The first thing Professor Greogry Conti wants you to know is that he comes from Princeton — the second is that the Republican right has a “woke” problem.
Conti and co-author Aaron Sibarium, a staff writer at The Washington Free Beacon, delivered a stunning analysis Friday on Republican wokeness that came with a stark warning for their party.
“We believe the Republicans’ war on woke has made America a fairer, safer place,” the pair wrote in The New York Times. “But we are also concerned that this backlash is morphing into something darker, dumber and ultimately self-defeating.”
As Conti and Sibarium see it, America is a safer place because “antiwhite discrimination” has been checked and a rhetorical war against transgender athletes has been launched.
Despite their concern for white Americans, the pair did not mention the ICE agents who killed Renée Good or Alex Pretti — or that anti-trans rhetoric has sent a wave of hate speech descending on the WNBA.
The real problem, these two argue, is that the Republican Party has begun to resemble the left.
“There are invented identities like heritage American, claims of white genocide in South Africa and arguments from right-wing influencers that the Allies weren’t the good guys in World War II,” Conti and Sibarium write.
“The rise of this so-called woke right is sometimes blamed on the ability of podcast bros and online streamers to circumvent official G.O.P. messaging. But it also reflects the way the Republican Party transformed in reaction to the woke era, moving further to the right on race and gender and losing its immune response to genuine cranks.”
Podcast bro cranks and their “open bigotry” represent a serious conundrum for Conti and Sibarium because of the looming midterm elections.
The Princeton professor and his writer friend would like to see the GOP present itself with more moderation as it combats liberals’ claim that the Republican Party is “racist and sexist to its core.”
But they also assert that growing diversity within the Republican Party is a problem.
“The trouble for the G.O.P. is that the party is becoming more diverse at a moment when the right is losing its will to gatekeep open bigotry,” they wrote. “Frustrated by the suppression of mainstream, center-right views, conservatives increasingly reject as cancel culture any public repudiation of genuinely fringe ideas, creating a subculture of racism, sexism and antisemitism that did not exist to the same degree even five years ago.”
Examples cited in the editorial include a tweet that reads “Normalize Indian hate” from a fired and reinstated DOGE employee and comments to women from Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes that it may be their bodies but it is “his choice.”
How to handle this blatant bigotry is a real nail-biter for Conti and Sibarium.
“The danger is that the G.O.P. will come to be seen as the mirror image of left-wing identity politics, causing antiwoke swing voters to defect from the coalition,” they write.
“Such defections would be a brutal blow to a party that has, despite Mr. Trump’s sagging popularity, kept midterm polls reasonably close.”
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