I have asked my MAGA brother to explain woke to me and all I get is a blank stare. Then he throws out DEI and men in women’s locker room
ToeDisastrous3501 on
Sort of. The right wing media mega-machine put words in Kamala’s mouth that she never said or even hinted at and the blasted them in unison through Fox, podcasts, TikTok, churches, radio… Kamala could said literally anything. Wouldn’t matter. Nobody heard her.
Until we have a media (yes, propaganda) mechanism that can compete with what they’ve built, we’re fucked.
EDIT: It’s telling to me how many conservative lurkers have felt the need to call me out specifically on this comment. I believe it’s because they suspect that what I said is true, and that implies that they are not in fact the free-thinking patriots they’ve been told they are for ten years. Just a different breed of sheeple.
HLL0 on
The narrative of blaming one single thing when it was many different things to many different people is nonsense.
International_Soup on
It’s not the actual policies it’s the narrative aka the right wing propaganda and until the democrats understand and effectively counter that this will keep happening
Turok7777 on
Not “woke politics,” but obnoxious, sanctimonious people who poisoned the identity politics well with their holier-than-thou bullshit over the last 15 years.
A metric ton of them hang out on Reddit and enable each others’ derangement so there’s no real hope for self-reflection.
randomtask on
Let’s make it real simple shall we?
Latinos for Harris? That’s some woke manufactured identity politics bullshit.
Latinos for Trump? Solidarity my brothers and sisters, let’s make America great again!
Identity for me but not for thee.
The core issue in this country is that many, many people are in pain — both real AND imagined. Nearly 50% of the American electorate is plugged in to brain-rotting media that exclusively blames liberals and the establishment for their lot in life. “I really care that the stock market is doing well”, said no electrician or auto technician ever. Right-wing media capitalizes on the fact that no one on the left is speaking directly to the inherent unfairness of life in America for so many, and gives people an easy — but entirely wrong — explanation as to why things are the way they are.
In some cases it was significant (Running adds on Harris supporting sex changes for prisoners)
Virbillion on
Woke has become a slur against equality.
Woke fear mongering is successful on the right because ‘fear of other’ is ideologically baked into conservatism.
Fear of other campaigns will never motivate the left, you have to champion equality and individual liberty to motivate the left. Harris did not successfully champion that.
YouWrongMatt on
Reddit learns absolutely nothing again. What a shock
StratStyleBridge on
That’s the spirit. Learn nothing.
VonWolfhaus on
It’s literally not the politics, it’s the perception. If Disney does some performative inclusion, that’s the libs. Heard about a drag show at a school? That’s the libs. Then you get conservative media amplifying these things endlessly. Woke shit is talked about in conservative spaces 10x more than on liberal media.
Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, are considered woke lib media. Even though they are overwhelmingly conservative, and you’ll get pushed into a right leaning algorithm extremely quickly.
The perceptions blasted by social media are fucking insane. If you spent a week on conservative media you’d think trans rights are the biggest tentpole issue of the Democratic party.
I’m not sure how exactly to change the perception, but it needs to be.
Appropriate_Camp_191 on
Kamala was smart enough to run from the woke platform, but everyone knew it’d be dialed back up to 100%. Every regular American over the age of 30 knows there are 2 genders and you can’t change yours.
erikhow on
Democrats lost because they constantly lean on social issues to get them into office, but fail to incorporate that into populist policies that will affect the voter’s wallet. You can’t just expect that Americans will always be thinking about situations that don’t affect them, making social issues an impossible backbone to run on.
The_B_Wolf on
I think this is largely correct. Politics in this age is very tribal. A lot of the vote is already baked in. It’s in the margins–turnout and swing voters–where things are won and lost. Friends, we lost this election primarily for one single reason: prices are too high. Inflation happened and voters wrongly, if predictably, blamed the incumbent party. That’s it. There isn’t another lesson to be learned here. It wasn’t the candidate, the message, the campaign, or the media. We lost at the checkout counter.
kummer5peck on
The bottom line is that a lot of people who voted for Biden in 2020 sat out this election. For whatever reason they were not as motivated to vote for Harris as were for Biden 4 years ago. Democratic voters can be very frustrating like that. They show up in overwhelming numbers when they are motivated but get complacent after they aren’t wowed by the party every election cycle. Republicans have fewer total potential voters but they show up constantly in every election.
justlaughing1 on
It isn’t why. It’s ONE of the reasons
TarotCat0611 on
I think some people were extremely tired of virtue signaling, identity politics, and all of transgender debates.however your right, I don’t think that’s why she lost.. I think she lost because she interviewed terribly and sounded so hypocritical. The right also did a lot of digging in her closet making it really hard to trust her.
Visible-Big-1149 on
No it’s not. People hate this shit. Dems get bogged down in stupid culture wars
LilytheFire on
We can go back and forth all day how much sticking up for minority groups caused the Dems downfall but trying to pin this on “identity politics” doesn’t tell the whole story.
Trump got marginally more votes than he did in 2020 while kamala got significantly less than Biden. Roughly 2-3 million net Biden voters out of 150M flipped to trump and another 5-6M stayed home. Who are these Biden voters that didn’t show up and why did they stay home this time? A huge chunk of them must come from cities because that’s where we see much of the lower vote totals. Cities that normally vote for democrats 75-25 consistently shifted 8-15 points to the right across the nation. Alongside the demographic shifts, this screams low turnout among your most liberal voters and I wouldn’t say they’re the demographic to get scared off by “woke politics”.
Whatever their reasons for staying home were, I do know that LGBT people made up roughly 8% of the electorate this year per GLAAD and they voted for Kamala around 90% per NBC. Losing 10% support among that group seriously hurts your chances of winning going forward.
tresslessaccount on
“It’s the economy, stupid!”
But for real, it’s the economy. No amount of looking at charts, graphs, etc. can erase that. Things cost more, and just because inflation is down to normal does not mean the prices have gone down, they just don’t rise as fast as they did before.
Sprock-440 on
It’s hard for incumbents to win when inflation is high. And Democrats don’t seem to be interested in helping anyone. Those two things doomed them.
They said Trump lead an insurrection, and then they sat on their hands for years instead of holding him accountable. They say that people don’t make enough money, but they refuse to get rid of the filibuster so that they can just pass a minimum wage increase. They say they support abortion, rights, but have never passed national abortion protections. Three Supreme Court seats were stolen, but they refuse to expand the Supreme Court.
As far as I can tell, they’re interested in maintaining the status quo and trying to keep Republicans from saying anything mean about them. If they tried fighting for the people, the people might support them.
favnh2011 on
Yep
ceelogreenicanth on
The issue is the low turnout. He got all the votes he’s always gotten. Some demographics are moving toward him but those moves have more to do with the dying media landscape than anything else.
partisan_heretic on
Yes. Zero self-reflection. Do it.
espresso_martini__ on
Not so sure about that. I know a lot of people that are so sick of “wokeness.” This election really surprised me in how many guys I knew that openly celebrated Trump winning because they saw him as anti woke. So disappointing.
Chengar_Qordath on
At this rate we’re a few years removed from the establishment Dems saying that the party needs to run on a platform of “Okay, you can go back to lynching blacks and gays as long as you let us raise the minimum wage.”
TheBrain511 on
I mean economic conditions were
But to say it didn’t have an affect on things so up d be wrong
Belus86 on
So double down is the strategy…cool cool cool
Bumbleblaster99 on
Machismo wouldn’t let them vote for some uppity lady. Pure and simple.
ElleM848645 on
I don’t believe it’s the primary reason. I think there were a lot of small reasons that added up to her loss. Also, none of this stuff stuck to Biden n 2020 because he was a known commodity. He was able to be more progressive than people thought, because he was old man Biden. Harris was a younger biracial woman, that some people didn’t know, so Trump’s attacks worked.
JJscribbles on
No it isn’t. I’ve been voting blue for 30 years and I almost didn’t vote for Harris cause I feel like the whole party keeps shifting further to the left and they don’t listen to anyone who isn’t wrapped in a rainbow or living a life in opposition to objective reality.
Every day I feel like I have less in common with these folks, and some days it’s how I measure my objective sanity. You guys can call it nonsense if you want, but I’m far more concerned with being able to retire and pay down debt than I am with re-educating the population to protect people’s preferred pronouns.
okilz on
Pretty sure it has alot to do with the lack of iq from trumpers
Bombay1234567890 on
The idea that Trump won is nonsense.
oflowz on
Trump won because of the exact opposite of wokeness.
Why so many people who are willing to simp for a person just because they are rich is beyond me.
There’s literally broke MFers cheering Trump’s tax cuts for the rich.
I guess they didn’t get the memo that poors taxes go up to compensate for it.
Hoardzunit on
Honestly, the ones complaining about wokeness are the right. They won’t stfu about it. And then they say how it’s being shoved into their faces and they fail to realize that the podcasts they watch are why they keep hearing about it.
OMG-Its-Logic on
I am a lefty and I think it played a role. How big, I don’t know. I grew up poor but now work in a “high paying coastal elite” type job. So, I hear both sides. What I hear from people is stuff like this. “I feel like I can’t walk into a room of all genders and say “Hey guys” meaning it completely gender neutral and not feel like I’m about to get canceled.” The poor white Americans I grew up with feel like calling them “privileged” when they’ve been hard working but poor for generations is a non-starter.
I agree with the academic and intellectual arguments for white privilege and gender terms but I also think it hurts the party. The message started good. Everyone is equal don’t be biased or a racist asshole. But, instead of that it comes off as “everyone is equal and we should be nice to them except for white people who caused all this inequality and pain.” Or, making a villain out of someone with good intentions who may say something they don’t even realize is insensitive. Not arguing for these things but I’ve been soul searching and analyzing how a guy like Trump could get so much of the American vote and I do think these things played a factor. How big? Hard to say.
ZestyclosePiccolo908 on
Crazy that being woke generally translates to just having basic human decency
AmigoDelDiabla on
There are quite a few factors, but to ignore the negative impact wokeness had on the Dems is to bury your head in the sand.
40 Comments
It did play a part though
I have asked my MAGA brother to explain woke to me and all I get is a blank stare. Then he throws out DEI and men in women’s locker room
Sort of. The right wing media mega-machine put words in Kamala’s mouth that she never said or even hinted at and the blasted them in unison through Fox, podcasts, TikTok, churches, radio… Kamala could said literally anything. Wouldn’t matter. Nobody heard her.
Until we have a media (yes, propaganda) mechanism that can compete with what they’ve built, we’re fucked.
EDIT: It’s telling to me how many conservative lurkers have felt the need to call me out specifically on this comment. I believe it’s because they suspect that what I said is true, and that implies that they are not in fact the free-thinking patriots they’ve been told they are for ten years. Just a different breed of sheeple.
The narrative of blaming one single thing when it was many different things to many different people is nonsense.
It’s not the actual policies it’s the narrative aka the right wing propaganda and until the democrats understand and effectively counter that this will keep happening
Not “woke politics,” but obnoxious, sanctimonious people who poisoned the identity politics well with their holier-than-thou bullshit over the last 15 years.
A metric ton of them hang out on Reddit and enable each others’ derangement so there’s no real hope for self-reflection.
Let’s make it real simple shall we?
Latinos for Harris? That’s some woke manufactured identity politics bullshit.
Latinos for Trump? Solidarity my brothers and sisters, let’s make America great again!
Identity for me but not for thee.
The core issue in this country is that many, many people are in pain — both real AND imagined. Nearly 50% of the American electorate is plugged in to brain-rotting media that exclusively blames liberals and the establishment for their lot in life. “I really care that the stock market is doing well”, said no electrician or auto technician ever. Right-wing media capitalizes on the fact that no one on the left is speaking directly to the inherent unfairness of life in America for so many, and gives people an easy — but entirely wrong — explanation as to why things are the way they are.
Trump poured $21 million dollars into attack ads on trans people. https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/US/trump-spends-millions-anti-trans-ads-despite-polls/story%3fid=115001816. Meanwhile, most of the issues listed on Harris’ campaign page are about economics: https://kamalaharris.com/issues/ Trump screamed that Democrats were all woke and no economy until everyone believed it.
In some cases it was significant (Running adds on Harris supporting sex changes for prisoners)
Woke has become a slur against equality.
Woke fear mongering is successful on the right because ‘fear of other’ is ideologically baked into conservatism.
Fear of other campaigns will never motivate the left, you have to champion equality and individual liberty to motivate the left. Harris did not successfully champion that.
Reddit learns absolutely nothing again. What a shock
That’s the spirit. Learn nothing.
It’s literally not the politics, it’s the perception. If Disney does some performative inclusion, that’s the libs. Heard about a drag show at a school? That’s the libs. Then you get conservative media amplifying these things endlessly. Woke shit is talked about in conservative spaces 10x more than on liberal media.
Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, are considered woke lib media. Even though they are overwhelmingly conservative, and you’ll get pushed into a right leaning algorithm extremely quickly.
The perceptions blasted by social media are fucking insane. If you spent a week on conservative media you’d think trans rights are the biggest tentpole issue of the Democratic party.
I’m not sure how exactly to change the perception, but it needs to be.
Kamala was smart enough to run from the woke platform, but everyone knew it’d be dialed back up to 100%. Every regular American over the age of 30 knows there are 2 genders and you can’t change yours.
Democrats lost because they constantly lean on social issues to get them into office, but fail to incorporate that into populist policies that will affect the voter’s wallet. You can’t just expect that Americans will always be thinking about situations that don’t affect them, making social issues an impossible backbone to run on.
I think this is largely correct. Politics in this age is very tribal. A lot of the vote is already baked in. It’s in the margins–turnout and swing voters–where things are won and lost. Friends, we lost this election primarily for one single reason: prices are too high. Inflation happened and voters wrongly, if predictably, blamed the incumbent party. That’s it. There isn’t another lesson to be learned here. It wasn’t the candidate, the message, the campaign, or the media. We lost at the checkout counter.
The bottom line is that a lot of people who voted for Biden in 2020 sat out this election. For whatever reason they were not as motivated to vote for Harris as were for Biden 4 years ago. Democratic voters can be very frustrating like that. They show up in overwhelming numbers when they are motivated but get complacent after they aren’t wowed by the party every election cycle. Republicans have fewer total potential voters but they show up constantly in every election.
It isn’t why. It’s ONE of the reasons
I think some people were extremely tired of virtue signaling, identity politics, and all of transgender debates.however your right, I don’t think that’s why she lost.. I think she lost because she interviewed terribly and sounded so hypocritical. The right also did a lot of digging in her closet making it really hard to trust her.
No it’s not. People hate this shit. Dems get bogged down in stupid culture wars
We can go back and forth all day how much sticking up for minority groups caused the Dems downfall but trying to pin this on “identity politics” doesn’t tell the whole story.
Trump got marginally more votes than he did in 2020 while kamala got significantly less than Biden. Roughly 2-3 million net Biden voters out of 150M flipped to trump and another 5-6M stayed home. Who are these Biden voters that didn’t show up and why did they stay home this time? A huge chunk of them must come from cities because that’s where we see much of the lower vote totals. Cities that normally vote for democrats 75-25 consistently shifted 8-15 points to the right across the nation. Alongside the demographic shifts, this screams low turnout among your most liberal voters and I wouldn’t say they’re the demographic to get scared off by “woke politics”.
Whatever their reasons for staying home were, I do know that LGBT people made up roughly 8% of the electorate this year per GLAAD and they voted for Kamala around 90% per NBC. Losing 10% support among that group seriously hurts your chances of winning going forward.
“It’s the economy, stupid!”
But for real, it’s the economy. No amount of looking at charts, graphs, etc. can erase that. Things cost more, and just because inflation is down to normal does not mean the prices have gone down, they just don’t rise as fast as they did before.
It’s hard for incumbents to win when inflation is high. And Democrats don’t seem to be interested in helping anyone. Those two things doomed them.
They said Trump lead an insurrection, and then they sat on their hands for years instead of holding him accountable. They say that people don’t make enough money, but they refuse to get rid of the filibuster so that they can just pass a minimum wage increase. They say they support abortion, rights, but have never passed national abortion protections. Three Supreme Court seats were stolen, but they refuse to expand the Supreme Court.
As far as I can tell, they’re interested in maintaining the status quo and trying to keep Republicans from saying anything mean about them. If they tried fighting for the people, the people might support them.
Yep
The issue is the low turnout. He got all the votes he’s always gotten. Some demographics are moving toward him but those moves have more to do with the dying media landscape than anything else.
Yes. Zero self-reflection. Do it.
Not so sure about that. I know a lot of people that are so sick of “wokeness.” This election really surprised me in how many guys I knew that openly celebrated Trump winning because they saw him as anti woke. So disappointing.
At this rate we’re a few years removed from the establishment Dems saying that the party needs to run on a platform of “Okay, you can go back to lynching blacks and gays as long as you let us raise the minimum wage.”
I mean economic conditions were
But to say it didn’t have an affect on things so up d be wrong
So double down is the strategy…cool cool cool
Machismo wouldn’t let them vote for some uppity lady. Pure and simple.
I don’t believe it’s the primary reason. I think there were a lot of small reasons that added up to her loss. Also, none of this stuff stuck to Biden n 2020 because he was a known commodity. He was able to be more progressive than people thought, because he was old man Biden. Harris was a younger biracial woman, that some people didn’t know, so Trump’s attacks worked.
No it isn’t. I’ve been voting blue for 30 years and I almost didn’t vote for Harris cause I feel like the whole party keeps shifting further to the left and they don’t listen to anyone who isn’t wrapped in a rainbow or living a life in opposition to objective reality.
Every day I feel like I have less in common with these folks, and some days it’s how I measure my objective sanity. You guys can call it nonsense if you want, but I’m far more concerned with being able to retire and pay down debt than I am with re-educating the population to protect people’s preferred pronouns.
Pretty sure it has alot to do with the lack of iq from trumpers
The idea that Trump won is nonsense.
Trump won because of the exact opposite of wokeness.
Why so many people who are willing to simp for a person just because they are rich is beyond me.
There’s literally broke MFers cheering Trump’s tax cuts for the rich.
I guess they didn’t get the memo that poors taxes go up to compensate for it.
Honestly, the ones complaining about wokeness are the right. They won’t stfu about it. And then they say how it’s being shoved into their faces and they fail to realize that the podcasts they watch are why they keep hearing about it.
I am a lefty and I think it played a role. How big, I don’t know. I grew up poor but now work in a “high paying coastal elite” type job. So, I hear both sides. What I hear from people is stuff like this. “I feel like I can’t walk into a room of all genders and say “Hey guys” meaning it completely gender neutral and not feel like I’m about to get canceled.” The poor white Americans I grew up with feel like calling them “privileged” when they’ve been hard working but poor for generations is a non-starter.
I agree with the academic and intellectual arguments for white privilege and gender terms but I also think it hurts the party. The message started good. Everyone is equal don’t be biased or a racist asshole. But, instead of that it comes off as “everyone is equal and we should be nice to them except for white people who caused all this inequality and pain.” Or, making a villain out of someone with good intentions who may say something they don’t even realize is insensitive. Not arguing for these things but I’ve been soul searching and analyzing how a guy like Trump could get so much of the American vote and I do think these things played a factor. How big? Hard to say.
Crazy that being woke generally translates to just having basic human decency
There are quite a few factors, but to ignore the negative impact wokeness had on the Dems is to bury your head in the sand.