Jack Saunders sent me a video clip of a guy, Ben Kawaller, who recently gave a speech to the Log Cabin Republicans, down in Los Angeles. Ben (I feel like I can call him by his first name) is gay, calls himself a “centrist Democrat,” and the topic of his speech was how much he loathes wokeness, which he defined as “the belief that a person’s immutable characteristics, like race or gender, always and inherently either limit them or grant them advantage.”
I personally have struggled to define wokeness. In a way it’s like Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography: I know it when I see it. It almost always has to do with an obsession with race, and it definitely always comes from that part of the liberal-left spectrum called “progressive.” I don’t think there’s anything particularly progressive about “progressivism,” which is why Seneca Scott calls it “regressivism.” Maybe the way to characterize it is simply to rattle off the names of some local politicians that call themselves progressive: Sheng Thao. Nikki Bas. Carroll Fife. Dan Kalb. Pamela Price. To name them is to know them.
Anyhow, back to Ben’s definition. Do race and gender “always and inherently either limit [people] or grant [them] advantage”? I myself don’t believe that, but then again, I’m not woke. So let’s try to put ourselves into the brain of, say, Carroll Fife, who is woke, and try to figure out how she interprets Ben’s definition.
Let’s start with “blackness.” Fife has made it clear for years that her number one priority, politically, is the advancement of Black people. She has many different ways of expressing that concept. For instance, it can be negatively expressed, as in “Carroll Fife wants to smash White dominance.” Or it can be positively expressed: “Carroll Fife wants to empower Black people.” Either way, Fife believes that, under current circumstances, being White always grants White people advantage, while being Black always limits Black people, not because they’re naturally limited in some way, but because America is built on structural racism that always inherently limits how much Black people can achieve.
Now, this may not be the exact way that Fife expresses her philosophy, but it comes pretty darned close. In Fife’s world view, America has been hostile to people of African descent since 1619 (when the first slaves arrived here; hence the 1619 Project), and America remains hostile to Black people today. There is, in the Fife conspiratorial view, an actual plot to limit Black people in every way, shape and form from succeeding, and therefore—again in Fife’s world—it’s the duty of right-thinking reformers to expose this hideous plot and undo it; and if that means giving Black people certain powers that no one else has, then so be it.
Speaking as a centrist Democrat (like Ben), I find that world view insidious. To begin with, there is no plot to keep Black people down. As I’ve insisted before, everybody wants Black people to be free, to break out of the dysfunctionality that characterizes too many Black communities, and rise into the daylight sunshine of prosperity and security. Centrist Democrats believe that we can help Black people reform their communities by personally not being racist, and by accepting the truth that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” in the words of one of our greatest Democrats, Thomas Jefferson. Centrist Democrats believe also that we can best bring about this equality in a nation that is a small-“d” democracy, unencumbered by religious intrusion into government, where the values of decency, patriotism, the Golden Rule, and adherence to the law dominate. Centrist Democrats want desperately to keep religion out of government. And, perhaps most importantly, Centrist Democrats are emotional, compassionate, and root for the underdog.
Woke Democrats believe none of these things. They detest democracy, because they believe that most people—or most White people, anyway—are fundamentally evil, and therefore can’t be trusted with power. They don’t want organized religion to intrude into government, but they’ve formed their own secular religion—wokeism—which they insist be the national religion. If you don’t like it, you’re an apostate, to be shamed and canceled. As for adherence to the law, here is where wokeism is most inimical to true Democratic values. Wokeism believes in breaking the law, if to do so allows them to express their contempt for “structural racism.” Wokeism is not bothered by criminality, which is merely a form of redistribution of wealth that was stolen from Black people. Wokeism doesn’t believe in the Golden Rule. Everyone is equal, they say, but some people have got to be made more equal than others (e.g. affirmative action or quotas), in order to make up for past injustice. Wokeism roots for the underdog, as long as the underdog is Black. White people cannot, by definition, be victims. We can only be oppressors because, as per Ben Kawaller’s definition, Whiteness is “an immutable characteristic that always and inherently grants White people advantage.”
Kawaller told the Log Cabin Republicans how distraught he was, as a Democrat, to see the “collective insanity” of wokeness “take over so much of the left.” I feel the same way. Ben spoke of the many reasons why he could never become a Republican—reasons I share with him. Which leaves him, and me, and people like us, very uncomfortable. We want a home in a political party. It can’t be the Republican Party, for obvious reasons. It’s increasingly not the Democratic Party now owned by its extreme left. Nor can it be a third party because we don’t believe in throwing away our votes. That leaves us one option: to cleanse the Democratic Party of wokeism. I don’t claim to speak for all the members of the Coalition for a Better Oakland, but that is my goal: to sanitize (bring sanity back to) the party of Jefferson, Wilson, FDR, JFK and Barack Obama, by disinfecting it from the lethal virus of wokeism forever.
Steve Heimoff