If You Don't Know, I'm Certainly Not Going to Tell You!

A goodly number of people on the left, let alone in the Democratic Party, were severely shaken and demoralized by Trump's victory, and I have to admit that I'm one of them.  I find that I have little to say about it, because I don't have any good ideas on how to combat him other than the obvious: support the ACLU and other organizations that have fought him in the past and are ready to fight him now, speak out on specific matters when possible.

Unfortunately, some of the commentators I've looked to before are in disarray, not just from the US version of the center (what is considered "left" in the mainstream and the far right) but to some extent from the actual left. It's no surprise that many people are looking for someone to blame.  I've got a little list myself.  Nor is it a surprise to see a lot of lashing out, almost at random, and as I've seen so many times before, a favored target is The Woke or whatever symbol of infantile leftism is current.  As I've already argued, "woke" is a meaningless epithet, like "politically correct," "CRT," "cancel culture," or "DEI."  All those terms can be defined in meaningful and useful ways, but that's not how they're being used.

I think it's fairly obvious that Kamala Harris didn't lose because she was too "woke."  Supporting horrific Israeli atrocities and dumping on those in her own party who oppose them, cozying up to billionaire donors, and embracing the Cheney crime family don't constitute "wokeness" in any sense the term is being used -- rather the opposite, I would think.  No matter where on the political spectrum you imagine yourself, ignoring or endorsing those tactics is siding with reaction.  That's happening a lot right now, on immigration (where there has never been much daylight between MAGA and the Democratic Party establishment anyway) and birthright citizenship for example. The political scientist Corey Robin has written some very good things on this, but on Facebook rather than on Twitter/X or his own blog; if you use Facebook, I'd recommend following and reading him there. 

But here's a good example of that lashing out.

I don't recall "the left" ever making such a decision.  The only time I heard that line during my half-century working at a Big Ten college campus, it came from upwardly-mobile students of color, who weren't leftists. But yeah, you know, maybe I missed the announcement from Woke / PC Headquarters.

Another possibility is that the "left" (again, not the Kamala Harris campaign or the Democratic establishment) tried to educate people but did it badly.  I've written along those lines for a long time, but there too I was addressing not the left but what I call the Culture of Therapy, which has a lot of power in universities and in the corporate world (also not the left).  Much of the Sixties left went into inventing the culture of therapy, which could mean that there's a deep affinity between radical politics and therapeutic authoritarianism.  That possibility is supported, I think, by a response to the post above, which also has roots in dogmatic left hostility to any political activism outside the labor movement.

This is MAGA-level incoherence and rage, I think.  Shirtless continued:

If "sustained gaslighting campaigns, outright lies," etc. don't work, why has the far right - which relies on those tactics -- gotten as far as it has?  Why did Trump win in November?  I pointed out to Shirtless that pretty much every successful advance in human affairs has been denounced as insane, utopian, bullshit, what have you: the extension of the franchise beyond white property-owning males; the abolition of slavery; religious freedom; allowing various national groups to immigrate to the US; the 40-hour work week and the 8-hour day; social safety-net programs; abortion and contraception; allowing blacks, women, and gays in the military; same sex-marriage, and more.  On the other side, genuinely insane projects like colonizing Mars or planets outside the solar system get a respectful hearing from people hostile to transgenderism.

Shirtless accused me of "survivor bias" in my choice of examples.  That was a clueless or deliberate dodging of the point, which is that his original claim is falsified by many cases, so what made the difference?  I certainly agree that the Culture of Therapy isn't the right approach.  I submit that while top-down measures were sometimes used, several of my examples (such as the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day) were genuinely popular at a grass-roots level and were only considered insane by elites and their toadies.  In other cases, such as increased acceptance of gay people and of same-sex marriage, change occurred because while we are a minority, we are embedded in society at large.  As we became more visible to our friends, families, and co-workers, it became harder to demonize us. The same has been true of "interracial" marriage, and is true of transgender, an even smaller minority but one that is connected to the majority.  Several lefty-liberal commentators argued that GOP candidates below the presidential level played down anti-trans positions in 2024 because their base knew trans people and didn't support the MAGA line.  But I'm critical of trans people and their allies who try to support their claims with misinformation.

(I believe that contrary to much of what I hear, transgender [not necessarily by that name] is intuitively plausible to most people, because most people think of sex/gender in magical terms.  That's apart from [or maybe related to?] the general confusion over sex and gender, which gives us "gender reveal parties" to announce the sex of a fetus, confusing "intersex" with transgender, the historical and transcultural popularity of drag, and so on.  It's no surprise that the Cultural of Therapy got transgender issues wrong: it's a bountiful source of misinformation and sloppy thinking.  But I need to do a separate post about all this.)

Whose job is it to educate you?  There's no single answer.  I was an active educator on sexual orientation at my university for over four decades; I certainly see it as my job to educate others -- not only straights but other gay people. That often put me at odds with Culture of Therapy professionals, but in the long run I think I won against them in important areas, though I had no power to impose my views.  Numerous of our speaker volunteers told me that I'd influenced them on the born-gay question.  At first, they said, they thought I was just being mean (why?) but over time they thought it over and changed their minds.  As a white male, I also consider it my job to educate myself, and I am critical of those who want to put that burden on the Other.  I think that stance is connected to hostility to minorities who do try to educate them.

I'm skeptical of the very claim that the "left" abdicated its role in educating others in the first place.  I think it's an excuse for joining MAGA reaction, which always happens when the right wins an election.  I remember liberals sliding right when Ronald Reagan became president, for example.  I'm not optimistic about the next four years, and one reason is the liberals and leftists who are all too ready to make common cause with Trump.  There are a lot of them.  The rest of us can't rely on them.