Why Even Progressives Are Waking Up to the Failure of Woke

by Ace

I’m always skeptical of Peak Woke arguments — arguments that woke has reached its maximum power and is now receding. We’ve thought the tide had turned before. We were disappointed.

Ruy Teixeira, the liberal Democrat who wrote with great eagerness about The Coming Democrat Majority based on the immigration and fecundity of Hispanics, has been writing a lot of critical pieces about the Democrats’ lurch towards Marxism and identity-politics Maoism.

He thinks the Democrats have killed the progressive agenda — whether or not Kamala wins or not.

The public, he says, simply “hates” this agenda.

How Progressives Blew ItDefund the police. An open border. Identity politics. End the use of fossil fuels. Is it any wonder America turned against the progressive movement?

This article is reprinted from the Substack newsletter “The Liberal Patriot.”

It wasn’t so long ago progressives were riding high. They had a moment; they really did. Their radical views set the agenda and tone for the Democratic Party and, especially in cultural areas, were hegemonic in the nation’s discourse. Building in the teens and cresting in the early ’20s with the Black Lives Matter protests and the heady early days of the Biden administration, very few of their ideas seemed off the table. Defund the police and empty the jails? Sure! Abolish ICE and decriminalize the border? Absolutely! Get rid of fossil fuels and have a “Green New Deal”? Definitely! Demand trillions of dollars for a “transformational” Build Back Better bill? We’re just getting started! Promote DEI and the struggle for “equity” (not equal opportunity) everywhere? It’s the only way to fight privilege! Insist that a new ideology around race and gender should be accepted by everyone? Only a bigot would resist!

Progressives thought they had ripped the Overton window wide open and it remained only to push the voters through it. In their view, that wouldn’t be too hard since these were great ideas, and voters, at least the non-deplorable ones, were thirsty for a bold new approach to America’s problems.

In reality, a lot of these ideas were pretty terrible and most voters, outside the precincts of the progressive left itself, were never very interested in them. That was true from the get-go, but now the backlash against these ideas is strong enough that it can’t be ignored. As a result, politics is adjusting and the progressive moment is well and truly over.

Astute observers on the left acknowledge this, albeit with an undertone of sadness. Progressive Substacker Noah Smith plaintively notes:

I spent pretty much all of the 2010s–my first decade as a writer and pundit–advocating for various progressive causes.
 
….In the late 2010s, it felt like a long wave of progressive sentiment. . . had finally reached a critical level of intensity.
 
…A few years later, I’m not so sure. My values haven’t become more conservative.
 
…But I have to say that I now doubt the practical effectiveness of some of the policies I embraced in previous years.
 
…Finally, David Weigel of Semafor observes in his recent article, “No Matter Who Wins, the U.S. Is Moving to the Right”:

The Democratic Party, after two decades of leftward post-Clinton drift, has jerked abruptly right. . . . They’ve adjusted to an electorate that’s shifted to the right, toward the Trump-led GOP, on issues that progressives once hoped were non-negotiable–immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, climate change policies, and criminal justice reform. . . .Both parties now face voters, white and non-white, who were open to some left-wing ideas about race, crime, and gender in 2020 but are far more skeptical now.

So how did the progressive moment fall apart? It is not hard to think of some reasons.

1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea, and voters hate it. When Joe Biden came into office, he immediately issued a series of executive orders loosening the rules for handling illegal immigrants, a move that was rapturously applauded by progressives. The real-world effects were immediate, as New York Times reporter Miriam Jordan crisply explained:

It is not just because they believe they will be able to make it across the 2,000 mile southern frontier. They are also certain that once they make it to the United States they will be able to stay.Forever.

And by and large, they are not wrong.

…”Americans simply do not like the practice of rewarding asylum seekers for crossing the border illegally,” writes Smith. Progressives’ epic failure to understand this reality is a big reason why the progressive moment is over.

2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea, and voters hate it.

…[D]emocrats became associated with a wave of progressive public prosecutors who seemed hesitant about keeping criminals off the street, even as a spike in violent crimes such as murder and carjacking swept the nation. This was twinned with non-prosecutions for lesser crimes that degraded the quality of life in many cities under Democratic control. San Francisco practically became the poster child for the latter problem under District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s “leadership.”

The most enthusiastic supporters of a Boudin-style approach to policing tend to be white, college-educated liberals–the base, as it were, of the progressive movement. The sentiment among pro-Democratic, non-white, and working-class voters toward policing is quite different. These voters tend to live in areas that have more crime and are therefore unlikely to look kindly on any approach that threatens public safety. A Pew poll found that black and Hispanic Democrats–who are far more urban and working class–are significantly more likely than white Democrats to favor more police funding in their area.

A survey conducted for my new report with Yuval Levin, Politics Without Winners, confirmed the strength of these sentiments. By 73–25 percent, they backed keeping police budgets whole in the interests of public safety over reducing these budgets and transferring money to social services. Among non-white working-class voters there was a 30-point margin against reducing police budgets, which ballooned to 50 points among moderate-to-conservative working-class non-whites, the overwhelming majority of this demographic. By contrast, white college-grad liberals favored reducing police budgets by 20 points. That tells you a lot.

As Smith apologetically admits: “The simple fact is that policing works.” Who’da thunk it? Progressives own this one, and it is another big reason the progressive moment is over.

3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea, and voters hate it. In recent years, huge swaths of the Democratic Party, egged on by progressives, have become infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those engaging in them….

But most voters don’t believe that….

4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea, and voters hate it.

…Workers far prefer a gradual “all-of-the-above” approach to transitioning the energy system over the frantic push for renewables that characterizes progressives’ Green New Deal–type thinking…. An overwhelming 72 percent in the survey favored the all-of-the-above approach, while just 26 percent backed the rapid renewables transition. Views were even more lopsided among working-class voters.

Predictably, progressives’ BFFs, white liberal college graduates, were an exception–two to one in favor of getting rid of fossil fuels. But moderate and conservative white college graduates, who vastly outnumber the liberals, were almost seven to one against.

The hard fact is that progressives’ hostility to fossil fuels is not widely shared by ordinary voters. In a recent result from a New York Times/Siena College poll, two-thirds of likely voters said they supported a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.”

Two-thirds!

…What comes next? Certainly Kamala Harris is furiously backpedaling from all these positions, but she is not a particularly convincing messenger for a new approach or even able to articulate what that new approach might be. In all likelihood, it will take some time for a new moment to emerge and influence Democrats the way the progressive moment did. Until then, Democrats are stuck with the fallout from the progressive moment, which may fatally undermine them this November 5. We shall see very shortly.

If Kamala Harris wins, they’ll double down on woke and identity politics and DEI and transgenderism for children.

Even if she loses, they’ll double down on it– it will take 10-16 years in the political wilderness to finally shock the Democrat Party leadership into kicking out the wokies and implementing party-wide ideological reform. Bill Clinton and the Democrat Leadership Council did not win out over the old George McGovern left until 1992, when the Democrats had lost every presidential election except the post-Watergate fluke year of 1976.

LINK