And therefore Obama did lose… Not!
And therefore Obama… I can see a pattern here. Besides, this thing about not advancing all at once is not quite so, there was a lot of advancing of black rights, for obvious reasons.
Here’s one reason the right had/has such success w/their target demographic and the most recent election:
That page is practically an SNL skit: just show a voter, or a group of voters, earnestly reviewing that Who We Serve section with dwindling hope as the list gets longer and longer and they’re just not on it…
I appreciate there are some serious challenges here, but the Republicans don’t win all the time even in the age of MAGA. Tearing at our hair, wailing, and gnashing our teeth surly won’t accomplish a darn thing, so we might as well do something. Will it work? I don’t know. But I know doing nothing will accomplish nothing.
Democrats:
We need to explore our messaging to ensure we’re not being too critical of white men or alienating moderates with “woke” ideas. It’s important that voters know how we intend to help them live a better life.
Republicans:
IMMIGRANTS ARE EATING PETS
SCHOOLS ARE PERFORMING GENDER SURGERIES ON CHILDREN
WE CAN FUND THE ENTIRE GOVERNMENT WITH TARIFFS
EGGS ARE $10 A DOZEN, STORES DON’T HAVE BREAD ANYMORE
JOE BIDEN WILL ABOLISH THE US OIL INDUSTRY
Pardon me or the late reply. I presume everyone has moved past the questions posted in the OP. In my opinion wokeness has gone a bit too far for the moment. It is time to consolidate gains and press forward later.
Firm woke and proud of it. Will never shut up.
Obama was willing and able to take a left, but not maximally left, position on that issue and he won. That’s the point.
They complained about this in the 80s, when it was called “political correctness.”
I generally don’t worry about excesses in arguments over manners because
A) It always evens out over time, and
B) Of course there’s excesses and stupid people in every walk of life. Whaddya gonna do.
This however shows that the overall point, made many times in the thread already, was missed spectacularly. In the past election what you say here is what took place, a mess of “woke” ideas were not put forward as much as the right-wing propaganda machine misled many into thinking that that was the case.
But it was not wanting to give equality to gay people, the entire point of pushing “civil unions” was to impose a form of segregation on them. Just like racial segregation it wasn’t an attempt to progress, it was an attempt to write bigotry into the law, to make bigotry mandatory. And would likely stagnated progress on that front for decades at the best.
And if being correct, if pointing out the facts is “woke”, then what are politicians supposed to do? Should they just treat voters as ignorant gullible fools who cannot be reasoned with and just lie to them like the Republicans do? Because that’s where that argument goes; instead of “moralizing” at people and “talking down at them”, actually treating the voters as evil and stupid instead of being perceived that way.
Sorry for being “rigid” about standing up for my own civil rights. I should be more open to letting people treat me as a second class citizen, I guess.
I searched the forum and at least one person did call Obama a bigot at the time:
Let’s say you want rights A, B and C. A has majority support, B is 50:50, but most people are opposed to C. Is it better to have a politician who promises to do A, and does A and possibly B if they have enough support, and meanwhile try to change people’s minds on C, or a politician who promises to do all 3 and risks losing the election and being unable to achieve anything? What if the opposition is a historically awful candidate who’s a threat to democracy in the US?
AFAIK the Harris campaign did tack towards the centre, so presumably they made this calculus. But it didn’t help or wasn’t enough to overcome the unfavourable economic situation and her ties to an unpopular Biden administration.
Also, sometimes it’s just impossible to please everyone, like with the war in Gaza. Whatever position Kamala took on that was going to alienate some of her potential supporters.
Let’s not. Opposing same sex marriage is homophobic, full stop. Whether or not it made political sense for a particular politician to pose as a homophobe is a separate question, and not one I was addressing.
So, the consensus of this thread so far seems to be that, whatever cost wokeness has been for the Democrats or progressives, it is worth the price to pay.
I thought the consensus was that nobody has ever put forth a workable definition of that word.
Not even close.
My belief is that whether Democrats are woke or not is completely immaterial to the electoral cost that Republicans will exact through lying about Democrats. It has been that way for about half a century now, if not longer.
Democrats being gaslighted into believing that they are overly woke and beating each other up over it is part of the Republican plan, and exacts a much higher electoral price than the electoral price of actual wokeness, which, again, is close to zero.
I agree. The Venn diagrams for “decides whom to vote for because of ‘wokeness’” and “would never vote for a Democrat in the first place” have basically complete overlap, I believe. Both because of the beliefs it indicates, and because they are most likely just listening to the Republicans in the first place. And the endless pursuit by the Democrats of the imaginary persuadable Right has done nothing but cost them elections.
Besides, even if it worked “winning” an ideological conflict by turning into the enemy isn’t winning at all, it’s just the enemy winning in another way. A goal the Republicans have made great strides in with the Democrats already.
Some would accuse me of class reductionism but as a socialist I believe Capitalism and the neoliberal system that governs the world is awful and hurts every human being that isn’t rich in countless ways subtle and explicit. Think of Capitalism as a mythological Echidna that has birthed all the infamous monsters of civilization. Every major problem that plagues humanity is either caused or exacerbated by it. I recognize due to bigotry (systemic and otherwise) minorities like black people, trans people and the disabled have a harder time but I believe ultimately helping the working class (who are the overwhelming majority of the population) and abolishing Capitalism is the final solution we should never lose sight of. Anything that gets us closer to that is good in my eyes whether it be the minimum wage, free healthcare, prison abolition etc. Otherwise what’s the point of being a leftist as opposed to a social democrat or liberal? We should still do our best to address racism and other kinds of bigotry of course. I say this as a racial minority myself.
It’s as though we were in a war planning our next campaign to defeat the enemy and a significant number of our compatriots were obsessing over relatively small engagements on the border of the map. As a point of comparison in WW2 the Allies weren’t fighting Nazi Germany to save specific groups like Jews, Roma and homosexuals. Their foremost goal was to liberate the entire continent and the nearly 250 million people who lived under Nazi rule. I’m reminded of the Ship of Fools parable about a ship crew so distracted by identity politics that they let the ship crash and shrink. I don’t desire a system where everyone is exploited and harmed equally by corporations and austerity regardless of minority status. I desire a system without exploitation that works for everyone, not just the wealthy elite. I don’t want a future where the drone strike pilots are racially diverse and the concentration camp guards get your pronouns correct before they whip you. As cruel as this may sound we can continue indefinitely as a civilization with the existence of racism, ableism, transphobia etc. We know this because these prejudices have existed for thousands of years in various forms. However, if Capitalism isn’t abolished and a better system instituted eventually there won’t be much of a civilization worth living in due to climate change, wealth inequality, resource depletion etc.
If I had a magic wand and I could chose to abolish Capitalism or end bigotry I’d choose the former with no hesitation as awful and virulent the latter can be. I wouldn’t struggle with the choice no more than if I had to choose between eliminating disease and eliminating murder. As I always remind people you have far more in common with a bigoted Trump supporter living in a trailer park than you do to the wealthy elite however ostensibly nice and progressive they may be. We don’t have the luxury of being able to write off the tens of millions of working class people who may hold bigoted views (which are often the result of brainwashing by reactionary news media rather than something they naturally developed) as unnecessary when it comes to fundamentally changing our society for good. Chris Hedges and Walter Benn Michaels explain it well in these articles. The wealthy have orders of magnitude more class solidarity than the working class and this has to change if we want to avoid a nightmarish dystopia (Brave New World and 1984) or a collapsed hellhole (The Road and Mad Max).
Here’s a relevant quote from Michael Parenti:
When we think without Marx’s perspective, that is, without considering class interests and class power, we seldom ask why certain things happen. Many things are reported in the news but few are explained. Little is said about how the social order is organized and whose interests prevail. Devoid of a framework that explains why things happen, we are left to see the world as do mainstream media pundits: as a flow of events, a scatter of particular developments and personalities unrelated to a larger set of social relations - propelled by happenstance, circumstance, confused intentions, and individual ambition, never by powerful class interests - and yet producing effects that serve such interests with impressive regularity.
Thus we fail to associate social problems with the socio-economic forces that create them and we learn to truncate our own critical thinking. Imagine if we attempted something different; for example, if we tried to explain that wealth and poverty exist together not in accidental juxtaposition, but because wealth causes poverty, an inevitable outcome of economic exploitation both at home and abroad. How could such an analysis gain any exposure in the capitalist media or in mainstream political life?