“Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it.” You might expect to hear a rant about wokeness from liberal Democrats in the “Bill Maher” space, but from a big time Democrat strategist, Clinton inner circle, TV and radio pundit and personality like James Carville you might NOT expect it.
But man he did say it. And that “maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isn’t the smartest thing to do.”
He trashed the wokeness mob, mostly on presentation and language, but the subtext was perfectly clear. And it was in an interview with Vox no less.
He trashed “faculty lounge” politics.
You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not.
Performative wokeness, or virtue-signalling.
VOX:
Is the problem the language or the fact that there are lots of voters who just don’t want to hear about race and racial injustice?Carville:
We have to talk about race. We should talk about racial injustice. What I’m saying is, we need to do it without using jargon-y language that’s unrecognizable to most people — including most Black people, by the way — because it signals that you’re trying to talk around them. This “too cool for school” sh*t doesn’t work, and we have to stop it.There may be a group within the Democratic Party that likes this, but it ain’t the majority. And beyond that, if Democrats want power, they have to win in a country where 18 percent of the population controls 52 percent of the Senate seats. That’s a fact. That’s not changing. That’s what this whole damn thing is about.
And when Vox asked him if he has “a problem with ‘wokeness'” he said EVERYONE does.
“Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this,” he said.
“But they don’t want to say it out loud,” he pointed out. This is an important point.
“Why not?” Vox asked him.
“Because they’ll get clobbered or canceled,” he answered.
Yep. That’s how they’re keeping people in line. Fear. You can smell it on the Vox interviewer the whole way through.
Bonus exchange:
VOXBOY: Part of the issue is that Republicans are going to paint the Dems as cop-hating, fetus-destroying Stalinists no matter what they say or do. So, yeah, I agree that Democrats should be smart and not say dumb, alienating things, but I’m also not sure how much control they have over how they’re perceived by half the country, especially when that half lives in an alternate media reality.
CARVILLE: Right, but we can’t say, “Republicans are going to call us socialists no matter what, so let’s just run as out-and-out socialists.” That’s not the smartest thing to do. And maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isn’t the smartest thing to do because almost f***ing no one wants to do that.
Ha ha ha. But seriously though, right? Read it all here.