The Woke Mind: How The Woke Left Plays The Power Game

This will explain why they always seem to win, even if they lose elections

The Woke Mind is a series of articles that seeks to explain, in plain English, how you can expect the woke left to behave and why they do what they do. If we don’t understand this, we can’t defeat them.

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When it comes to culture, people talk about pendulum swings, the ongoing game of back and forth between the political left controlling the political levers before they bounce over to the political right. The presidency and Congress change hands every few years, and the ruling party and opposition party switch back and forth between the tribes.

In 2024, some people believe a significant backlash will lead to the political right retaking power. Setting aside that they thought there would be a red wave in the 2022 midterms that never manifested, they are missing a more significant point:

It doesn’t matter if there is a political backlash.

We’ve discussed extensively that one of the primary goals of the woke left is to gain as much power as possible.

People may assume that means political power, and sometimes it does.

However, political power is not the only kind of power that exists.

More importantly, political power isn’t even that powerful.

Have you ever wondered why the woke left always seems to win, even when they don’t hold the presidency or the majority in Congress?

There are different types of power that people and groups can hold. For our purposes here, we’ll focus on two types:

• Political power, which is getting into elected positions where you can create laws and control resources.

• Institutional power, which means getting appointed to a position within an institution that is not subject to election - a faculty role, CEO, head of a major non-profit, etc.

These types of power are very different:

• Political power is temporary and easily changeable. You are never guaranteed re-election, and a young upstart can knock you out of your position, just as AOC did when she won her first primary against one of the most powerful and long-standing members of Congress.

• Institutional power, on the other hand, can last a very long time and can be very difficult to change. You can’t fire a faculty member who has gained tenure, and CEOs and heads of organizations usually need to voluntarily relinquish their position in order to be replaced.

If you had to choose between political power and institutional power, you should choose institutional power every day of the week because it will give you much more longevity, which means you have more time to make the changes required to meet your goals.

The woke left will certainly embrace political power when it comes their way. However, that’s not the type of power they rely on.

They rely on institutional power. That’s what we mean when we say their made a long, slow march through the institutions - they have spent the last century getting themselves into positions of institutional power throughout all major institutions in our society.

And they’re not going to give up those institutions anytime soon.

This is why the woke left always seems to be winning, even when they lose elections.

Political power may change hands every few years. They may even lose control of all branches of government. They lose their ability to pass laws and allocate public resources for a few years, at least on a federal level.

So what?

Not only do they still have political power across a good portion of the country at the state and local level (meaning that even if they can’t pass things federally, they can still make new laws), but they also still have all their institutional power to fall back on.

The woke left wins because they rely on institutional power, not political power.

Don’t rely on a pendulum swing to save us. It won’t.

We have to start playing more strategically than that and focus on reclaiming the institutions and waking more people up to what’s going on around them.

The right plays the short game. The left plays for keeps.

Questions?

Let me know in the comments!

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