I'm glad you're pushing back against the idea of wokeness as a capitalist plot. Too many people on the right are indulging an aspiration toward a sort of anti-woke/anti-capitalist alliance. The wokest politicians and CEOs are pretty consistently the most anti-capitalist politicians and CEOs as well. Lenin had a better understanding of capitalist behavior than many conservatives today: corporations will happily sell the rope that will be used to hang them. They aren't nearly 'class-interested' enough to make use of wokeness the way they're accused of making use of it. I kind of wish they were that clever and farsighted.
1. Some conservatives think that affirmative action or special protections for conservatives will blow lib minds and leave them speechless and confused. In fact, it's very easy to construct a rationale for why blacks should get affirmative action but not conservatives ("were supply siders taken to America in chains?") and liberals will use these rationales. No one will be persuaded. The whole heart of woke ideology is that different groups need different levels of protection.
2. As a slightly different matter, I do support state laws that provide civil-service level protection for everyone against being fired for off-the-job political speech unrelated to the job. This is far more ideological defensible: conservatives shouldn't be fired for their views because no one should be fired for their irrelevant political views, not because conservatives are a protected class. I acknowledge the case of Damore shows such the limits of such protections but Damore, it should be said, expressed these views in a memo to colleagues rather than on his Facebook page, which is a slightly different issue.
3. All anti-woke pundits should have, as a short of affirming post-it note, "California Proposition 16 failed by 14 points" at their desks. There is probably a supermajority in this country in favor of colorblind meritocracy. Stop eating ivermectin and win elections on this principle, and the tide may turn.
A good piece. Too often conservatives are tempted to use state power to oppose the excesses they don't like, forgetting that it was that same state power that allowed those excesses in the first place. As long as the power exists, people are going to use it to push whatever new madness they come up with on others in a never ending cycle.
Attacking civil rights legislation is such a hard sell by itself though. Perhaps one useful line to take would be around *privacy*. In other words, "companies are collecting too much data on their employees, we need to pass laws barring them from collecting too much personal data on them, beyond a defined bare minimum (which would exclude race, gender, sexuality, etc)". This would override the relevant aspects of civil rights legislation without having to revoke it altogether, which wouldn't go down too well.
Another thing you could do - ban organisations from discriminating on the basis of educational attainment, except where such attainment is directly and demonstrably relevant to the job at hand. This would disempower woke elites relying on liberal humanities degrees to get them through an interview and create a level playing field between them and the working classes, so would be an easy sell.
I'm glad you're pushing back against the idea of wokeness as a capitalist plot. Too many people on the right are indulging an aspiration toward a sort of anti-woke/anti-capitalist alliance. The wokest politicians and CEOs are pretty consistently the most anti-capitalist politicians and CEOs as well. Lenin had a better understanding of capitalist behavior than many conservatives today: corporations will happily sell the rope that will be used to hang them. They aren't nearly 'class-interested' enough to make use of wokeness the way they're accused of making use of it. I kind of wish they were that clever and farsighted.
Some thoughts:
1. Some conservatives think that affirmative action or special protections for conservatives will blow lib minds and leave them speechless and confused. In fact, it's very easy to construct a rationale for why blacks should get affirmative action but not conservatives ("were supply siders taken to America in chains?") and liberals will use these rationales. No one will be persuaded. The whole heart of woke ideology is that different groups need different levels of protection.
2. As a slightly different matter, I do support state laws that provide civil-service level protection for everyone against being fired for off-the-job political speech unrelated to the job. This is far more ideological defensible: conservatives shouldn't be fired for their views because no one should be fired for their irrelevant political views, not because conservatives are a protected class. I acknowledge the case of Damore shows such the limits of such protections but Damore, it should be said, expressed these views in a memo to colleagues rather than on his Facebook page, which is a slightly different issue.
3. All anti-woke pundits should have, as a short of affirming post-it note, "California Proposition 16 failed by 14 points" at their desks. There is probably a supermajority in this country in favor of colorblind meritocracy. Stop eating ivermectin and win elections on this principle, and the tide may turn.
A good piece. Too often conservatives are tempted to use state power to oppose the excesses they don't like, forgetting that it was that same state power that allowed those excesses in the first place. As long as the power exists, people are going to use it to push whatever new madness they come up with on others in a never ending cycle.
Attacking civil rights legislation is such a hard sell by itself though. Perhaps one useful line to take would be around *privacy*. In other words, "companies are collecting too much data on their employees, we need to pass laws barring them from collecting too much personal data on them, beyond a defined bare minimum (which would exclude race, gender, sexuality, etc)". This would override the relevant aspects of civil rights legislation without having to revoke it altogether, which wouldn't go down too well.
Another thing you could do - ban organisations from discriminating on the basis of educational attainment, except where such attainment is directly and demonstrably relevant to the job at hand. This would disempower woke elites relying on liberal humanities degrees to get them through an interview and create a level playing field between them and the working classes, so would be an easy sell.