Greg Conti in Compact Magazine:
In recent years, as opposition to the cluster of ideological shibboleths known as wokeness has become the unifying cause of the political right, negative polarization has ensured that much of the left continues to fall in line with the latest progressive cause. Nonetheless, one strain of anti-woke politics has managed to gain some influence within the Democratic coalition: so-called popularism, identified especially with the pollster/strategist David Shor and liberal pundits like Matthew Yglesias. Rather than contest woke ideology on the merits, popularists limit themselves to pointing out its unpopularity with voters outside of highly educated settings. Politicians attempting to appease the boutique activist concerns of their far-left college-educated voters, they argue, will turn off working-class voters and thereby set back the liberal agenda as a whole.
A version of this popularist line of criticism was on display in a recent New York Times column by David Brooks, an erstwhile conservative exiled to the center-left by the rise of Trump. Reflecting on his fellow meritocrats’ addiction to rapid cultural change—and to punitive measures for those who can’t keep up—Brooks remarks: “Using words like ‘problematic,’ ‘cisgender,’ ‘Latinx’ and ‘intersectional’ is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells.” In their ruthless enforcement of new mores that originate in NGOs and higher education, Brooks worries, progressives will continue to play into the hands of a gleefully politically incorrect figure like Donald Trump, who promises liberation from this onerous moral oversight.
There is doubtless some truth to all this.
More here.