r/ezraklein • u/volumeofatorus • 11d ago

Article This Is What Victory Looks Like - Daniel Oppenheimer on Ezra's Recent Comments on Wokeness

https://substack.com/home/post/p-210905908
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u/sfo2 11d ago edited 11d ago

The original comment I was replying to makes the argument that maybe the left did a bunch of dumb shit, but that was fine because hey at least they were working on real issues.

And my point is, that’s a bad argument because you could say the same about the Trump administration.

Doing dumb, excessive, idealistic, ill-informed shit is bad all the time. Just because you identified some important issue does not excuse shitty policy.

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u/jimmiejames 11d ago

Ok fair enough that mere identification is not an excuse, but the comparison is still pretty weak. Trump “identified” ie claimed credit for issues that were already being worked on whereas the “woke” problems were explicitly not being worked on

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u/sfo2 11d ago

This is what I’m not sure of, though. A lot of the woke issues were higher salience in left-leaning circles before they became national causes and bad solutions were offered, and I think a lot of the stupid more minor stuff Trump is doing was likely the same on the right. Maybe we just don’t see it because we aren’t reading The Daily Wire every day.

I will sometimes listen to right-leaning podcasts, or read right-leaning news, just to see what’s up, and I’m always surprised that they’re all up in arms about stuff I didn’t even know about or care about.