I do not think that Harris lost because of "woke" but it sure as hell didn't help. She was a woman of color from California. Her primary run in 2020 had her move to the left as so many did. She tried to distance herself from that this time, but she was kind of trapped when Trump used the trans issue as a wedge. It's silly to be obsessed with gender reassignment surgery for prisoners, but she stepped on that rake and felt she couldn't engage on that issue.
The other issue is the Young Man Problem that we are going to be rehashing for the next four years.
Working in academia, I've been steeped in some of the new paradigms of culturally left social mores. I remember the seminar on microaggressions. Basically, don't be a dick, especially when you don't really know the other person. However, I didn't think it was necessarily worth spending a professional development day on it. Didn't hurt, but didn't help.
I remember when I was told, not suggested told, that I had to put pronouns in my email signature. Again, not a big deal, but anyone who knows me is unlikely to be confused by my gender. I get that this was to model for students who might be gender nonconforming, but it wasn't entirely clear just how big a deal it was to them.
Shibboleths were words and practices that were only known by certain in-groups. By saying words in a certain way, by wearing clothes in a certain way, you were known to be part of the group without saying it aloud, and this would be invisible to people not in your group.
Much of what passes under the umbrella of "woke" are shibboleths. I'll give an example.
We torture English to come up with "people experiencing homelessness" instead of "the homeless." I'm smart enough to understand the reasoning for this, if it was laid out before me, but I honestly don't know what the difference is supposed to be. I referred to Harris in the second sentence as a "woman of color", because "colored woman"...boy howdy. I don't understand what "people experiencing homelessness" is supposed to mean.
What's more important is I don't understand what it's supposed to accomplish, except as a shibboleth. If I genuinely care about the homeless, but don't call them by the proper terminology, I am understood be outside the group that cares about the homeless in the proper way.
Circling back to young men, there is a lot of this stuff in academia, as academics tend to be thinking about correcting centuries of scholarship that centered white men. It can come across as blaming an 18 year old for the crimes of slavery or Jim Crow. It's an observable sociological fact that young men are the most likely to commit crimes, but pointing that out can feel targeting in ways that would be unacceptable if it was directed at any other group. Poor people are more likely to commit crimes than wealthy people (Trump excluded), but saying that could be considered "racist" or "colonialist" or some other stupid shit.
So much of the nonsense coming from the Gaza encampments fit into this frame. America is absolutely not responsible for the crimes of Netanyahu. That would be like saying that the Black population of America was responsible for the Rwandan genocide. Yet I get this shit from my own son. Of course, "America bad" seems a lot more defensible when you elect a demagogic charlatan like Trump.
Was this the determinative factor in Harris' loss? I don't think so. Why did the Tories lose in Britain? Le Marche in France? The BJP losing its majority in India? Why did the German coalition collapse? Why did Milei win in Argentina?
Ultimately, "the system" broke down for so many people during Covid. There was the economic deprivation, the social isolation and subsequent erosion of social norms, and that was followed by inflation, which was tame by historical standards, but a forgotten dynamic in much of the developed economies.
The "woke" issue is not that people are (necessarily) racist, though they are perhaps tired of "everything being racist". The extremes on this issue are positions like "being on time is racist." No Democrat, least of all Harris, was campaigning on this nonsense.
To the degree it mattered, it might have created a perception that Harris was "out of touch" with people's economic concerns. She couldn't differentiate herself from Biden (who actually did an objectively good job on the economy) and Trump's hammering her on trans issues (which she didn't rebut) made her seem like she didn't care about people's economic situation. Hell, paying off college loans and not other forms of household debt probably didn't help.
The Biden Administration was one of the most pro-worker administrations in all of our lifetimes, but inflation hit them hard. Harris was pinned in a frame where she couldn't say "Biden screwed up on inflation" - which isn't actually true - and distancing herself from a few statements that the Trump team hung around her neck.
Having said all that, most of these social issues are in Democrat's favor. People support abortion rights, they support minimum wage increases, they support marriage equality. Republicans flogged the one issue that they could to make it seem like Harris was a Berkley gender studies professor rather than a San Francisco prosecutor.
Democrats, going forward, just need to not step on rakes and not be cruel and the pendulum should swing back.
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