The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

Before you set your hair on fire; yes, the author is a leftist. He also is reflexively anti-Trump, sounds like an anti-Semite, comes off as a smug academic, but also has some genuinely interesting interpretations of the current Woke malaise we find ourselves enduring.

Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law

People have generally misunderstood wokeness as a purely cultural phenomenon. It does have a cultural component, of course, but it is important to also understand wokeness as something that has been law in the United States for the last half century.

The triumph of this ideology over the last 10 years in public discourse is simply culture catching up to law. To reverse what has happened, one needs to know a bit of the history, and how every major institution in the country came to act and think in the exact same way.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) are obvious progenitors of the insanity of the last 10 years, but Hanania also blames presidential executive orders and most of all a federal bureaucracy that is entrenched and always expanding its reach into boardrooms. He links the rise of Human Resources (always the farthest left of anyone in business) in American corporations to the increase in regulations governing all facets of hiring and conduct. Since the government regulations are chaotic and ever changing, it behooves the typical corporation to follow the herd, and the herd has stampeded to draconian restrictions on what used to be private behavior. Hostile work environments, disparate impact, equal opportunity, affirmative action, and the rest of the litany of government-driven initiatives that have entered our culture as axioms.

The article is long, but worth a read, especially because the author suggests a way of this, and it doesn't include simply ranting and raving at every Woke insanity we are subjected to every day.

Taking apart disparate impact and repealing affirmative action executive orders should be litmus tests for Republican presidential candidates in the same way taxes and abortion are.

Why hasn't this happened already? Probably because the payoff to fighting wokeness is more long term. People seek immediate gratification; you can change the tax rate or how many immigrants you let in immediately, while it's hard to convince people to have a political fight today in the hopes of having an uncertain effect on culture years or even decades down the line. Moreover, it's hard work to go to war with an entrenched bureaucracy that has the media completely on its side, especially if you haven't explained to your voters why doing so is necessary. Nonetheless, I'm convinced there is no short-cut to changing the culture.

No, there is no short-cut. But there also isn't an option. We either fight back or cede this country to the left. And not the Woke left...I mean the real left of labor camps and state-sanctioned murder and misery and starvation.

The willing fools of the Woke left should read more communist history and fewer sociology textbooks. Trotsky and Kirov and Bukharin come to mind, but Stalin killed about 1/3 of the communist party to consolidate power during his "Great Purge," and the hysterical wokesters will surely be among the first victims in an American Great Purge.

posted by CBD at 11:00 AM

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