Ethnic composition of the anti-woke left

Here's a revealing insider observation of the antagonism that the woke left levels against various white ethnic groups who are supposedly their fellow travelers on the left:

The irony of the nazbol/strasserite bs on here are the hundreds of explicitly anti-catholic, anti-Irish, anti-Italian accounts on the woke left. Radical liberalism in this era actually has incorporated a plank of the Second KKK (the big one) into its culture.

— Amy Teresa Replyg*y (formerly Broke and Bespoke Ho (@Shialabeefsteak) August 12, 2019

Of course, the KKK would have exempted Southern whites, and yet the woke left hates their guts as well. Nowadays, Irish, Italians, etc., find themselves targeted alongside white Southerners, so the woke-ists cannot consist of some group that itself includes white Southerners, or who are welcoming to them at any rate.

An Appendix to this post goes over the ethnic backgrounds of particular members of the anti-woke left that I'm aware of, to substantiate the point made in the tweet above. What follows is a more general discussion. For now I'll just note that Aimee Terese, our post-prog princess, is half Lebanese (Catholic) and half white Australian (similar to the rowdy Celts of the American South).

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Wokeness is an elite class ideology, so those ethnic groups most likely to play an elite role will wield it, while those who are less likely to belong to the elite are more likely to be its targets. And it deals primarily with matters of race, ethnicity, and national origin -- namely, which groups will be allowed representation within the elite (and how is this choice to be rationalized). It only secondarily deals with gender, sexual orientation, and so on.

The two major elite ethnic groups in the US are WASPs, the original one, and Ashkenazi Jews, who joined during the Great Compression.

White Anglo-Saxon Protestants refers to those primarily in the Northeast, though also where they settled in the Midwest and West Coast (especially northern California), and generally those who came from a Puritan religious background, upper-class social stratum, and who have formed the elite going back centuries -- not Scotch-Irish hillbillies in Appalachia.

Ashkenazi Jews are those from Central and Eastern Europe, who were adapted to a professional middleman minority niche for centuries, not the ones from the Mediterranean or the Near / Middle East.

As the American empire has expanded over the past several centuries, it has like all other empires relied on buying off a number of aspiring elites from various foreign ethnic groups that the empire comes to control. Some elites from outside the Italian peninsula were given precious Roman citizenship (like Paul the Apostle). The Ottoman Empire used the millet system. And the Iranian parliament has some seats reserved for the elites of several minority groups. These are the secondary elites allowed into the upper stratum by the primary elites.

The main group bought off by the primary elites are the African-Americans, via affirmative action to promote the "talented tenth" of their group into elite positions. More and more, though, this program supposedly intended to redress slavery has come to promote elite immigrants who recently arrived from Africa (like MSNBC anchor Joy Ann Reid, whose parents are from Ghana). Members of this group have a vested interest in wokeness, hoping that they will be one of the 10% of their group who are handpicked to join the elite.

The other major group being bought off and integrated into the elite are upper-caste South Asians, mainly Indians but some Pakistanis as well, and including Hindus as well as Muslims. They wrote the book on ethnically stratified class structures, so this is not only nothing new to them -- they will be more adept at navigating it than the WASPs or Jews in the primary elites. After decades or centuries, they may even join the Jews as a new primary elite group, though I still think they're too culturally different from Americans to be considered legitimate by them as primary elites. Wokeness is central to their carving out a similar class niche as they enjoyed back in South Asia, so they will be largely in favor of the ideology.

East Asians invented standardized testing for elite positions, and their Mandarins are eager to become a talented-tenth in the US as well. They're invested in wokeness to get this set-aside.

"Hispanics" are following the same strategy, although they don't have an existing caste system like India's to furnish the talented tenth, and they don't have the African-American legacy of slavery to demand immediate representation in the elite as redress. But the basic behavior is the same: those who are smarter and lighter-skinned than their groupmates will advance themselves as leaders of their people, destined to hold on to the handful of elite spots that are carved out for their group in the interest of incorporating their people into the empire. As with the other secondary elites, wokeness creates the set-asides for their aspiring representatives, so this group will not be motivated to put an end to woke capitalism and woke imperialism.

Rather, opposition to wokeness on the left is most likely to come from the ethnic groups who have already been assimilated into the American system -- and who therefore do not need to be bought off during the current round of expansion -- but who were not exotic and foreign enough in the old days to require being bought off with set-asides back then either. And, in contrast to the Ashkenazi Jews, do not have higher average IQ that makes them more inclined toward an elite niche.

These are the non-exotic, common-people ethnic groups. The founding stock who weren't Puritanical WASPy commercial elites, more concentrated in the South than the North. And the Ellis Island groups other than the Jews -- Irish, Italian, Polish, etc.

So although the backlash from within the left itself against wokeness is mainly a class issue, it correlates enough with ethnic background to make it a cultural issue as well. Evidently, both sides on the left are aware of this -- the woke side knowing that Italians are safe targets for derision as bad whites, and the Italians speaking out (or at least privately muttering) against the anti-Italian bias from the woke-ists.

This faultline within the left, and within the Democrat party, represents a fracture of the New Deal coalition, when these groups were not only united in purpose, but were the dominant party over the Republicans.

After neoliberalism broke down the proto-socialism of the New Deal era, improving the material welfare for all groups become replaced by equal representation of ethnic groups within the elite class -- and too bad if you're from a group that gets set-asides, but you're part of the 90% that didn't get chosen as the talented tenth. This benefits only the aspiring elites within an ethnic group, not that group as a whole. Yuppies win, the majority loses. And members of those groups without specific set-asides cannot rest assured of their chances to enter the elite, making them even more wary of the new system and its ideology.

As it happens, these same groups are the ones whose defection from the Democrats swung the 2016 election to Trump, the would-be realigner who promised radical changes to the neoliberal status quo, unlike Hillary Clinton. See this recent post with data from the General Social Survey on election behavior by white ethnic groups. Italians swung the most, then the Irish, with Germans, Scandinavians, and Slavs swinging to a lesser degree but still in Trump's direction.

WASPs and Jews actually voted less Republican than usual in 2016, revealing their pro-elite and anti-populist bias, compared to the other Ellis Islander groups and to commoner founding stock like the Scotch-Irish. The anti-woke groups swung toward Trump, the pro-woke groups swung away.

That is what flipped the cities and large counties, which is how Trump won (the reservoir of rural voters was long dried up). Some of them flipped entire states -- Poles flipped Wilkes-Barre, which helped flip Pennsylvania -- while others only flipped their blue urban area without flipping the entire state (Staten Island, or Suffolk County in Long Island).

These non-exotic, common-people ethnic groups are sick and fed up with the neoliberal order, since they don't even have the chance at getting into the elite through ethnic set-asides, and they don't already belong to the primary elites of WASPs and Jews. Other minority groups may be content with neoliberalism, as long as it opens up a little more of the elite to their set-aside group. But they don't need radical change for that.

This split was seen during the 2016 Democrat primary, where the old white ethnic groups loved Bernie, while the African-Americans and Hispanics were more in favor of Clinton. Staten Island and Suffolk County were Bernie's two best counties in the NYC metro area, while he got clobbered in those with more non-white populations (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, etc.).

And that split has not gone away -- during the 2020 season, it is alive in the woke vs. anti-woke battle within the left. Already a bunch of Bernie's support in Brooklyn has defected to Warren. Those are the WASPy, Jewish, upper-caste Indian, and other model minorities and talented-tenthers who helped to elect AOC. While they have turned their backs on Bernie for Warren, the Staten Islanders, further-away Long Islanders, and even the Bayridge long-timers in Brooklyn (right across from Staten Island), will be more likely to stick by Bernie -- assuming he does not fully surrender to wokeness during this cycle.

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Appendix

I've only been reading the anti-woke left Twitter people since last November, when this battle broke outside of the leftoid echo chamber. Most importantly, Angela Nagle writing a left case against open borders, an utter taboo for the woke-ists. I don't know who all of them are, but I've got a decent feel from the ones I read and who gets retweeted by those accounts.

A person can be anti-woke in various ways, and to varying degrees. But they have to have made some overt, regular commitment against woke-ism -- not just refraining from participating in woke pile-ons.

The anti-woke side is smaller on social media than the woke side, so just about all groups will be represented on the woke side. The question is, who is bold enough to go on the anti-woke side? How lopsided is some ethnic group in siding with the woke or the anti-woke side?

I'm just looking for what info is already available online (like does their Twitter account mention being Irish, although they might not say what other groups they belong to). It's not a 23andme test, so these results may not be the whole picture, but the basic impression is clear enough.

It's striking how many of the woke-ist attackers have Anglo, German, or Scandinavian surnames (Pritchard, Soeller, Schuetz, Jensen, etc.). And just about all the Jews on the left are woke-ists. The only exceptions are partial -- Jamie Kilstein is half Jewish, and so is Anna Khachiyan. In her case, it's more her Armenian father speaking out against the woketards, than her Jewish mother. I'm not sure about Kilstein's case, I've only heard him on one podcast with Unauthorized Disclosure, on the very topic of needing to put class and empire over identity politics.

The only major exception for Germans I'm aware of is Benjamin Studebaker of the What's Left podcast. That family is Protestant in origin, too, so even more of an exception.

Below is a list of groups, and Twitter names belonging to them. They're mostly the non-exotic, common-people groups, the electoral base of the New Deal Democrats. There are only two prominent ones who I don't know for sure. Amber Frost refuses to say, but she has said at least some degree of white Appalachian, and her non-European facial features look to me more African than Asian (which is what others tend to guess). And "foolinthelotus" is from a Christian Chicagoland family, which is likely white ethnic, though not necessarily.

I don't know if Zaid Jilani and basantyagi are flukes or representative of a coming trend, but it's intriguing that among South Asian leftists in the US, it's the Muslims who are present on the anti-woke side. Usually Muslims in the US are looking to get set-asides for their group, and play the odds of getting chosen into the top 10% of their group. Perhaps it's because the Muslim caste system is less stratified in South Asia compared to the Hindu one, making Hindu Brahmins even more inclined toward woke hierarchies.

Notice that white-passing or white-"adjacent" groups like the Lebanese and Armenians are willing to go against woke-ism. They can call themselves "brown," but they pass -- Mediterranean, maybe, but not "brown". Ralph Nader is a Lebanese Christian, and no one thought he was non-white (he also refused to go along with idpol during his campaign, sticking to economics and foreign policy). And "American Top 40" DJ, and voice of Shaggy from Scooby Doo, Casey Kasem was Lebanese Druze, and nobody thought he was non-white. Presumably if there were more Persians here, they would eventually side with the Rania Khalek / Anna Khachiyan / Zaid Jilani side, against wokeness.

White Southerners

htmlmencken
as_a_woman
martymacmarty
bog_beef
Maarblek

Irish

nickmullen
SeanMcCarthyCom
jmrphy
matthewaraven
Angela Nagle (not on Twitter)

Italian

GarbageApe
RacismFactory

Irish / Italian

mtracey
Shialabeefsteak (and German)

Irish / Polish

jimmy_dore

Italian / Polish

kylekulinski

Slavic Catholic

nobody_stop_me (Belarusian)
LizFranczak (Polish)
toms_spectre (Polish)
kgosztola (Hungarian)

Catholic, unknown ethnicity

BiomeBiota
HillaryFan420 (?)

Armenian / Ashkenazi

annakhachiyan

Lebanese

aimeeterese (Catholic)
RaniaKhalek (Druze)

Pakistani

Zaid Jilani

Indian Muslim

basantyagi

Unknown

Amber Frost (not on Twitter)
foolinthelotus