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The American right claims to have a monopoly on patriotism. It celebrates the accomplishments and culture of rural white Christians. They’re what America is all about–the default, if you like.

But that is only a part of America. The dynamic, productive part is in the cities and, to some extent, the suburbs. It is ethnically diverse, increasingly female, and secular. It provides the impetus for wokeness, for better and for worse.

The reactionary base wants the second part of America to bend the knee to it. It fights for political power in order to oppress everyone who doesn’t agree with its values. It hates the idea of a diverse, changing America. It denies we are Americans at all. It wants us gone.

Even Xi probably wouldn’t go that far.

Many of the targets in the war on wokeness are in the private sector, not the government. DeSantis and his fans are particularly exasperated by “woke capital”: corporations that use their economic power to achieve left-leaning social and environmental goals. DeSantis wants to ban this kind of behavior. But how?

Creating an objective standard for intangible corporate values is not really possible. Furthermore, for corporations–particularly insurance companies–to ignore the future impacts of climate change on their bottom line would be suicidal. It isn’t going to happen.

In all likelihood, the war on woke capital would consist of a few highly publicized attacks by Congress, the IRS, and various regulatory agencies on companies that make their opposition to the DeSantis agenda too visible. In other words, expect dozens of Disneys if DeSantis gets elected.

Wokeness may be dead in Florida, but it is very much alive on Twitter. DeSantis will undoubtedly use his influence with his new pal, Elon Musk, to put an end to it. Will he succeed?

No, for three reasons. First of all, Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist;” running off the far left would be an act of extreme hypocrisy. Second, it would cost him money. Third, he enjoys being a troll; how can he own the libs if they can’t say anything worth demolishing?

The bottom line here is that, barring the assumption of vast emergency powers (an outcome that is far from impossible), it will be very difficult for a President DeSantis to shut the left up once and for all.

I fully expect Trump to be convicted of the new federal charges. His principal defenses–that Biden did the same thing, and that the offenses are trivial–may work in the court of public opinion, but not in a real courtroom. It is pretty clear from news reports that Smith has amassed plenty of evidence to rebut Trump’s only legal defense, which relates to intent. He’s going to go down.

But what does it matter? The pending criminal case won’t stop him from campaigning. The base will take this as even more proof that he is the victim of a corrupt establishment no matter what the record shows and a jury says. He’ll just pardon himself if he wins the election, and the DOJ will stand by him once he is in office. The only way he spends any time in jail is if he loses, in which case he will just be a pathetic old has-been, anyway. So what is the practical point of the indictment?

Smith is making a powerful conceptual argument in favor of the rule of law. He is absolutely right to do so. It just won’t work in the real world.

Like most Americans, I suspect, I do not view LGBTQ people as being “normal,” but I have no wish to oppress them, either. The leadership of the GOP does not agree with me. The recent wave of anti-LGBTQ statutes in red state legislatures is proof of that.

Part of the motivation behind these new laws is a desire to appease the reactionary base with red meat. But what is the greater objective? Given that being LGBTQ is rarely, if ever, a matter of choice, what is the right actually trying to accomplish here?

In the case of gays and lesbians, I think the idea is to force them back into the closet. That way, real Americans won’t have to be offended by their appearance and behavior, and the alleged danger of “contagion” will be minimized. If you accept the legitimacy of the objective, this makes sense. But what about trans people? How can you put a trans person back in the closet?

You can’t. Furthermore, the handful of trans people in this country don’t represent a threat to anyone but themselves. There is no evidence to prove otherwise. The new legislation is oppression for its own sake.

It seems pretty clear that there is a strong correlation between positive portrayals of LGBTQ people on TV and in movies and public acceptance of LGBTQ rights. It is also clear that black people are showing up in much larger numbers in TV commercials and programs, probably for the same reason. DeSantis and his followers undoubtedly view this as an impermissible form of affirmative action, driven by “woke capital,” that is an affront to “real America” and should be stopped. But what can they do about it?

It isn’t practically possible for DeSantis to regulate everyone with a camera. And while he might well privately support a system requiring set percentages of black and LGBTQ people to be portrayed as gang members and “groomers,” respectively, it is hard to imagine how he could get away with that, even in today’s world. The First Amendment still counts for something, so this is a battle that DeSantis cannot win.

Viktor Orban used his very extensive financial and legal powers to force the sale of the principal Hungarian media outlets to his political allies, thus effectively stifling dissent in his country. We know from “The Divider” that Trump tried to compel the sale of CNN to Rupert Murdoch. Would a President DeSantis try something similar, but on a larger scale?

There is no reason to doubt it. It would be far more difficult to put all of the MSM in the hands of the right in America than in Hungary, since our most important MSM don’t require discretionary federal licenses or feed off government contracts, and it would be hard to find someone rich enough to buy out Jeff Bezos. DeSantis would do his best, however. It is his MO.

First, I refer to “greedflation” because it is a simple term in common usage that is widely understood, but it doesn’t completely capture the complexity of the phenomenon. We don’t live in a world of the just price; companies are entitled to increase their prices and profits as much as the market will bear. Consumers have the power to avoid greedflation by switching to other products; if they don’t, it’s on them.

Second, greedflation is only possible in a society that is both prosperous in the aggregate and unequal. There would be no point in trying to sell “premium” products to a large, but struggling middle class; no one would buy them.

Third, prices are far less sticky than wages, so if you argue that the companies that are jacking up prices are just reasonably anticipating future wage increases, you’re probably just a right-wing apologist for aggressive corporate behavior.

So the debt ceiling crisis is done.

I can’t really say it was fun.

Fiscal chicken, I fear

Will be back in two years.

But for now, it was Biden who won.

According to the NYT, retail food prices are still soaring in Europe even though energy prices are down and commodity prices have stabilized.

So much for the theory that it is the uniquely excessive pandemic stimulus that is still driving inflation in America.

American social conservatives absolutely love Viktor Orban. They view Budapest as the new Jerusalem. Why wouldn’t they? He agrees with them on the virtues of illiberal democracy (he invented the term, after all), and he is on the front lines of the war on wokeness.

The difficulty here is that, while Orban may be on the right side of the wokeness wars, he is also relatively friendly with China, which is typically viewed as an existential threat by his right-wing allies. Whoops! That’s a bit embarrassing, no?

It is an article of faith among cultural conservatives that left-wing academics are brainwashing our children and leading them away from God, traditional moral values, and patriotism. As I’ve noted before, to the limited extent it is true, it is due to natural forms of self-selection. Academics tend to be liberal for the same reason that businessmen believe in tax cuts and deregulation.

Ron DeSantis wants to change this. He wants to tear wokeness out of our schools by the roots. As president, he would undoubtedly use the threat of the loss of federal funds as his principal weapon to accomplish this. The problem is that there simply aren’t enough reactionary academics and administrators to replace the woke ones on a national basis. DeSantis consequently would have the power to destroy our universities, but not to genuinely reform them.

The real question here is whether DeSantis would go so far as to deny federal aid to any student who wants to attend an institution he and his henchmen would consider woke, as opposed to directly assisting those institutions themselves. My best guess is that the answer is yes. I have seen no indication that he respects any limits in the woke wars. Just ask Disney.

There has been a great deal of angst recently about the role of men in contemporary society. The advent of the knowledge-based economy has devalued skills based on physical strength, thus threatening the historic male economic and social predominance. Some men responded by killing themselves with opioids; others have become angry Trump voters. What are we to do with them?

Men aren’t just physically stronger than women; they are by nature more linear and task-oriented, as well. There are advantages as well as disadvantages to this. If you want someone to help you sort out your feelings, men are not the answer, but if you need someone to climb a mountain or take a trench, you had better call a man.

The correct response to my question, therefore, is not “absolutely nothing;” it is quite a lot.

Karl Marx thought he had discovered a law of history–something akin to gravity. The political system and the cultural environment of any given society were driven by the class system, which in turn was dictated by the ownership of the means of production. Marx (incorrectly) believed that the Europe of the 19th century, the most progressive civilization in history, was dominated by a tiny group of factory owners (the bourgeoisie), who would inevitably be overthrown as the result of the weaknesses of the capitalist system and the vast numerical predominance of the working class. Communism–the rule of the workers, with no more class contradictions–was thus an historical inevitability.

Racial and gender-based woke thought, like Marxism, divides the world into groups of oppressors (straight white men) and the oppressed (everyone else). It does not, however, view this distinction as being based on any kind of law of history, and it does not forecast any kind of happy ending. It focuses on elements of identity that Marx would have considered to be part of the “superstructure,” and thus ultimately irrelevant. It is also based on fact; who can deny that straight white men have largely ruled the world over the past few hundred years?

Wokeness is clearly not a form of Marxism; the two are probably best described as estranged family members. DeSantis uses the term “cultural Marxism” for cynical political reasons; he seeks to discredit ideas that have some basis in American history by tying them to demonstrably false and unpopular ideas that have already been rejected by the vast majority of the electorate.

I have spent a lot of time and energy over the years trying to define what wokeness means, both in theory and practice. The more cynical, and probably realistic, approach is to say it is any idea Ron DeSantis dislikes. Fighting wokeness as he defines it is consequently the centerpiece of his campaign.

There are four threads of anti-wokeness, only two of which have deep roots in American thought and culture. The third has only been around for a decade or so, the fourth basically was invented by DeSantis. Here is the list:

1. RACIAL WOKENESS: The battle over racial wokeness revolves around the concept of systemic racism. To the woke, and to many who aren’t woke, it is impossible to look at the discrepancy of a myriad of outcomes for white and black people in this country and find a cause other than an embedded form of racism. To DeSantis and the right, however, no such thing exists. Yes, there were a few unfortunate blips in our country’s history, but they were overcome during the Civil Rights Movement, and since then, blacks and whites have been on a completely equal footing. Any discrepancy of outcomes can be accounted for by bad, paternalistic government policy which encourages black people to lounge in the hammock of dependency. Since racial preferences were probably never necessary, and certainly aren’t necessary now, they should be banned. Anyone who says otherwise is the real racist.
2. GENDER WOKENESS: There are a variety of different kinds of thought here, some of which can actually come into conflict, but the ultimate target is the same: the social and economic dominance of cisgender males. Feminists revolt solely against this dominance, whereas the LGBTQ community increasingly rejects the entire notion of sexual “normality” and insists that historical support for heterosexual behavior is solely a misguided cultural and political construct. DeSantis and the right support traditional ideas of gender and sexual behavior and seek to stamp out everything else. This involves actions directed both at government and private sector actors, such as doctors and Disney.
3. CLIMATE CHANGE WOKENESS: Climate change, in the eyes of the right, is a hoax that was devised to give the left a pretext to use the government to compel real Americans to change their cherished way of life. It is the thin edge of the socialist wedge, and its impacts will be felt mainly by rural Americans who eat lots of meat and rely heavily on their cars. In other words, cars and fossil fuels are freedom and prosperity; public transportation is a mechanism of social control. The target here, for the right, is both government at all levels and “woke capital” which seeks to mitigate climate change impacts and expedite the transition to clean energy.
4. PUBLIC HEALTH WOKENESS: This one was invented by DeSantis. In his telling, all public health mandates are invented by the woke, elitist left in order to restrict the economic and religious freedom of real Americans who rely on right-wing web sites and Fox News for medical advice. Both governments and businesses should be prohibited from imposing any such mandates. If people die as a result, well, give me liberty or give me death! I can tolerate the result either way.

In my next post on anti-wokeness, I will discuss DeSantis’ argument that wokeness, as he defines it, is a form of “cultural Marxism.” Following that, I will analyze what a DeSantis presidency might mean for the private actors at the center of the battle, including left-wing intellectuals, the MSM, Hollywood, and academia.