Harris lost because of the economy, not because of "wokeism"
But that won't stop woke-obsessed pundits from pretending otherwise!
James Carville thinks that Democrats lost because of “the unfortunate events of what I would refer to as the woke era.” So does Lee Fang, who imagines the tribulations of 11-year olds who were defamed during the MeToo movement. And so does Natan Ehrenreich, who thinks the Democrat loss proves that “the utopianism of the woke governing vision is no longer persuasive, or so we hope.”
My only question for all three of men: can we get a shred of evidence for any of this?
Because as I noted yesterday, there is a lot of evidence indicating that this election was overwhelmingly driven by concerns about the economy. But just as a practical matter, as I scroll through the exit polls I can’t find a single question about “wokeness” — or even about wokeness-adjacent issues like DEI. And Trump, of course, famously ridiculed the media obsession with anti-wokeness right at the start of his re-election campaign and spent little time on the crusade. Why would this election be a referendum on wokeness?
My theory is that it is precisely the lack of evidence about wokeness and how the population responds to it that inclines some pundits to talk about it so much.
When I want to make a claim about how voters are responding to the economy I can’t just spout off with any theory that I like; I have to dig into the relevant polling and see if there’s actually any evidence for it. Sometimes this requires serious work, for example if the polling is hard to find or if you have to do some tedious data-analysis to draw out the information you need.
But if you want to talk about wokeness there’s rarely any reality testing whatsoever. You can just throw around wild claims like Carville, Fang, and Ehrenreich do here and there will never be any way to fact-check them. I know what this kind of punditry is like because when I was a younger and much lazier writer I did it myself: you just come up with a narrative that you think is interesting and that isn’t provably wrong, and then you can expect everyone to take it seriously.
The proliferation of commentary on wokeness and antiwokeness in the media probably has a whole lot to do with how remarkably easy it is. Pundits know that literally anything they say about the topic will drive a minimal level of engagement every time, and they convince themselves that it’s because they’re saying something insightful and important. But the fact of the matter is I could say something like “yesterday’s earthquake was because of wokeness” and I’d still get a mild bump in traffic on this site.
Anyway — a decade ago, the left’s primary critique of woke discourse was that liberals were using it to deflect attention away from economic issues. Ironically, now the exact opposite is taking place. Yesterday’s election was the clearest-cut referendum on the economy I’ve seen in a long time, and yet antiwokies are frantically trying to turn this into a vague conversation about culture wars instead. That a liberal (Carville), a centrist (Fang) and a conservative (Ehrenreich) have joined hands in that effort says a lot about just how ubiquitous this aversion to talking about the economy really is.
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