“The woke mind virus” has infected the Republican party so deeply that it's become President Joe Biden’s most effective weapon in his fight to be re-elected, a New York Times columnist wrote Tuesday.
An obsession with book banning, abortion rights and “harassing transgender people” is driving the GOP off a cliff as virtually no Americans are buying into it, wrote Jamell Bouie in an article titled “The woke mind virus is eating away at Republican brains.”
And the party's inability to realize that makes Biden’s normalcy his most attractive quality.
“Biden’s biggest advantage has to do with the opposition — the Republican Party has gotten weird,” wrote Bouie.
“I had this thought while watching a clip of Ron DeSantis speak from a lectern to an audience we can’t see. In the video, which his press team highlighted on Twitter, DeSantis decries the “woke mind virus,” which he calls “a form of cultural Marxism that tries to divide us based on identity politics.”
Bouie went on: “To a normal person, … this language is borderline unintelligible. It doesn’t tell you anything; it doesn’t obviously mean anything; and it’s quite likely to be far afield of your interests and concerns.”
The obsessive focus on extremely right-wing, cultural issues – mixed with far-out conspiracy theories such as continuing to deny the result of the 2020 presidential election – connects with just a tiny portion of the electorate, Bouie said. And to most, it’s a turn-off.
“Not only do Americans not care about the various Republican obsessions — in a recent Fox News poll 1 percent of respondents said “wokeness” was “the most important issue facing the country today” — but a large majority say that those obsessions have gone too far,” he wrote.
“According to Fox, 60 percent of Americans said “book banning by school boards” was a major problem. Fifty-seven percent said the same for political attacks on families with transgender children.
“And yet there’s no sign that Republicans will relent and shift focus. Just the opposite, in fact; the party is poised to lurch even further down the road of its alienating preoccupations. On abortion, for example, Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, says candidates need to address the issue “head on” in 2024 — that they can’t be “uncomfortable” on the issue and need to say “I’m proud to be pro-life.”
“But the Republican Party has veered quite far from most Americans on abortion rights, and in a contested race for the presidential nomination, a “head-on” focus will possibly mean a fight over which candidate can claim the most draconian abortion views and policy aims.”
Added to that is DeSantis' battle with Disney, “One of the most beloved companies on the planet."
“Taken together, it’s as if the Republican Party has committed itself to being as off-putting as possible to as many Americans as possible,” wrote Bouie.
“As for Joe Biden? The current state of the Republican Party only strengthens his most important political asset — his normalcy. …Normal isn’t fun and normal isn’t exciting. But normal has already won one election, and I won’t be surprised if it wins another.
