Richard Hanania noted almost immediately that the second Trump administration was more serious about policy across the board:
In 2016, Trump took over the GOP practically out of nowhere, nobody thought he would win the general election, and conservatives weren’t really prepared to do much of anything other than give him judges to confirm. The right has since then spent the last eight years thinking about how to make full use of the executive branch for when a Republican returns back to office.
But one thing this whole experience has taught me is that knowledge is fragmented and so much of politics, like life more generally, is about drawing attention. The Origins of Woke relies on the work of several scholars who are lesser known and have been hammering on some of the points I made in the book for decades, including Gail Heriot and Eugene Volokh, and many attorneys like Dan Morenoff and Alison Somin have done important work far from the public spotlight. And I think I probably originally learned about disparate impact from Steve Sailer. So there’s a kind of pipeline here, which in this case went Heriot et al-Hanania-Vivek-Trumpverse, from the most scholarly towards the most famous and attention grabbing. It’s been instructive to play a part in this process. One maybe can place Rufo in between Vivek and Trumpverse, or as part of an independent branch between Hanania and Trumpverse.
It’s possible no single person actually made the marginal difference here. If Trump hadn’t won the election, DeSantis certainly would’ve gone just as far. Vivek would have too, and even Nikki Haley opened her campaign with a video talking about wokeness as a threat to America, although in her case we can have doubts as to whether she would have taken decisive action on the issue. And maybe if Rufo and I didn’t exist, someone else would have filled our niches.
[…]
All of this makes me think that politicians are in a sense less important than intellectuals and activists. It’s actually difficult for me to imagine all this happening without me or Rufo, but easy to imagine it happening without Trump.
As I discuss in the introduction to The Origins of Woke, I started thinking about the relationship between wokeness and civil rights law around 2011 while I was in law school. I then spent about a decade trying to convince people how important this topic was. Finally, I just wrote about it myself, and things started to change.
[…]
Another lesson people can potentially draw from this experience is that it is possible to influence policy even if you’re starting out without much in the way of fame, connections, or money. Furthermore, my messaging hasn’t exactly been optimized to win over Republicans. Yet by making a compelling case in emphasizing the issue and bringing it to public attention, I was able to contribute towards changing the conversation on civil rights law. For anyone else who wants to influence policy, here’s a demonstration that it can be done.
[…]
Most political struggles end in failure or some kind of ambiguous outcome. But sometimes you advocate for an idea, and it just wins. I wanted conservatives to go to war against wokeness as a matter of policy, and the outcome has surpassed my most optimistic hopes. It’s a very satisfying feeling.
Intellectual nobody has ever heard of claims he and his ilk are the most important, influential people around.
“It’s easy imagining all of this happening with out Trump, but not without us!”
Then why didn’t they actually, you know, ever do anything useful?
And they wonder why people hate and mistrust intellectuals.
McChuck, yes, the modern curse of public intellectuals has, like modern celebrities who are famous for being famous, a reach far beyond the intellectual’s own achievements. We only have to look at television talking heads panels where the members are highly paid merely for having opinions, and conclude that public intellectuals are together with popular singers and sports stars, entertainers.
If Donald Trump hadn’t run for office in 2015, and won, we would be in a completely different world. There are no systemic forces of history, let alone “intellectuals” or “activists”.
Scott Adams did. So… “nobody” to whom Hanania listens. The problem might be on his side.
And the sky was shockingly blue. When were they really prepared to do much of anything?
T. Beholder: “Scott Adams did.”
Scott Adams saw an opening for self-promotion and took it, to his credit.
I think the whole thing is illustrative, however.
Now, «In a theocracy, the ceremonial office holders are generally less important than the priests» is self-evident. The rest of mental efforts resulting in this trivial thesis were wasted on elaborate dances around euphemisms and flinching whenever the author brushed electric fences of crimestop. Is it not just silly and exasperating?