural force? I think you can make the argument that it succeeded in that realm as conspicuously as it failed in electoral politics.

Example: to activate Rufo’s cynical anti-woke strategy, FL Gov. Ron DeSantis made the Left Coast-dwelling Rufo a state college trustee to help dismantle famously liberal New College of Florida. DeSantis also signed a slew of constitutionally questionable culture war legislation that disrupted schools and businesses — and cost taxpayers many millions of dollars to defend in court.

Angry Boots hoped to push future convicted felon Donald Trump aside and march triumphantly into Iowa on the strength of actions like that, i.e., to reap the electoral benefits of the anti-woke agenda. But DeSantis crashed and burned, immolating hundreds of millions of GOP donor funds along with his national political future as anti-woke as an electoral force proved a dud even with Iowa’s conservative GOP base.

Still, we shouldn’t overlook the real-world consequences of the anti-woke push where wingnuttery already holds sway. The transformation of New College from an academically over-achieving hippie haven into a space that caters to meathead conservative jocks is proceeding apace. And the anti-woke agenda has successfully rolled back a lot of the progress (or at least made dead letters of pledges to make progress) in the corporate and academic worlds too.

NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg addressed this in a May essay (gift link) that reviews a book written by cancel culture-obsessed journalist Nellie Bowles.

“At various points, my fellow reporters at major news organizations told me roads and birds are racist,” [Bowles] writes. “Voting is racist. Exercise is super racist.” Even allowing for 2020’s great flood of social-justice click bait, these are misleading and reductive caricatures. It’s hardly revisionist history, for example, to point out that Interstates were tools of racial segregation.

But my biggest disagreement with Bowles lies in her insistence that the movement she’s critiquing has triumphed. She describes the New Progressivism as the “operating principle of big business,” as well as the tech sector and academia. This week, speaking on the podcast of her wife, the Times Opinion writer turned heterodox media entrepreneur Bari Weiss, Bowles said, “The revolution didn’t end because it lost. It ended because it won.”

It didn’t, though. Even at the zenith of the George Floyd demonstrations, the corporate social-justice stuff was mostly window dressing; the operating principle of big business is and always was the pursuit of profit. And now, we’re in the middle of a furious reversal.

Goldberg is right about the reversal. As she notes, corporations and institutions are jettisoning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies as fast as they adopted them in 2020. Elite colleges are cracking down on protesters. States and institutions are banning consideration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance in investment decisions.

Maybe it’s the inevitable backlash that arises to vociferously oppose every scrap of social progress, however modest and necessary and overdue. But it also looks like a partial victory for the Rufos, Bowles and Weisses of the world. We shouldn’t expect them to recognize that since their cashflow depends on monetizing nonexistent conservative victimhood. Luckily for them, it’s an inexhaustible resource.

Open thread.

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