Anti-Wokeness Isn't a Viable Path to Power
It's great for fundraising, but a lot of those funds are going to end up wasted
A lot of right-wingers are playing at regime-level analysis, they’re using the word “regime” a lot these days. But they don’t really understand how the left works. If they did, they wouldn’t be doubling down on anti-wokeness.
Because of the funding structure of the machine that powers the Democratic Party and progressive activism, making anti-wokeness the centerpiece of conservative strategy, like Tom Klingenstein is trying to do, is not going to work. Their funding is centrally coordinated through Arabella. Funds for everything from abortion rights to climate change to racial justice pass through these philanthropic advisors and their funds.
This constitutes a lever the Democratic Party can pull, to either dial up or dial back the leftism at will. Ordering up a protest is as easy as ordering a pizza, though everyone in Washington maintains the fiction that these are grassroots things. Republicans can double down on being anti-woke, and all the Democrats have to do is pull back the lever a smidge, and the right will be consigned to a mess of impotent shrieking. That’s already happening. Anti-woke conservatives are at risk of becoming reactionaries without something to react against. How long do you want to play this game of rope-a-dope?
I realize this sounds insane if you’re on Twitter. The conservative media monitoring strategy is to find odd characters with gender identity issues on TikTok and subject them to a viral two-minutes hate, the Chaya Raichik gambit. This gives right-wingers a mistaken impression of how woke things really are, but you can bet they’ll keep going to that well till it’s dry.
My lefty friends would say this is precisely the point of conservatism, to direct people away from their material interests. At this moment I find it hard to disagree with them, but you could say the same about trendy left cultural politics, and anyway most of the time you still have to try and assume good faith.
The poor Democratic Socialists of America are having their own confrontation with the Arabella lever, if you look at what’s going on in Nevada. I kept waiting for the moment the DSA might get wise to this game too, and renounce cooperation for the sake of preserving their moral authority, like the bolsheviks abstaining from the First Duma. It never came, and now they’re more or less unnecessary. Too late, guys.
What should be the focus then? Small government? Free-market, libertarian principles? Responsible, mature, conservative leadership? Nobody cares about these thing, doesn't get people animated
Feels hopeless to be conservative in 2023... You can't stop progress, all you can do is stomp your feet as progress marches forward
As Moldbug pointed out a few days ago (https://graymirror.substack.com/p/acorns-for-the-culture-war), another Southern statesman, a few years ago, gave away the game:
"Conservatism is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation.
What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.
American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted?
Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance:
The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip."