An online example of a woke non-engagement with an argument, just hatred and exclusion.

There is a natural end & there is a chosen end

When I was young, the doom that sealed cultural conservatives’ fate was their tendency to not engage in actual argument, but, instead, separate themselves from their opponents, call them names, write them out of humanity.

That ad hominem/marginalization technique meant that conservatives would always lose all the major “culture wars” with the progressives. The “right” could not live down its association with authoritarian techniques of censorship, censure, marginalization, and invective.

And, when I was young, I thought that apt. I hated conservatives’ easy resort to social control rather than rational debate.

Now, the group that plies such authoritarian methods with the greatest fervor is the progressive left, and these leftists have infected their Wokianity cult rightward, into the center-left, and even further, into corporate culture, normal commerce, to half of the libertarian movement and to no small amount of ostensibly Christian culture.

I suspect that the natural end of this technique in an open society is the undermining of whatever position (political, “cultural,” religious, “scientific”) that relies upon the technique.

The only wrinkle in this process is that the people the woke put in charge, politically, are engaging in an anti-democratic wreck-the-economy strategy . . . for success. Destroy to . . . “build back better.” Will they succeed in taking down civilization with their mad dash of Cloward-Piven and anarcho-tyranny?

That’s an open question.

But one thing: if you want to succeed, forswear reliance upon social control in debate, and act like a rational individual when rationality is required. While in a closed society — like under Islam, the Nazis or Communism — social controls can work for a long generation, and do damage for many, many generations, in a free society the cycle runs much differently. It destroys the people who engage the technique.

So, you can now see why Democrats so strongly oppose free speech and so enthusiastically practice social controls and marginalization and shunning: they are trying to establish a closed society based on their mores . . . of the moment. It is the only way they can maintain cultural dominance. In the normal course of democratic culture and politics, they are on their way out, their end is nigh. But if they succeed in closing society up, who knows how long they can rule, and rule maliciously?

twv