Thread by @Noahpinion

This is a great post. I think it comes down to this: As a country, we needed to give rural White Americans some sort of identity they could be proud of other than Confederacy-style white supremacy. We failed to give them one.

https://twitter.com/willwilkinson/status/1432439582436458497

Of course the blame for this lies with Republicans who stirred up racial resentment for votes, etc. etc. We all know that story. But what did we liberal elites do to push back on this? Nothing. We ditched the rednecks and fled to hippie college towns and cities on the coast.

Getting picked on by rednecks as a kid sucked. So what did liberal Gen Xers and Millennials do? We moved out. We didn't stay and work to build a real nation out of the people who gave us a hard time. We got college degrees that allowed us to escape to better places.

This was an understandable move on our part. America is a big place, with room to spread out -- or at least it was, before social media. No reason to spend your life among people you don't fit in with. But it's not very conducive to nation-building.

America's decades of "live and let live" -- what Bill Bishop calls "The Big Sort" -- made life easier for a lot of people but weakened our national cohesion. So now we have rural and exurban Red America waving the flags of dead slave empires.

amazon.com/Big-Sort-Clust…

Now social media has changed the game. We can't spread out any longer. We're all in one room together. Mobility, in the substantive sense, has vanished. Meaning we have to become a real, unified nation once again. That's happening now, and it's a painful process.

And like it or not, the ideology that's going to re-unify America will be based on the thing we call "wokeness". A pushback now underway will limit it, but overall it will become the basis of the new consensus for how we define our sense of nationhood.

America has always been fundamentally a liberal nation, guided by elite "Enlightenment" concepts but animated at a deep and fundamental level by a crusading Protestant-inspired racial egalitarianism. That is what gave birth to wokeness.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-…

Much of this Protestant-inspired grassroots egalitarianism comes from Black people obviously, but much also comes from White people animated by a Protestant-inspired crusading spirit.

To me, @willwilkinson, who wrote the article I linked above, typifies this spirit.

The children of the Confederate-flag-waving exurbanites will mostly be woke -- sometimes painfully, awkwardly, excessively so. Wokeness' fervor will die down, but like a prairie fire it will burn outward to the limits of its fuel supply.

We've entered what I call a Time of Consolidation -- a time of nation-building when we renegotiate who we are as a country and create a new consensus identity that will carry us through the rest of this century.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-time-of-…

It's still possible that the nation will break up, of course, but I don't think it will. I think we'll reaffirm our identity as a crusading liberal racially egalitarian nation (even though we will carry out many policies that violate that identity).

The story of liberal Gen Xers and Millennials will thus be this: We ran away from the rednecks, but we built an Internet by which we could transmit liberal values back to rural and exurban areas from our coastal and college-town enclaves. And that worked.

It will take more years, and probably more important historical events, before we become a nation that thinks of itself as a nation again. But the neo-Confederate rebellion will fail, as the original did. It's already in the cards. We are, and will be, a liberal nation.

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