A response to Cathy Young and Shadi Hamid.
When deciding who to vote for in November, what should we base our decision on? What considerations should we let sway us, and what considerations should we ignore? You might think the answer should have something to do with our values, beliefs, and convictions—and you’d be right. But some on the left are actually trying to make the case that voters should put all that aside. Instead, we should base critical political decisions (like who should be the President) on how likely they are to elicit violent reactions from the left.
Last Friday, Cathy Young, a contributing editor at Reason magazine and Arc Digital, took issue with President Trump’s order to end diversity training based on Critical Race Theory in federal agencies. “There is plenty wrong with the ideology and practice of most forms of racial sensitivity training,” she acknowledges, but, according to Young, “recruiting Trump to fight this war is the worst possible move.” She believes that doing so risks triggering the reaction of progressive politicians and activists against President Trump’s move. The President’s opponents will “rally in defense of diversity training,” she writes, so “the anti-Trump backlash may actually strengthen such programs.”
Then, on Sunday, Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued in the Atlantic that even “law and order Republicans” should prefer a Biden victory. Like Young, Hamid’s concern was how Democrats would react. For Democrats, losing the November election will “undermine faith in democracy, resulting in more of the social unrest and street battles that cities including Portland, Oregon, and Seattle have seen in recent months. For this reason, strictly law-and-order Republicans who have responded in dismay to scenes of rioting and looting have an interest in Biden winning.”
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Young and Hamid have something right: at this critical moment in American history, we face a warlike foe. But we shouldn’t capitulate. We should make our decisions in accordance with our convictions and be prepared to fight back against those who’ll oppose them. We should position ourselves as wartime conservatives. After all, soldiers and nations have made the ultimate sacrifice, facing conflict and likely death to stand for truth and justice. Even if we risk mass violence, civil war, or succession by siding with the same, we’d be cowards for doing otherwise.
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People oppose wokism because its claims are untrue and its actions unjust. Woke discourse casts people into groups ordered hierarchically by the level of oppression they’re deemed to have suffered, running roughshod over considerations of individual justice. It insists on an ideological and naive view of history, and it proceeds by trying to shame those who resist it into acceptance. In 2016, President Trump’s base rejected the Democrats because they were wandering off the woke cliff, as Clinton’s attack on “the racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic” deplorables amply demonstrated. We rejected establishment Republicans because they failed to contend with wokeness entirely, focusing instead on issues of limited government and free markets. At the same time, the left achieved dominance in all domains of cultural formation (K-12 education, universities, Hollywood, the media, etc.).
We chose president Trump because he fought back against wokeness, explicitly: bucking political correctness entirely (stating plainly, for instance, an immigration policy millions of citizens were yearning for) and refusing to bend to woke ways of manipulation. That this movement has led to “an increasingly militant cultural left” confirms the wartime conservative’s assessment of the left. Young’s tepid anti-wokism is not adequate to the threat that wokism poses. Tyranny doesn’t abate when you remove resistance to it.
So yes, the left will absolutely “rally in defense of diversity training” when confronted with President Trump’s recent order. But that’s not a reason not to endorse the executive order: it’s why we absolutely must throw our support behind it. An animal roars loudest when it’s wounded.
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What Hamid fails to reckon with is that we voted for President Trump in 2016 precisely to teach the establishment class that their entire political culture is failing our country. The Democrats’ behavior since 2016 demonstrates that they’re failed to learn their lesson. While Hamid would abandon the lesson entirely, wartime conservatives think it should be taught again (and again, and again, and again).
Of course, we recognize the danger posed to the country by an outraged left; there’s no confusion there. But for wartime conservatives, the fear of leftist outrage is silenced by our commitment to the belief that Democrats should “process a Trump victory.” If Democrats won’t listen to what their opponents are saying in the public sphere, they should be made to hear their voice at the ballot box until they do. That’s how properly functioning democracies work. They should be taught their lesson until they recognize that their moral vision needs amending.
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Hamid, however, only considers that the country will be safer by appeasing the left—he fails to ask what kind of country we’d be saving by doing so. A big worry for him is that, for Democrats, a Trump re-election “would provoke mass disillusion with electoral politics as a means of change.” He notes that Republican politicians will be more willing to acknowledge a Biden victory than Democrats will be to acknowledge a Trump victory, an asymmetry that will be mirrored in the media. “There’s a lot of right-of-center journalists and right-of-center commentators who’ll respect a Biden victory in a way that left-of-center journalists will not respect a Trump victory,” he explained in a podcast foreshadowing his editorial. He concludes that the gap between what the country is and what it ought to be will appear greater to Democrats under a Trump presidency than it’ll appear to Republicans under a Biden presidency. This is why Democrat losers will be more despairing of democracy, and “this has implications for mass unrest and political violence across American cities.”
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A Biden victory, Hamid postulates, will lead to a cold civil war within the Democratic Party instead of a hot one on our streets. The ‘woke anger’ of the radical left will transfer onto Biden centrists instead of Trumpists. Hamid sees this as “a more pro-democracy outcome, for that’s not really questioning the democratic system.”
Hamid’s argument here is absurd: if Democrats lose a fair democratic election, they’ll despair of democracy. The deciding factor in the election should be whether Democratic voters are left “questioning the democratic system.” Essentially, we must vote Biden to coddle the American Democrat.
Never mind that these Democrats are falsely and unjustly claiming that democracy is now in question. (Hamid flat out denies that these facts matter: “We can debate that, but…”) What’s important to ‘guardians of democracy’ like Hamid is only that Democrats “will lose their shit and lose their minds.” That they’ll do so because “they can no longer think rationally” and will obstinately refuse to recognize the results of a fair election is, for some reason, to be ignored.
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The radical left has outsized institutional power today. Throughout the Trump Presidency, this year especially, they’ve converted their beachheads in our major institutions into dominance of them. Liberals blame this turn of events on Trump’s provocations, but, more than anything, what it demonstrates is the wartime conservative’s view that the radical left had to be squarely confronted. And it’s appeasement-thinking like Young’s and Hamid’s that allowed the radical left to establish such strong beachheads in the first place.
