Were yesterday's elections a rejection of "wokeness"?

What I hear here, is that he tried (and probably succeeded) to ask for the moderate Republican vote (he apparently kept distance from Trump).

Is “wokeness” considered a Democrat thing, a left thing?

I don’t think people really care about any possible or imagined after effects of their votes.

@rebbel I would say it’s more associated with the left than Democrats. It’s not a great term, but here I’m using it to refer to more progressive, controversial policies and practices (such as dismantling police departments and teaching the 1619 Project).

@kritiper Probably true. I’m just interested in general ideological trends.

I am wondering if any of those people who are criticizing it can actually define “critical race theory” and give examples.

It’s more evidence that running “Republican-lite” “centrist” Democratic candidates is a losing strategy. Republicans would rather vote for the real thing than a pseudo Republican and having an uninspiring platform won’t fire up people on the left to turn out. Republicans are always going to focus-group the next manufactured wedge-issue outrage in think tanks. We should expect that.

@Caravanfan “I am wondering if any of those people who are criticizing it can actually define “critical race theory” and give examples.”

Case in point

The Dems are terrible at unifying and passing legislation and Republicans are great at exploiting cultural wedge issues and selfishness and fear.

(The sooner I stop hearing the outdated and rarely used term “wokeness” the better.)

Wokeness, like cancel culture, is a right wing pejorative buzzword used as part of their culture wars against people who are not all white evangelicals.

The votes weren’t a rejection of Democratic policies, they were a statement of fearmongering by Republicans.

I will say in NJ I think the closeness of the race is due to an attitude of “you can’t make me” on the part of anti-vax, anti-maskers and “my taxes are way too high.”

Not only can they probably not define Critical Race Theory, it’s also NOT taught in public grade schools, so a completely false invented issue, but still one that gets the racist-apologist faction riled up.

“Wokeness”, “cancel culture”, “political correctness”, etc (eve what is commonly described as “critical race theory”) do not exist. Literally. They just don’t.

That’s not to say that these terms don’t exist. They do, but they are fabrications of conservative/right-wing culture, and were created as propaganda tools.

To contemplate whether conservative propaganda terminology was used to defeat certain candidates is one thing. But you seem to be insinuating that the propaganda terms are actual words have utility and map to reality. They don’t.

So, really you’re asking if conservatives were successful at tricking an uninformed electorate by employing propaganda tools that they devised for this purpose.

conservatives were successful at tricking an uninformed electorate by employing propaganda tools that they devised for this purpose

If that’s the case, they seem to be quite successful at it. So how does one counter it? Why are the Dems bad at passing progressive legislation?

@Demosthenes “Why are the Dems bad at passing progressive legislation?”

Because they’re paid to fail. You can’t expect congresspeople taking huge amounts of money from Big Pharma, Big Oil, etc. to pass legislation that hurts those industries. It’s not just Manchin and Sinema; a huge percent of our Democratic legislators are on the take. The latest fiasco was designed to fail from the beginning. The strategy was how to kill it in a way that they could APPEAR to support it.

@Demosthenes: “Why are the Dems bad at passing progressive legislation?”

Invalid premise. What @gorillapaws said. You’re assuming that Dems have any interest in passing progressive legislation, when they clearly do not. They are the front line firewall against any progressive/left legislation, and they are very successful at that.

Those measures failed because they’re viewed by many as mostly bad measures and enough people who did not want them showed up at the polls.

I agree completely with @product and @gorillapaws. The Democrats clearly have no incentive to do anything remotely progressive. There are certainly those in the party who do, but they are held hostage by the conservatives in the party. Therefore, they are seen as ineffective.

But everybody is fooling themselves if they thing this is about issues. This is about messege. The Democrat campaigned against the Republican by pointing a finger shreaking shrilly and yelling “Trump Trump Trump!” The Republican campaigned by pointing a finger and shreaking shrilly “They are stripping your rights as parents!!!” Both are liars.

@Caravanfan Exactly. I swear it’s going to push me to a third party before long.

Only there is not really a third party to go to. That is… one that is sensible, pragmatic, compassionate and holds this country and its citizens in the highest regard. Such a thing does not exist.

I don’t know if I would say it was a rejection of just wokeness. A recent poll showed 71% of the people in this country felt the Democrats were taking the country quickly down the wrong path. And every one of the Democratic candidates pretty much campaigned on the Democrat platform. So if you feel the Dems are leading us astray and you have candidates that are campaigning on those same ideals, you aren’t going to support them.

@Blackwater_Park There is that.

@seawulf575 I agree. Inflation may be more to blame than social issues in my area.

When you mess with people’s money they tend to get up and take action. “It’s the economy stupid” still holds.

Every time I hear people complain about CRT, I wonder what they have against Cathode Ray Tubes.

Yes. It was a clear repudiation of politically correct woke social justice warriors and their anti-American Cultural Marxist agenda.

Americans love freedom, God, and guns.

Americans don’t love cuck commie bullshit like free healthcare, not being shot by cops, vaccination, lowering carbon emissions, or “anti-racism”.

@Kropotkin You say that as a joke, but I feel like that’s probably not far off from the feelings of a good portion of this country. :)

@Demosthenes “I feel like that’s probably not far off from the feelings of a good portion of this country. :)”

September Poll:

Do you support or oppose the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework?
Support: 64%, Oppose 24%

Support or oppose 3.5 Trillion investment plan?
Support: 62%, Oppose 30%

Universal Pre-K?
Support: 59%, Oppose 30%

2 years of tuition free community college?
Support: 58%, Oppose 33%

Lowering Medicare eligibility from 65 to 60?
Support: 59%, Oppose 32%

Repairing and modernizing K-12 school buildings?
Support: 73%, Oppose 18%

Pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers?
Support: 56%, Oppose 34%

Modernizing the electric grid, improving reliability, and funding new research?
Support: 74%, Oppose 16%

Civilian Climate Corps to add jobs to address climate change and conservation?
Support: 58%, Oppose 30%

Extending Child Tax benefits for families?
Support: 50%, Oppose 41%

Allowing Medicare to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs?
Support: 73%, Oppose 15%

Investing in long-term care for seniors and people with disabilities?
Support: 79%, Oppose 12%

Increasing funding for the I.R.S so that they can make sure that the wealthiest 2% of Americans and large corporations pay the taxes that they owe?
Support: 64%, Oppose 27%

Raising income taxes on Americans that make more than $400,000?
Support: 64%, Oppose 28%

Increasing taxes on large corporations from a rate of 21% to 28%?
Support: 62%, Oppose 29%

Increasing taxes on people who earn over $1 million a year from selling stocks and bonds?
Support: 66%, Oppose 26%

Raising taxes on the wealthiest 1% of business owners by limiting what expenses they can deduct from their taxes?
Support: 68%, Oppose 25%

It’s just one poll, but I believe there are other similar ones out there. It’s when you put labels on them that people start to dislike the bills. Americans are way more progressive than people think.

@Demosthenes @gorillapaws

Yes. There’s a large disconnect between what people claim to want, and what they actually vote for.

In post-election surveys about why voters voted the way they did, you often find policies are fairly low on the list of reasons, and it’ll be more about superficial perceptions of candidates, their likability, supposed competence, or how dangerous or extreme they might be.

Very little is rational or based on any evidence, and they end up getting policies they neither like or support. And that is how capitalists and the ruling class want it, who spend an inordinate amount of resources on propaganda and misinformation in order to get these sorts of irrational voting patterns.

The other part is that politicians often fail to live up to their promises anyway, even when they do have an attractive populist platform, which just reinforces the cynicism and distrust in politics and government, to that point that if some candidate is trustworthy and offers popular policies, people will not believe it.

I find with elections, it’s like a pendulum. The Repubs win, they enact their policies, the policies don’t often work, the pendulum swings back toward the Dems. Next election, the Dems win, they enact their policies, the policies don’t often work, the pendulum swings back toward the Repubs. Right now people are not thrilled with Biden for a variety of reasons, and this is the result.

@gorillapaws that poll was from about as far left an organization as you can get. They used web panel respondents which means anyone that went onto their website (which is probably at least 95% leftists) are the population they chose. In other words, those results weren’t worth the time it took to write them down.

@seawulf575 That poll’s resultsl matched Quinnipiac and Monmouth polls on the broader questions. It also has similar results to this Morning Consult/Politico poll.

@gorillapaws So you take another uber-liberal poll as proof the first uber-liberal poll was accurate?

For reference, my number of 71% came from an NBC Poll which, while it is still left leaning will at least get a broader cross-section of America. And when a left leaning poll shows this, you can probably add a few more percentage points to hit the real number.