We don’t blame them; they have no leader and no mission. Everyone who was once a doyenne of the party was either revealed to be impotent by Tuesday’s result (see: Barack Obama), or is simply too old to be fit for purpose (see: Nancy Pelosi). Power abhors a vacuum, and as such, the party’s two wings – its establishment liberal wing, and its woke progressive wing – are now scrambling to try to fill that vacuum.
Candidly, we expect the establishment liberals to win. And that is a victory we welcome, if only because it will put an end to the woke progressive reign of terror which has reduced America’s culture and politics to frail shadows of their former selves. Wokeness, and its applied form cancel culture, deserve to go down with the same infamy as the Salem Witch Trials, McCarthyism, and the Satanic Panic. Like the Witch trials, it made monsters out of innocents. Like McCarthyism, it was indifferent to guilt or innocence. Like the Satanic Panic, it was a moral panic brought on by an unprecedented challenge to religious supposed verities, none of which were true or even functional. Everyone who promoted the woke movement must either recant or walk out of public life forever, ironically for precisely the reasons that they speciously canceled so many: because the harm they did to America’s social fabric is just that deep. Unlike them, we do not believe merely holding cruelly mistaken political ideas is unforgivable, but forgiveness, in this case, must be earned.
And to the establishment liberals’ small credit, they seem just as determined – if not moreso – to enforce accountability upon those who were responsible for this intellectual plague. It seems like every day we get a new “Sister Souljah” moment – so named for the moment Bill Clinton publicly repudiated the rapper Sister Souljah’s call to “kill white people” after the Rodney King verdict.
According to Puck News, Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s former White House Chief of Staff, says it’s “time to start punching Left.”
Former Clinton political guru James Carville describes wokeness as “a stench of the highest order” which will take multiple election cycles for the Democrats to wash out.
And these aren’t just vague denunciations. Carville cites “Defund the Police” as an explicit example of what’s wrong with Democrat messaging, while one congressman – Rep. Seth Moulton -- from deep blue Massachusetts has even braved protests, an official cancellation from a university in his district, and negative press, just to call the far Left out for his insane stance on trans issues.
“I have two little girls,” Moulton reportedly said in his comments which sparked the uproar, “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
He’s right. That this was said by a Democrat at all is stunning. That Moulton is not backing off, but instead doubling down, is positively revolutionary. If we had any say in the conversation about who should lead the Democratic party, Moulton would join the likes of Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin as a truth-telling profile in courage. We, of course, do not have such say. But we suspect the outrage at him will only grow his vote share going forward, and possibly position him strongly for some species of higher office within the Democratic party, should the unwoke forces within the party’s liberal establishment, which have now turned antiwoke, prevail.
And make no mistake, the Democrats need people with that kind of courage, if they’re to chart any future for themselves at all. Carville is arguably understating the situation by calling wokeness a stench. It would be more accurate to call it an infection, which will destroy the Democrats from within as surely as it nearly destroyed the country from within. In fact, it may yet damage the nation even from beyond the grave, as even Lefty disinformation types have been forced to acknowledge the rise of election denial on the Left, which they call “BlueAnon.”
We wish we were surprised that something like this could take hold in Leftist quarters, but we are not. Because the truth of the matter is, while insane woke progressivism has done incalculable damage to the free speech rights, due process rights, creative freedoms, and civil liberties of countless Americans, it has arguably done even more damage to the minds of its adherents.
If you doubt that, just try going to YouTube and watching any of the videos cataloguing the woke reaction to the 2024 election. And once you’ve stopped laughing, consider the deep damage that must be done to people’s sense of political reality to make them say half the things revealed. As just one example, one woman laments, “I’m scared to go to sleep; I might wake up a mother*ckin’ slave.” If you think you missed that part of the RNC platform, you aren’t alone, because it wasn’t there. We may not agree with Democrat voters, but they unquestionably deserve better than to be terrified and gaslit into believing things so extreme. And no, it doesn’t stop with cringey takes on TikTok. Crisis calls from LGBT youth spiked 700 percent after election day according to the Trevor Project. However mistaken we may think their self-identification is, kids should not be threatening suicide over a presidential election. But they are, because of what their woke teachers and political leaders told them would happen. That is inexcusable. That is evil.
So yes, bring on the Sister Souljah moments if only because, as Bill Maher said this past Friday, “losers look in the mirror.” But more importantly, bring them on so that the entire toxic class of identity grifters who have metastasized like cancer within America’s institutions can be rooted out and cast back into the Park Slope co-ops from whence they came. America’s sanity and civic traditions can be repaired, but in order for that to happen, liberals must cleanse themselves of the destructive, hateful extremists within their ranks. Will they have the guts to do it? If not, then Republicans may actually get tired of winning. But if so, then perhaps something more important will be gained, and America will once more have two functional political parties, rather than having to deal with gaslighting every four years by an antidemocratic quasi-religious cult of indoctrinated identitarian hatred. But to stop that cult, the Democrats need genuine profiles in courage. We hope, for America’s sake, that they emerge.
