Republican View: Wokeness is the perfect alibi for white elites

The county wrestles with dramatic economic inequality. Meanwhile, wokeness around race has emerged as the perfect alibi that lets liberal elites see themselves as compassionate and progressive — without the inconvenience of giving up privilege or political power.

During the decades when the Democratic Party went from (as Paul Begala recently noted) “being the party of the factory floor to being the party of the faculty lounge,” economic guilt was transformed into racial guilt by shifting focus from class to color (tinyurl.com/24ru64cb).

Throwing working people under the bus (so many deplorables!) provides Church of the Woke indulgences for white liberals (who as a group are more affluent and college educated than the general population). Wokeness reinforces elite class assumptions about superior virtue while providing many convenient outlets for signaling that virtue (Yard signs! Bumper stickers! NPR totebags!).

And wokeness does not tamper with the assumption that political power, as well as wealth and privilege, should flow naturally to the “meritocratic” smart and talented, who cling to the myth of their own intelligence and talent. The intensity of that myth is illustrated by the failure of so many liberals to grasp that Trump did not cause the political polarization they (ostensibly) deplore; he was the result of it.

Woke “antiracist” white liberals dodge guilt about class privilege and multi-generational wealth by displacing it onto an immutable characteristic: their whiteness. As Batya Ungar-Sargon points out (tinyurl.com/29malm64), “This is how white liberals arrived at a situation where, instead of agitating for a more equal society, they agitated for more diverse elites. Instead of asking why our elites have risen so far above the average American, they asked why the elites were so white.”

Also, of course, this keeps the system intact for the generational transfer of wealth and power from themselves to their children.

Their underlying guilt is revealed by a “tell” — the documented tendency of liberals (but not conservatives) to “dumb down” their language when addressing a Black audience (Dupree and Fiske, doi.apa.org/record/2019-12064-001?doi=1). Examples include the linguistic blackface repeatedly affected by Hillary Clinton when speaking to predominantly Black audiences and Joe Biden telling a Black radio host, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”

The current woke “antiracist” moral panic serves as a figleaf behind which economic elites hide the regressive view that, as Ungar-Sargon says, “elites should not only exist but rule.” However, the Wardens of Woke might be sowing the seeds of their own destruction. Enforcing conformity always protects mediocrity (see: the Biden Cabinet).

We live in complicated times, and Fortune favors the bold.

Full disclosure: When I went to Cornell University as a working-class scholarship student along with students from the elite class, I was impressed by two things — compared to Cajuns, the boys were terrible dancers, and beneath that well-polished preppy charm, they often were just not very bright compared to, say, the average welder.

Republican View appears in the last edition of each month in Tompkins Weekly.