From a commenter:

It’s clear enough how it works when a marauding horde of horse-archers or even a gang of street toughs wins by intimidation; but even this is only possible under certain certain conditions.

But when that strategy works for crybabies complaining to teacher, then you have to ask what peculiar conditions did teacher create?

John McWhorter would say that the threat of being called a racist puts as much fear into people as the threat of being attacked by a marauding horde of horse-archers. But it seems that we could overcome the former fear by a simple act of will.

Michael Bang Petersen and Alexander Bor write,

our study, however, suggest that it’s not the Internet that transforms otherwise nice people into angry trolls. People who are jerks online are jerks offline, too. We do find that the kind of people who are obsessed with politics are often frustrated, angry and offensive. But they tend to rant about politics in offline interactions as well.

Who are these people? We find that the biggest factor associated with political hostility — online and offline — is status-seeking. Some people crave higher social status and try to intimidate others into recognizing them.

Are these people angry because of what society has done to them, or because they are just intrinsically angry? The authors seem to lean toward the former explanation, but I lean toward the latter.

N.S. Lyons writes,

Today, I would argue, there is an immense and growing popular thirst for a return to and reconnection with reality. And our leaders and would-be leaders should recognize this and understand that it is (I am convinced) an immense latent political force, of which we have only seen the first stirrings.

He links to Mary Harrington, who writes,

And even as tech and media elites sing the praises of luxury Gnosticism for the rest of us, they’re reserving unconstrained, in-person human interaction as a privilege for themselves.

They describe gnosticism as a movement to escape the physical world and live in an alternate reality. Metaverse, anyone? With Bitcoin as currency?

Peter H. Schuck writes,

Dissident students know that university leaders at the most prestigious schools (with rare but notable exceptions like Robert Zimmer and Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago) are prepared to pay a dear price to secure campus peace. And since they and their faculty are overwhelmingly liberal politically—almost 90 percent identify with and often contribute to the Democratic Party—they tend to sympathize with the protesters’ agendas, even when more radical than their own.

There are many other passages in the essay that I was tempted to excerpt.

Winning Through Intimidation is the title of a business book from the 1970s, at the height of the “me generation.” I don’t know what is inside the book, but I suspect it is mediocre pablum. The title, on the other hand, seems to me to describe how the Woke movement succeeds.

They’re at it again. One example:

Matt Yglesias writes,

what you don’t want to do, as a political movement, is run around looking for reasons to exile people from your political coalition. A non-trivial number of rank-and-file Democrats have a range of views on LGBT issues that put them at odds with the bulk of progressives. It is very important that those people keep voting for Democrats, or else Donald Trump is president again and progress on things like military service becomes impossible.

My thought:

He wants progressives to engage in rational political behavior. Tactically, you want to try to tolerate people with whom you do not always agree. But I would argue that Woke progressivism is not a political movement in that sense. Political movements are inclusionary, but it is in the nature of Wokeism to be exclusionary. Exercising the power of shaming, shunning, and excommunicating is at the essential core of Wokeism. The Woke would rather lose elections while retaining their power to intimidate than have it be the other way around.

The 20th edition of Keeping up with the FITs.

Wilfred Reilly writes,

According to the best publicly available data, members of most minority groups dislike PC culture more than whites do. Eighty-eight percent of Native American Indians, 87 percent of all Hispanics, 82 percent of Asian Americans, and 75 percent of blacks (vs. 79 percent of whites) call political correctness “a problem” for the United States. Per several studies, the only group that strongly supports the movement of speech in a more woke direction is made up of young liberal white women.

This is not so surprising. The moral dyad theory, as described in my review of The Mind Club, says that we simplify complex moral situations by assigning one party the role of unfeeling agent and the other party the role of helpless person who feels pain. In the case of political correctness, white males become the unfeeling agents and others become helpless feelers. In the extreme example, the party with agency is a robot and the party with only feelings is a baby. But a full human adult has both agency and feelings. So PC not only insults white males by treating them as unfeeling; it also insults others by treating them as infantile.

Angelo Codevilla, who died recently, was an eloquent essayist. A favorite of many people is his 2010 essay on America’s Ruling Class.

while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate — most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class’s prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans — a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents — lack a vehicle in electoral politics.

Later,

Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. . .In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.

I think that this is actually true. Our lives have become way more complex. In the past, people understood how their tools worked and they could fix things that were broken. A farmer in 1800 probably could fix almost anything on the farm that broke. As recently as the 1950s, many people with no formal training in auto mechanics could fix cars.

Today, I think we are reliant on experts to a much greater extent than ever before. But the relationship between knowledge and power is out of kilter: people with too little knowledge have too much power.