I’ve been following complaints from liberals about conservatives slamming “Critical Race Theory” and “woke-ism“
And then, I came across some interesting discussion:
I recommend going over the whole thread.
I think that too many liberals are underestimating how effective these attacks will be:
I think we are seeing this in the UK, where Labour just lost a seat it has held for decades:
Go back to the the discussion on CRT that I linked to. The intellectuals on the thread seems to think that the reporter got owned by those more intellectual critics. He may have..if the debate/discussion was being analyzed by intellectuals.
But the public doesn’t give a fig about the theoretical/intellectual underpinnings of Critical Race Theory.
They care about possibly being fired because you celebrated winning three contests in a row with the wrong finger symbol.
They care about being subjected to tedious woke HR training. They worry about being fired over a bogus accusation.
Now the intellectual might say “wait a minute”; these are isolated stories ..and this is NOT what “Critical Race Theory” is about. But while such claims might be important in scholarly circles, they are NOT important in the public sphere nor are they important in politics.
This reminds me of the battles atheist scientists have with the more liberal religious people. Said scientists claim that a big impediment to the acceptance of evolution is…religion.
The educated liberals respond that the scientists are using a very crude, primitive version of “faith” and need to study “sophisticated theology.”
But, the atheist scientists point out that the “sophisticated” word salad deities of the philosophers and educated theologians has almost nothing in common with the “God, please cure my brother’s cancer” deity worshiped by actual worshipers…to THEM, a God performing magic tricks to snap the universe into existence is unsurprising … and THAT type of deity is the one that science educators have to face.
The same goes with the public getting irritated with sanctimonious liberal “activists”; said activists might be getting CRT wrong, but that is not the point.
I really wish liberals would come to understand that there is no HR in the public sphere..no Dean to snap to their “calling out racism”:
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Black people have, on average, less wealth and income than white people, anything that redistributes wealth and income from the haves to the have-nots reduces racial gaps. But the politics of these framings are perverse. It’s particularly perverse because the kinds of people who spend a lot of time thinking about race from a progressive point of view are precisely the people who in other contexts are inclined to emphasize what a big deal racism has historically been in shaping American politics.
That’s why liberals from FDR and LBJ to Obama tried to downplay it when possible — they were trying to win and help people! After all, there’s no special features of unions or Medicaid or the minimum wage that leads them to close racial gaps — all egalitarian economic policy has this effect.
My suspicion is that this is a weird tic of campus politics that has followed graduates into the professional arena where they unconsciously started deploying it in less appropriate contexts. If you’re in a dorm at a fancy college and you can convince an administrator that something is racist, the administrator will probably put a stop to it. At the same time, “this is bad for poor people” just isn’t going to get you far as a campus argument. After all, these schools more or less openly auction off a number of admissions slots to wealthy donors (while, of course, practicing affirmative action to keep things diverse) so they can hardly take a hard line on class politics.
But electoral politics in a democracy isn’t like that. And to the extent that the US political system isn’t democratic, it’s mostly tilted in favor of over-representing white people with no college degree. So if you actually want to close racial gaps by raising the minimum wage, expanding union membership, expanding Medicaid, and reducing student debt, the last thing you want to do is to sell people on the idea that this is really all about race.”
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James Carville is right, in my opinion. We’ve set ourselves up; we’ve got to become smarter about branding and about persuading.
Life of an old goat 