Voters & the Vexing Problem

It was a weird election. Forget the vote oddities. After two years of rising crime, lockdowns, woke hysterics, inflation and nuclear brinksmanship, it was set up for a vote of no confidence for the ruling party. It did not happen. Some of this can be blamed on candidate quality and vote harvesting but a problem is the voters themselves. It is not stupidity. It is that they are all in on race and sexuality objectives as a hypergood. There is no winning them back.

This involves the ticket splitting as alluded to above, but points to a deeper problem. One can ask, “how does anyone look at the last two years and still vote Democrat”. Why would anyone want more of that in DC? Forget the minority client voter banks, and focus on more elastic voters as even independents broke against GOP senate candidates like Laxalt, Masters and Walker. What we are running into is the post-Christian left’s replacement of Judeo-Christian moral ethics with a woke morality. Charles Taylor wrote “Sources of the Self” over thirty years ago, but his concept of hypergoods seems applicable here.

A hypergood per Taylor is as follows:

“we acknowledge second-order qualitative distinctions which define higher goods, on the basis of which we discriminate among other goods, attribute differential worth or importance to them, or determine when and if to follow them. Let me call higher-order goods of this kind ‘hypergoods’, i.e., goods which not only are incomparably more important than others but provide the standpoint from which these must be weighed, judged, decided about.”

The left wing activist class within the Biden administration has taken a view that all policy decisions or options must be viewed through a woke lens. A Democrat friend who works in Congress in DC has discussed his frustration with this as everything is examined on its merits for improving racial equity or lgbt promotion.

This midterm election reveals that it is possible that the entire Democrat base has signed onto this as well. We all know this is a product of the university and media memeplex. Generation highs in inflation, rising crime, supply chain mismanagement, mismanagement of foreign affairs and possible nuclear warfare all come secondary to the woke concern.

While Russia is not traditionalist, Rep. Raskin wrote a letter about the importance of taking on Russia because it is a boogeyman of anti-woke policies and culture. America is fighting for PRIDE parades with the risk of thermonuclear warfare. Rising crime? No concern since dismantling the incarceration system is a goal to improve racial equity. Leftists excuse crime nonstop online. Their voters seem to not mind either. Polling of self-declared independents would be helpful to understand how much this has affected them.

The destruction of the late ‘60s and ‘70s caused a backlash at the polls made famous by Nixon wooing the South and white ethnics and Reagan’s media shocking Reagan Democrats. There was a limit to the madness. Voters would cross over and pump the brakes. This later caused the Democrats to refill their leadership with the DLC men to form Clinton’s triangulation strategy. We have seen this insanity for years now since Obama’s second term, and it increasingly looks like voters are happy with it.

This is dangerous ground because it is a runaway train effect. No brakes. No second guessing. The left won’t even admit they have become more radical because some academic can manipulate a study to show it is the right that has radicalized, and only the right. All policies are allowed if they can be rationalized with the goals of the left’s hypergoods. Maybe your mom got stabbed in the neck by a felon out on the streets despite prior violent charges, but at least he isn’t in jail, denying his family his wonderful presence. Equity. That’s what matters. That’s all that matters. The danger is that we have a cult that would rather rule radioactive ashes than address any problem because it would violate its woke hypergood framework.