Like Ed says, there’s so much tasty stuff here it’s tough to decide what to excerpt, or how much. In the way of our esteemed colleague John Wilder, to excerpt it is to ruin it. Or, as Salieri said of Mozart’s music in Amadeus: Displace one note and there would be diminishment, displace one phrase and the structure would fall.
The dawn of the anti-woke era
Having rejected the Democrats’ progressivist dogma, the American electorate is undergoing a social and demographic revolution.In late November, a California judge rejected a demand by several women’s volleyball teams to disqualify a transgender player for San Jose State before this year’s tournament. Six opponents have forfeited games against the team this year rather than collude in what they see as cheating. The larger question of transgender athletes in college sports will be decided later, but the judge is defending a lost cause. Fewer than a quarter of Americans (23 per cent) support allowing transgender athletes to play on women’s teams. Teams that do field trans athletes are sometimes booed off the pitch. Such feelings go a long way towards explaining Donald Trump’s resounding win in November’s presidential elections.
Washingtonians are often asked what it feels like to watch the second age of Trump dawn. Oddly, it does not feel much like his first arrival in 2016. It feels more like Barack Obama’s in 2008 or Bill Clinton’s in 1992 – less a political than a social revolution, in which philosophical habits will be broken along with political hierarchies. This particular social revolution owes most of its energy to a revulsion against woke. That is the source of the new era’s promise and danger.
Trump left office only four years ago. Washington rejected him – somatically, as in a botched organ transplant. Having squeaked into power on an anti-establishment platform, he arrived in the capital to find the establishment bloodied but unbowed. Hostile neighbours on Tennyson Street hung rainbow flags in front of the house where his vice-president Mike Pence was staying during the transition. By the CVS drugstore at Connecticut Avenue and McKinley, activists waved signs at honking motorists throughout December. The day after the inauguration in 2017, over 200,000 women, decked out in “pussyhats” and led by establishment celebrities from Scarlett Johansson to Emma Watson, descended on the Mall. It shook the city: it was the largest collection of protest marchers since the Vietnam War, and drew a considerably larger crowd than the inauguration ceremony. The mood was defiant.
There’s none of that now. The mood in Washington’s progressive neighbourhoods is more one of muttered commiseration. (And they are all progressive neighbourhoods: in the capital city, Harris defeated Trump 93 per cent to 7 per cent.)
The result was revolutionary, and not in the way Democrats intended: anyone with a sense of fair play would be tempted to vote for a fellow who had been, as the playwright David Mamet put it, “raided, indicted, convicted, sued, slandered and shot”. But at this point, to do so would be to declare the judicial system corrupt. In the end, half the country did just that: suburbanites wore T-shirts with Trump’s mug shot on them. Grannies danced giddily on TikTok: “Here’s how it feels to vote for a convicted felon!”
The country is floating free of its laws. That is what gives the present its feeling of open-ended promise and peril. If Trump decides to investigate the Biden administration’s connection to these cases, will it be sauce for the gander, or a sign of authoritarian tendencies? Hard to say. Every elected official poses some risk of turning authoritarian. Mostly, we assume it’s one in 100, or one in 1,000. But the more discontented an electorate is, the higher a risk it may run.
There, that ought to be sufficient motivation for y’all to click on over and read the whole thing. Of course, Caldwell throws in some of the usual “Trump lost in 2020 fair and square” bushwa which has become de rigeur for Old Media essayists these days, along with the now-obligatory “baseless” codswallop I railed about last night. All in all, though, it’s a good piece; his brief rundown deriding Trump’s “34 felonies” is especially pungent, and the rest is well-written and quite insightful at the very least.
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