One of the best of Dennis Prager’s many great aphorisms is “everything the Left touches, it destroys”.
Along with, apparently, itself.
I read Charles Cooke’s satirical take on the recent meltdown at…well, any number of leftist institutions, as the Woke Mob eats itself.
“What”, I thought, “could better than a Cooke takedown?”
Only the actual article being (as far as events allow) lampooned, and the facts and history presented – which read as first-class, if unintentional, parody on their own.
This is, of course, a caricature of the left: that socialists and communists spend more time in meetings and fighting with each other than changing the world. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential election, and then Joe Biden’s, it has become nearly all-consuming for some organizations, spreading beyond subcultures of the left and into major liberal institutions. “My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife. Whereas [before] that would have been 25-30 percent tops,” the former executive director said. He added that the same portion of his deputies’ time was similarly spent on internal reckonings.
“Most people thought that their worst critics were their competitors, and they’re finding out that their worst critics are on their own payroll,” said Loretta Ross, an author and activist who has been prominent in the movement for decades, having founded the reproductive justice collective SisterSong.
“We’re dealing with a workforce that’s becoming younger, more female, more people of color, more politically woke — I hate to use that term in a way it shouldn’t be used — and less loyal in the traditional way to a job, because the whole economic rationale for keeping a job or having a job has changed.” That lack of loyalty is not the fault of employees, Ross said, but was foisted on them by a precarious economy that broke the professional-social contract. That has left workers with less patience for inequities in the workplace.
“All my ED [executive director] friends, everybody’s going through some shit, nobody’s immune,” said one who has yet to depart.
It appears they’ve shot themselves in the foot with their own ideology:
The silence stems partly, one senior leader in an organization said, from a fear of feeding right-wing trolls who are working to undermine the left. Adopting their language and framing feels like surrendering to malign forces, but ignoring it has only allowed the issues to fester. “The right has labeled it ‘cancel culture’ or ‘callout culture,’” he said, “so when we talk about our own movement, it’s hard because we’re using the frame of the right. It’s very hard because there’s all these associations and analysis that we disagree with, when we’re using their frame. So it’s like, ‘How do we talk about it?’”
For years, recruiting young people into the movement felt like a win-win, he said: new energy for the movement and the chance to give a person a lease on a newly liberated life, dedicated to the pursuit of justice. But that’s no longer the case. “I got to a point like three years ago where I had a crisis of faith, like, I don’t even know, most of these spaces on the left are just not — they’re not healthy. Like all these people are just not — they’re not doing well,” he said. “The dynamic, the toxic dynamic of whatever you want to call it — callout culture, cancel culture, whatever — is creating this really intense thing, and no one is able to acknowledge it, no one’s able to talk about it, no one’s able to say how bad it is.”
That’s the good news.
The bad news? It reads like an ideological mirror image of the Minnsota GOP.
You know you are woke, when phrases like that roll effortlessly off your tongue.
The Democratic Party has embraced its Tea Party moment, when it became disconnected from reality.
As with the Tea Party around the 2008 financial crisis, the Democratic Party has become disconnected from reality and from the vast majority of its voters. They have adopted irresponsible and damaging positions on police reform (defund), immigration (open borders), women’s rights (as opposed to the status of “pregnant people”), and education (“merit is white supremacy”).
We have yet to coin a term for this, but I would suggest the Woke Party as a parallel to the Tea Party.
For those of us who feel profoundly alienated from this current form of “progressivism,” it is time to reclaim the banner of the traditional, classic, liberal. I spent some time with Francis Fukuyama’s newest book, “Liberalism and its Discontents” to come to grips with what is happening.
I’m not sure where we are supposed to rally, but it is time to reclaim classic liberalism and defend it.
Vocab trigger warning for new SITD readers: woke trolls do not use words according to their usual and ordinary meaning. The words ‘racist,’ ‘Nazi,’ ‘Trumpism’ and now ‘Tea Party’ all mean the same thing: “bad.”
How to blow a woke mind: ask them to define the word “Woman”
(btw: the fascists at Merriam-Webster define it as “: an adult female person”)
Huh? the whole economic rationale for keeping a job or having a job has changed.
and of course double Huh? the chance to give a person a lease on a newly liberated life, dedicated to the pursuit of justice
My company has a VP of Corporate Responsibility, and we’re getting a lot of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) messaging about how important this is to investors and why we have to live it.
At times I can’t tell if his title is VP, or Arch-Bishop, but I do wonder how the ESG-heavy companies fared in the crash this week compared to the more unenlightened ones.
I don’t really have a handle on what the stock market is doing since my investments are heavily into the 3 B’s: Bullets, Bourbon, and Bullion.
Night Writer, this is the other end of the SJW employee see-saw. You want your employer to act out the values that you have in your private life, well, don’t be surprised when your employer wants you to act out its values in your private life.
I’ve known that the left eats itself ever since living in Boulder for nearly a decade. Heck, I’ve known it since the first time I visited Boulder in 1991, when a number of women protested at the Foreign Affairs conference topless because….I think it was something like insufficient women panelists. Totally lost on them was not only that the bulk of panelists agreed with them at least 98%, but if you want prominent diplomats and leaders there, ya kinda gotta work with the people that are available.
They did get their pictures in the student paper, though. I’m sure their parents were so proud, almost as proud as the parents of kids who posed for “Girls of the Big 12” a couple of years later.
MP, I’m hoping I can glide through the next couple of years until retirement, but my “whatever” margin for avoidance is getting squeezed – especially since my job is marketing. Just wait until I mention something OG such as David Ogilvy’s maxim: “How much soap does it sell?”
So far, however, my company has maintained some sanity and practicality. For instance, we didn’t celebrate Pride Month in our Middle Eastern and Chinese markets.
I’m reading that on Wednesday some SJW SpaceX employees circulated a petition demanding that SpaceX disassociate itself from statements made by Elon Musk.
They were fired by Thursday afternoon.
Imagine being so confused about your purpose as a human being that you feel diminished if your employer does not “share your values.”
^ Fired for coordinating an open letter about self described “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk?!?!
Yes, I know, Emery. For numb nutted wokies like you, getting fired for disparaging your company internally is wrong.
Twitter prohibits speech by political enemies.
Spacex fires insubordinate employees.
Yep, pretty much identical. Thanks for pointing that out, E.
jpa:
Let me translate.
Your job now is to collect Pedo Joe’s stimulus checks and let your gubmint run your life for you.
The free speech absolutist strikes again. Here come all the “it’s his company, he can do whatever he wants with it” replies.
Dayum, “free speech absolutist” pouring out of the hole in the trolls head. Your side is the one censoring people for just QUESTIONING whether the election was fair and honest. Shut yer trap jerk, you got no right talking about ANYONE’S speech.
Besides, that’s just another talking point going round the intarwebs today. Find something original for once.
You mean I can’t write a note to my co-worker saying the boss is a poopyhead without getting in trouble? Waaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Just a note on trying to change history. The Tea Party was about gummint spending too damn much money.
According to our revisionist historian troll, this is about the fourth time he has gotten it wrong. Wasn’t about the financial crises, wasn’t started in 2008. Sheesh, you must talk to a lot of dumb bunnies in your world.
The problem with today’s woke isn’t that I disagree with them politically, it is because they are insane. They believe that women can impregnate either men or women who can then carry a child to term. They believe that taking careful note of a person’s race and then granting that person rights and privileges based upon your perception of that person’s race, is not only anti-racist, it is the only legitimate way to be anti-racist.
The Tea Party, on the other hand, believed in lower taxes and a less powerful federal government.
MP, your comments puts me in mind of a screed I read somewhere. Woke Liberal angry that “Conservatives hate us and want us to die.”
My response: hate you? I don’t even know you. I hate the policies your side demands because those policies are making it harder for me to protect my family’s safety and livelihood. But I’m too busy trying to salvage a future to worry about hating anybody. Even if I did, I wouldn’t waste time posting about it on-line. That’s an activity for people who don’t have anything real to worry about. Must be nice.
Sunday is Father’s Day. It always falls on Sunday. I never get Father’s Day off work with pay. Monday is Slaves’ Day. I get the day off with pay. Plainly, Congress believes slaves are more important than fathers.
In completely unrelated news, children raised in single-parent households tend to be raised by mothers, have little to no fatherly involvement, live in poverty, experience worse health, gain less education, have lower job expectations and die younger than their two-parent peers.
I wonder what percentage of the car jackers and drive-by shooters came from each group of households? I wonder if Congress has optimally aligned its priorities?
Uh… actually, I am going with Emery on this one.
SpaceX is Elon Musk’s company and contracts aside, he is free to fire his employees for cause. In this instance, the protections of free speech do not apply.
However, this is not a case of what a company like Twitter or SpaceX can do, it is what it should do.
It is rather incongruent to demand free speech on Twitter then can someone for speaking out at SpaceX.
What Elon should have done was put on his free-speech big boy pants and respond:
Here is the text of the letter.
JD, Sunday is the unfortunate confluence of Juneteenf and Father’s day.
I expect celebrants of the former will consider bringing up the latter to be extremely bad form during backyard BBQ’s.
Another reason the comparison between the Tea Party and the Woke is inappropriate.
The Tea Party got its start in 2009, as a reaction to the extraordinary actions taken by the federal government in response to the financial collapse of 2008.
The Tea Party is widely credited for the GOP regaining control of congress in 2010 by historic gains.
OTOH, the woke, now implementing their agenda through congressional Democrats, are facing very poor polling and are looking at a shellacking in the elections this fall. The woke program — which includes high profile issues like an open border, introduction of trans ideology into every aspect of American life, and racist government policies, is incredibly unpopular.
The two movements are completely unlike, other than that each can be described as activists exerting influence on a party’s policy goals.
Another difference is that the Tea Party famously did not achieve most of its goals. The Republicans it elected congress went back to business as usual for the most part.
On the other hand, while the Woke may have had greater influence after the 2020 election, this has mostly been a result of the Woke capture of newly elected President Biden. The Dems lost house seats in the 2020 elections, and control the senate only because of veep Kamala Harris’s tie breaking vote.
It is rather incongruent to demand free speech on Twitter then can someone for speaking out at SpaceX.
Have to disagree, Greg: Twitter is, ideally, a company maintaining a platform for its users for disseminating ideas. SpaceX is a company putting rockets into space.
If you have an employee doing something not in the scope of his/her normal duties, using company resources to do so, they’re in breach of their employment contract.
I’m thinking the employees got on the bad side because they were very negative on the boss and offered no specifics while going public. Doesn’t constructive criticism usually involve specifics?