Progressives’ Grunts Are Growing Desperate

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

 

Confused, alarmed, and unbalanced by the changing world around them, America’s erstwhile progressive class has been eventually reduced to the grunt. The proximate stimulus doesn’t matter a great deal, for, whatever the question, the answer is always the same: “Racism! Sexism! LGBT!” Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, a little paralysis will do the movement good?

 

“Abortion bans,” the ACLU tweeted recently, “disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous & other people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, young people, those working to make ends meet, people with disabilities.” Quite why this is so — or, in the case of “the LGBTQ community,” how it is so — was not explained. The words were just snapped carelessly together, like Freudian Duplo. In the distant past, an argument might have been stapled on, but not now, when everything is everything — when slogans have replaced expostulation and ideas have been melded into pink noise. Like Shakespeare’s Thomas Mowbray, progressive America may at long last have run out of gas, leaving its participants to confess in desperation that, “The language I have learned these forty years / My native English, now I must forego / And now my tongue’s use is to me no more / Than an unstringed viol or a harp.”

 

It remains a matter of considerable irony that those Americans who believe themselves to be the most tolerant, the most perceptive, and the most open to new ideas have chosen to box themselves in in this manner. Asked recently by the New Yorker to explain Governor Ron DeSantis’s political approach, MSNBC’s newly minted darling, Stuart Stevens, determined that:

 

Republican leaders have made a calculated choice in recent decades. As their reliable cadre of white voters shrank, they realized that they could either try to attract more minorities or try to motivate white citizens who rarely voted by tapping their racial insecurities. When Romney ran, he rejected the latter strategy, Stevens told me. Then came Trump, who embraced it and won. “The G.O.P. has become a white-grievance party,” Stevens said. DeSantis, he believes, is following the Trump playbook.

 

This is a reflex, a habit, a tic, a chant. It is catechism, not analysis; prayer, not insight; dogma, not science. It is an old memory, stored at the back of a dusty brain that, some time ago, summarily ceased to inquire. As anyone with eyes is able to ascertain, the story of the Republican Party’s continued success in Florida is not one of a “motivated” “white” “cadre,” desperately clinging to its “racial insecurities,” but of a series of progressively successful outreach programs and of some salutary demographic shifts. In May of this year, Ron DeSantis’s reelection campaign spent $5 million on Spanish-language commercials in Florida, the purpose of which was to capitalize on the ongoing shift of Hispanic Floridians toward the Republican Party. In 2020, Donald Trump won a majority of Florida’s 1.5 million Cuban Americans, a majority of Florida’s one million Colombian Americans, and a majority of Florida’s 100,000 Venezuelan Americans. Trump improved on his performance in Miami-Dade County, losing it by seven points in 2020 compared with 29 points in 2016, and he won two-thirds of the vote in Hialeah, the most Hispanic city in the United States. The last time Florida had a midterm election, in 2018, the Washington Post predicted that the election would be a battle between “older white voters” and “the state’s rapidly diversifying youth.” Instead, DeSantis gained 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in the governor’s race, and Rick Scott won 45 percent in his Senate race — a touch shy of the 48 percent that Marco Rubio won in 2016. This time around, DeSantis aims to win Hispanic voters outright.

 

But what use are all these facts when there is tribal wittering to be indulged? We are dealing here with a habit so impervious to reality that it is able to transmute the news that an immigrant from South Africa has voted for a Mexican-born woman to represent an 84 percent Hispanic district into a story about “white supremacy and authoritarianism.” “When the facts change, I change my mind,” John Maynard Keynes once said. Increasingly, progressives try to change the facts. After Trump outperformed expectations with Hispanic voters in 2020, they simply recast Hispanic voters’ role. “These days,” the Washington Post’s Eugene Scott submitted a few days after the election, “you do not have to be white to support white supremacy.” “Latino,” wrote the New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, “is a contrived ethnic category.” “Cubans,” offered up activist Andrea L. Pino-Silva, “have been sold a narrative that they have a guaranteed path to whiteness, and many will sell out every other minority to get it.” To avoid introspection, anything goes.

 

Whenever news progressives don’t like breaks, this grunting is immediately audible. The Supreme Court strikes down a state law discriminating against religious schools at the request of, among others, the Council of Islamic Schools in North America and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America? The move is quickly cast as “the dream of Christian Nationalists,” and its non-Christian advocates as mere tools of the “white Christian nationalist project.” There’s a mass shooting in Texas? Barack Obama shows up to insist that, “As we grieve the children of Uvalde today, we should take time to recognize that two years have passed since the murder of George Floyd.” Roe v. Wade seems to be in danger? Along come the “Dykes for Body Liberation” to note that opposition to overturning the ruling also “means being pro-abortion, pro-gun control, anti-displacement, and anti-police.” Nothing may stand alone. Support for abortion must be linked to “defunding the police.” Support for defunding the police must be evaluated on the basis of its effect on “good climate policy.” And good climate policy, of course, must be inextricable from combatting “systemic racism.”

 

Chaucer taught us that all good things must come to an end, and so it will be here. Earlier this month, the Audubon Society announced that it had “partnered with drag queen and intersectional environmentalist Pattie Gonia” to present “#BirdsTellUs: The Song of the Meadowlark, a message of hope for the future of our planet as we face climate change,” and, in so doing, it signaled that we were approaching the bottom of this deep well of palaver. We fancy ourselves frightfully modern here in 2022, but it still remains impossible for anyone who talks like this to avoid blank stares, involuntary commitment, and, ultimately, banishment. Having forgone his native English, remember, Thomas Mowbray was exiled — forever.