Why the working class has turned its back on the left
2) Whipped up by the outrage machine, culture wars have come to dominate political dialogue. Educated professionals and tech-savvy knowledge workers who are the face of liberalism today have found themselves on the opposite side of this cultural divide from the less educated and less skilled. Few of the former even try to hide their contempt for the latter any more.
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Reflecting on what he called “the woke identity,” Freddie DeBoer observed a tendency among some leftists to forcefully reject the work of persuasion with excuses like, “It’s not my job to educate you.” The not-yet-woke are to be chided, not engaged.
“The problem with making your political program the assembly of a moral aristocracy is that hierarchy always requires exclusivity,” DeBoer argues. “A fundamental, structural impediment to liberal political victory is that their preferred kind of moral engagement necessarily limits the number of adherents they can win. It’s just math: you can’t grow a mass party when the daily operation of your movement involves finding more and more heretics to ostracize from the community.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...ft-win/522102/
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Cosmopolitan liberalism is the culture of the elites and is deeply divisive. Identity politics, in its libertarian pursuit of self-realisation and its judging and dividing into victim status hierarchies, is corrosive of society.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politic...bourgeois-left
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...It was and remains extremely counterproductive for the left to treat Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” especially given how tiny a percentage of his followers would need to be converted away from the president to reorient political power in Washington, D.C. For directing me to a Lincoln speech I’d never read before, I thank Andrew Sullivan, who quoted it to support the argument that “you will not arrest the reactionary momentum by ignoring it or dismissing it entirely as a function of bigotry or stupidity. You’ll only defuse it by appreciating its insights and co-opting its appeal.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...ft-win/522102/
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