Waking up to woke

We need looser criteria for disqualifying candidates

The nearest analogy might be the spelling bee. No double-elimination, no second tries. One wrong and you’re out.

That’s what woke means to some of us.

Defenders of wokeness will tell you, with some sincerity, that its goal is the comfort and safety of everyone. So you eat up the first five minutes of every meeting reciting pronouns as the price you pay for not mis-gendering someone later in the meeting. It also makes everyone feel good about themselves before the meeting gets started.

And if the party of Trump and Youngkin spends the first five minutes of their meeting discussing how to eat your political lunch, that’s the price you pay for virtue. Extremists in the party of Biden and Harris are probably ready to call me transphobic. Six different ways. And they’ll spend another five minutes of the meeting saying it.

Morris Udall once described an endless legislative session this way. “Everything had been said, but not everybody had said it.” That’s the story of discussion in the only party left to pull us out of the mire. Everybody in it is really good at talking to each other.

I know serious people who could defend at length the teaching of Critical Race Theory, with references to and citations of the 1619 project. I’d prefer to hear a candidate say it’s not taught in public schools and it has nothing to do with, just for instance, a governor’s race.

There are serious and sincere people who can defend, individually and in depth, the books being banned by right-wing school boards in the name of parents’ rights. But they’re mostly supplying talking points to one another. I can’t fault them too much; their writing is usually good and worth reading. But the political message is that parents can block what books their kids can check out; it’s their job, not the school board’s, regardless of what’s in the books.

Think about all the things we depend on government for. Police and fire protection, education, social security and Medicare, highways, national defense, food safety, aviation safety. Those things have to work, and that’s an argument the good guys should have been making for years. Instead the political dialogue has focused no whether we’re coming for their guns and what they can do to make life miserable for a pregnant teenager.

Serious and sincere people talk about working with the other side. The answer is you can’t. They won’t work with us. They’ve proven it time and time again. And we’ve missed the opportunity to point out that they’re destroying the services we depend on and endangering our way of life. That’s the message. They’re breaking things. It may be too late to stop them. Their president can talk about grabbing literal pussies, while the figurative ones on our side worry they’ll lose a vote if they call bullshit on liars.

I thought about this when Mark Warner said, “I think the majority of the party realizes that the ideological purity of some of the groups is a recipe for disaster and that, candidly, the attack on over-the-top wokeism was a valid attack.”

The proper reply is that he’s right. If we have a checklist of secondary issues that a candidate has to weave their way through just to satisfy their own voters, we are not going to field candidates who can satisfy the swing voters who decide elections. Single elimination works for spelling bees and playoffs. We need a better standard for choosing the people who’ll get us out of this political dystopia, if it’s not already too late.

We need to worry about winning elections, and fortifying majorities, before we bear down on quotas and pronouns. Those issues aren’t luxuries, but they’re minority issues. Minorities win primaries. Majorities win elections.