Ed Kilgore alerts New York “Intelligencer” readers to the greatest threat facing Arkansas that isn’t candidate-for-governor and former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. It’s “wokeness“:
Here’s her “elevator pitch” to Arkansans:
With the radical left now in control of Washington, your governor is your last line of defense. As governor, I will defend your right to be free of socialism and tyranny. Your Second Amendment right to keep your family safe and your freedom of speech and religious liberty. Our state needs a leader with the courage to do what’s right, not what’s politically correct or convenient.
She also modestly claimed that in the White House she “took on he radical left, the media, and their cancel culture … and won!” As governor, she promised to “be your voice, and never let them silence you!”
This is Arkansas we are talking about, where it’s hard to imagine socialism is in the works, or lying liberal media dominating news and views, or woke cancel-culture commissars stalking the earth searching for good decent Christians to “silence.” But without question, Sanders is a savvy pol. So the strange gospel she is preaching could well be the coming thing in Republican politics everywhere.
Kilgore has more about how anti-wokeness allows Republicans “and their supporters to pose as innocent victims of persecution rather than as aggressive culture warriors seeking to defend their privileges and reverse social change.” Anti-wokeness is a “parody of the very over-sensitivity it attributes to the ‘woke.’”
Perry Bacon Jr. of FiveThirtyEight believes anti-wokeness is “just a repackaging” of the party’s backlash politics. Kilgore calls it “white backlash to Black political advancement, and conservative backlash to cultural changes sweeping away the patriarchal society many remember and others fantasize to bring back in the guise of ‘American greatness.’”
I once almost got stuck in the airport in Fayetteville, Ark. on Christmas Eve.
The American greatness was the “almost.”