Woke Didn't Cause This

I have seen more than one take recently trying to still blame what is happening in the US (and what happened in Turkey and Hungary) on “liberal overreach.” This was very trendy after the US presidential election last year but, as Trump 2 gets worse and worse and worse, I still see people making this claim. Most recently, it was Noah Smith. (He did it again in his post criticizing ICE!)

Many of the policies and ideas that Americans think are “woke” are normal throughout the rest of the liberal world. I am, of course, Canadian and only the son of an American, and an expat at that. Though I have spent plenty of time in the US I have never lived there. I don’t know what it’s like to be an American, to strongly believe that your country is the best country that ever existed, that it’s unique, and that the ideas of other countries that might, you know, help the less fortunate, are foreign and “socialist.” (Be that single payer healthcare or extremely minor restrictions on freedom of speech or whatever.)

But I can’t help but think that the way the mainstream media in the US talks about politics and society has a lot more to do with what is happening now in the US rather than some kind of “liberal overreach.”

The way the media covers crime completely obscures reality, for example. Crime has mostly been going down for decades in the US but the average person is unaware of this. And when crime went up briefly during the pandemic, it was considered some kind of national crisis. It is now used as proof of some kind of liberal failure even though it really didn’t increase that much compared to the past.

The media covers politics - in a country which almost never goes without at least one election campaign at all times - like a horse race, rather than substantively. We do that here, too, but we have limits on when elections happen so it’s not the constant obsession with who will win that it is in the US. Pundits are never held to account for their incorrect predictions about races or just about public reactions to political decisions or events. They spout off endlessly, for decades, saying things that are regularly proven incorrect and keep their jobs.

And we all know that nobody agrees on a single shared reality any more. Fox and the other right wing news outlets tell one story of the US while the other networks and other 24 hours news outlets tell a different story. A substantial chunk of Americans watch one or the other and not both. Their only exposure to the other is through pundits on one side dunking on the other side.

But, despite this, or in addition to this abject failure of the mainstream media to cover their country in any way that reflects reality, I think there is a fairly reasonable explanation as to why Trump won in 2024 that doesn’t involve blaming everything on social justice warriors on Twitter, a platform that has never been among the biggest social media platforms.

• Republicans don’t vote Democrat unless you give them a really good reason to.

• The Democrats didn’t give them good reasons, they gave them inflation and Joe Biden visibly and audibly aging before their eyes and ears. That was enough for some independents and even who had voted Democrat in the past to vote Republican.

• Republicans have fond or normal memories of Trump 1.0. I have heard at least one average joe Republican say “I was better off in 2019 than in 2024.”

• Many Republicans now believe the pandemic happened under Biden and many also believe that it was Democrat-run states who did the “lockdowns.” (This would be liberal overreach, I guess, if it had happened like that rather than being bipartisan. Many Republicans seem to believe that the lockdowns were more strict where they lived than they actually were. While we’re dealing with media failures: some Republicans continue to believe that Trump should have won the 2020 presidential election.)

• Republicans did not believe Democrats that Trump 2.0 would be worse than Trump 1.0 despite the existence of Project 2025.

I think that’s a compelling argument as to why 70 million people “voted for this.” It doesn’t rely on any Twitter drama or any university controversies that the vast majority of Americans either didn’t know about or were only vaguely aware of it. (There’s also a clear indictment of the media in this explanation.)

I think this is a decent explanation because, despite some Americans’ absolute obsession with politics, most people don’t care about politics.

And I think this is a simpler explanation than trying to evoke this idea that Americans were upset about things other than the economy, that they were upset about the things political class of The Right and “centrists” (nominal Democrats, some of whom really seem to lean Republican, or towards Republican appeasement, an awful lot of the time) were upset about. The 2024 election result is not a reflection of pundits’ particular bete noires.

To me, claiming that ICE shooting people, arresting people, crashing into their cars and all the other shit they’re doing is some kind of response to “liberal overreach” is victim blaming.

Victim-blaming half the United States for what is currently happening in the US is not any way to move forward.

The people who are responsible for ICE’s actual overreach and extremely dangerous behaviour are the people in power. The people responsible for America’s current slide into authoritarianism are the ones who are doing authoritarianism! The Republican party that refuses to do anything about it is also deeply culpable as are, yes, the people who voted for that party even if they only voted for that party because they were mad about inflation and didn’t want to vote for a woman of colour.

If you find yourself arguing “yeah but” to this, and referring to any policy or problem - or especially, perceived problem - of the Biden administration, let me refer you to “Argument and Persuasion” by Donald Hall. It’s worth reading. The people who claim what ICE is doing - and any future invasion of Greenland - is the result of “liberal overreach” are the students in the story who want to blame anyone else other than [redacted as it’s a spoiler]. They are confusing context for cause.