Good piece in Compact on how Woke 1.0 radicalized the GOP.
Conti and Sibarium argue that ‘the GOP has moved so far right [under Trump II] that there may be more daylight between Trump I and Trump II than there was between Obama and Trump I.’
I think this is right. I was a lib back in 2016 and after the shock of Trump winning wore off I didn’t find any of his actual policies that alarming.
Under Trump I lib cultural hegemony was still in place and there wasn’t any real threat to the lib agenda that accreted from the 1960s up through Obama.
Most of the pre-Trump II bipartisan detentes on everything from affirmative action to LGBTQ favored libs and so in retrospect it’s crazy that libs manically decided to blow those agreements up. (I think ‘wokeness’ may go down as the greatest unforced error in domestic postwar American politics. Libs were getting 95%-98% of what they wanted with abortion being the only issue with any real conservative pushback.)
Anyways, libs tried to impose a set of untenable demands via wokeness, conservatives realized they were getting nothing from their concessions, Trump stomped back, the right has pushed an agenda that is actually of its own making, and the rest is history. Just very funny to think that libs had the perfect captive opposition and then got very high on their own supply and for some inexplicable reason just decided to shoot their own face off.
Deleted post griping about what Trump said about Los Angeles and San Diego being nuked by Iran. Now that I've seen the clip, it was clear that he simply wasn't speaking clearly, that he was WARNING that this could happen, not wishing for it. I apologize.
Dear American friends, while we wait for sanity to return, we’re going to start seeing other countries. It’s not you, it’s him. Looking forward to better days for all of us.