The Democrats Don't Want Unity

What they Want is Conformity

I appreciated Joe Biden’s valiant effort to unify the country. The problem is, I don’t think he quite understands the party he’s just been put charge of, not the party as it has defined itself of late. Biden is an old school Democrat, like the Clintons, like so many in Hollywood who meant well when they made movies about racism. Biden genuinely believes that hiring people of color and gender in high places of power will “fix” racism as defined by the left. Or at least help move things forward. If he is aware at all at what has been happening, he likely believes that removing Trump will be a big part of calming things down.

But I’m here to tell you that nothing has changed. What you saw with Trump was just a much bigger version of “cancel culture,” whether his enemies want to admit it or not. First, I’ll outline how I define “cancel culture” and then I’ll explain what I mean by Trump.

Cancel Culture didn’t start with Trump. It intensified under Trump because he represented an existential threat to the broader left, and many on the right in this country. Just like the young teenagers in Salem didn’t start witch hunts, witch hangings or witch burnings, but when the ever-fearful Puritans saw the young girls having a fit, their worst fears were suddenly coming true: the Devil had come to Salem. Cancel Culture, as such, was mostly in place before Trump arrived, or the beginnings of it. You can trace it back to universities and Critical Theory, or you can look at the two ways young people came of age online and split into two groups. The internet would call them “social justice warriors” and “alt right trolls.” The “sjw’s” more or less evolved on Tumblr, while the trolls evolved and hid in places like 4chan and Reddit. You outward activism, calling people out and “cancelling” them, and you had young kids who could not and would be controlled hiding out in places where they could say things that could not be said.

Both of these forces grew over the past ten or twenty years as millennials and Gen-Z came of age online as internet NATIVES. I am an internet immigrant. Gen-X is likely the last generation that remembers life before the internet. But those that after grew up with smart phones and high speed wi-fi. Many of them came of age in the era of social media whereas I remember when the web barely was usable. We can’t look at American culture now without looking at how the internet has impacted it and one way is most definitely how split young people have become with their ideologies.

The “alt-right” weren’t all racists, sexists and nazis. They were just called that. Clearly some of there are. You just need to read the comments at a site like Breitbart to see that. Not only do they exist but they get a thrill out of saying what can’t be said since they hide their identities behind anonymity.

By contrast, the left on the pages of Tumblr, in the Obama era, began to police culture. This started roughly back in 2013 on a site called “Your fave is problematic.” There, they would dutifully list each famous person who committed sins against the religion. And make no mistake, this is a religion, a fundamentalist one that insists on complete obedience. I could argue that Obama was at the head of it in an esoteric sense, as the first black President who began making inclusivity and diversity government policy in order to bring American culture forward. But really, what the religion believes is that white people are the force of evil, not just in this country but in the world, who are oppressing and exploiting BIPOC. This was true when my daughter attended middle school as a white girl and all of the other whites in her school needed to have some sort of affliction that would separate them from the standard white person in America. Like they were not a white cis male or female, but they were trans or they were poly or they had an eating disorder or anxiety or they were cutters. Whatever it was, they needed a shield to deflect harsh accusations against them or complete invalidity.

This is why, I think, you are seeing so many white people portraying themselves as something other than white, usually Black - but sometimes “Lantinx” - I put that word in quotes because it is the many ways people identify themselves online as part of the religion that believes that word must be used or you will offend someone somewhere. Using pronouns in your bio, a Black Lives Matter symbol in your profile or your email are other ways you signal to the broader internet that you are a true believer and in the tribe. If you don’t, you are suspect. Or you are a non-conformer or a non-believer. Or you are simply a homophobe/transphobe/racist.

One of the reasons, probably the main reason, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan are so popular is that they vocally push back on all of it. Rogan, for his part, is a lefty in all ways except this - the forced conformity of the left and “cancel culture.” But he and Ben Shapiro have discussed, in a calm way where they both listen to each other, why as an Orthodox Jew, Shapiro can’t attend a gay wedding because it is against his religion. He has no problem with having gay friends or even accepting gay marriages but he holds as true to his religion as many on the left are holding true to theirs.

In a sense, then, you could see what may be coming next in this country as, at least in part, an ongoing religious war - and we all know how those end.

Before we go any further, it has to be clarified that there are two factions on the left that fall under the umbrella of “cancel culture,” that’s Black Twitter and the “SJW” folks who rose up on Tumblr. They might have a lot of crossover but they seem to be very different sources of activism. The SJWs tend to be white, obviously, and they are the ones who see their belief system as a kind of religion fighting for the rights of BIPOC. So they support and defend Black Twitter. Black Twitter seems to be a force of activism that has a point and a destination. The SJWs are people who are more or less trying to remake American culture to reflect their reality on social media.

At the moment, it appears to be working. I make this distinction, by the way, because Black Twitter has provided the black community with a powerful voice that they’ve never had before. It would be a shame if that was lumped in with “cancel culture,” which is a term, like so many online, that came out of Black Twitter, it isn’t really the same thing. There is crossover, for sure, but it’s important to note that there are distinctions that have to be made - people who fight for their own rights, vs people who fight for the rights of others as warriors or saviors.

That latter force, fighting for the rights of others, is really where the left is going, where Biden sits, and where the Democratic Party overall will be fighting for going forward. It is going to be “it’s our way or the highway” and if you go along with it we can have unity. If you don’t, you are a racist/homophobe/transphobe. There is no fighting for a freer country where people can believe what they want. There is - you have to join our religion because that is where the country is headed.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why Trump’s message would resonate with so many, and it also explains why CNN or MSNBC or the New Yorker or anyone else on the left, would believe that 73 or 74 million people who voted for Trump in this country are racist/transphobe/homophobe. When in reality they were voting against the conformity demands on the left.

The Democrats do NOT want unity. They want compliance and conformity and then they will allow you in as a recognized American citizens whose rights matter. But only then. This is a war of ideology, a war to get people to think the way the left thinks, believe what they say, how they see American history and what defines this country moving forward.

This is true across the board on the left, which dominates culture, education, news, big tech and apparently, science. My friends who thought Biden was a moderate or who would “calm things down” or push back in any way - that’s not happening. Thus, the war in 2024 is going to be about this. It is going to be about a faction of the public who wants this to end. But they are unheard. Their voices remain muted because they know they can’t say what they really think about anything.

They will, therefore, count on people like Trump who came to destroy their religion and their movement, to speak for them. This is an appeasement vs. war. There can’t really be a middle ground because the left does not want a middle ground. They want and will only accept total compliance. As an example, the White House official contact email now has alternatives for pronouns. You have to pick one. Which means you have to conform to that ideology that people have to define their pronouns.

If it doesn’t matter to you, you won’t care. If you are a true believer, you will fill out the form with gusto and religious fervor. If you are opposed to having the government tell you what you must do, you will push back against it.

What worries me most is that if the choice given is only total compliance, then the alternative becomes total refusal. That is likely what takes us into our darkest days in the next four years.

The left’s utopia is not a big tent. It is a shrinking tent with the demands becoming more and more extreme, not less. Now that the Democrats are in power with all three branches two things will happen. The first, they will intensify their demands in government in ways that will shock the American public. The second, the reaction or pushback will also intensify as people who thought Biden would calm things down begin to see that they have just gotten much much worse.

If Biden wanted unity he would be pushing back on the extremism rising on the left. Or at least make room for people who might not be 100% down with tearing America down and rebuilding as a “woketopia.”

There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground here. Even for those Democrats who are in the middle, they will also have to comply or at least quietly suffer in silence.

The controlling forces of the party do not want appeasement. They do not want unity. They want compliance. They want war.