"Dayenu" as a Hebrew word meaning "it would have been enough". In its most well-known form, it is invoked to note how wonderful God has been. But it can be used the other way too.
The world is going crazy. Donald Trump was elected President for the first time in November of 2016.
Dayenu! Well -- it was without a majority of the popular vote. Maybe people who were sure Hillary would win stayed home or cast a protest vote. Trump's term was miserable, breaking all sorts of long-standing rules of decency and fair play, but at least at the end of it it seemed that the majority of politicians in the US still believed that people should be allowed to vote, that their votes should be tallied fairly, and whoever got the needed votes should be President. In January of 2021 Trump and his supporters tried to mount a coup d'etat, but even former Trump supporters like Mike Pence, the Vice-President, still thought the US constitution was more important than who they personally wanted to be in power. In the wake of the coup attempt, there was no major upheaval within the Republican Party, where they realized the rule of law really was vital and Trump needed to be decisively rejected.
Dayenu! Well, Joe Biden did squeak out a win and even had two years with Democratic majorities in House and Senate so he could get a few things done. Like a big infrastructure bill. As far as I can tell, his policy initiatives were pretty practical and successful. However, he and fellow Democrats seemed unable to communicate effectively what they were accomplishing. Unlike sneaky and successful dictators of the past Donald Trump said out loud that if elected again he would trash the rest of the Constitutional order protecting liberty, due process under the law, and fair elections. He said it out loud, and the Republicans nominated him for another term!
Dayenu! Well, the way the system works, zealous Republican primary voters have undue influence over who gets nominated. But did the middle "swing third" of the US realize the horror of what Trump was proposing to do? No!
Dayenu! Well, Joe Biden maybe should have realized he was getting too old for another term and realized it sooner. Maybe his old-school ways of thinking about and expressing support for the Constitution didn't communicate with people so well. Maybe Kamala Harris was a woman and a person of color, and enough people had good old traditional bigotry and sexism to lose her some votes. But the election happened, and Trump won! Decisively!
Dayenu! Well, maybe those things he was talking about were mostly bluster. He wouldn't actually do that stuff, right? Not fire huge swaths of civil servants. Not use the justice department to go after political opponents? Not use whatever lever were at his fingertips for his own personal agenda? Not improse huge tariffs, and change them constantly? He did.
Dayenu! Well, history is full of cases where a President is elected with big ideas for change, but lacking support in either House or Senate, has no hope of getting them passed. Sometimes (as now) he has those majorities from his party. And now the Supreme Court is more politicized than in recent decades. But even that has been no guarantee. But... Trump's Big Bill passed!
Dayenu!
Now we're talking big bucks. Transferring big bucks to the well off, adding big bucks to the national debt, and taking big bucks away from the most vulnerable and needy. Maybe the Republican mastery of the public discourse will at some point break. Somehow they've convinced people that the Biden years were an economic disaster, when it fact things were going very well. Somehow they've convinced people that immigrants are ruining everything, when they're not.
Maybe there really are some value shifts. Maybe lots of people in the Center really are coming to believe that we shouldn't confiscate money from the wealthy to support those who are struggling. Remember: Lots of them are 'Those People'. Thought: "If I'm poor or struggling, maybe it's just my own fault. I don't want to take anyone's charity." The other developed countries of the world all decided some time ago that a basic social safety net was an excellent idea. The US bought this idea in the 1930s with the New Deal. Republican politicians in the US in (say) the Eisenhower years -- or the Nixon and Ford years -- took the social safety net for granted as settled policy. But now the US seems to be questioning that. We used to think that Social Security and Medicare were untouchable, but are they? Maybe elderly Americans, in a trance, will realize that if they have needs, it's their own fault for living too long.
But there's one place where Republicans are accurately perceiving what Democrats are doing. And that is in the area of "High Woke". This is from a column in the New York Times by John McWhorter, July 3rd of this year (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/opinion/wokeness-race-gaza.html).
"Wokeness is still with us, as livid as ever, and I suspect it always will be... By wokeness, I refer not to its original meaning of being informed about larger societal structures that preserve power for a certain (white) elite. Awareness of what is often called structural racism is one thing. Something else is the strain of wokeness so many would like to eulogize — call it High Woke — with its three distinguishing traits. One is the idea that dismantling structures that favor whiteness and its power must be society’s primary focus, a North Star, rather than one of many. The second is the commitment to punishing those insufficiently devoted to the program. The third is resistance to fact and logic when they are inconvenient."
This leads us to deciding that the entire history of the US is based on racial oppression (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html). We're a country that's rotten to the core (as opposed to all those other Great Powers of history whose operations were just and beneficent). Democratic support for Trans people breaks new ground -- it may ultimately be a path towards justice, but it seems to be way out beyond the curve of public opinion: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VVU7pYq3WHw.
I'd bring this back around the personal. I've made a number of posts over the years that are in one way or another objections to High Woke.
http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2019/06/review-of-white-fragility-part-1.html
http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2019/06/review-of-white-fragility-part-2.html
http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2019/05/considering-activist-requests-carefully.html
http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2022/07/my-problem-or-societys-problem.html
http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2021/05/racism-as-one-of-many-comparable.html
Now, you can distinguish between two things here: (1) what represents truth and justice, and (2) what's politically wise and feasible. There's room for argument about #1, but when it comes to #2, I think the votes are all in and the verdict is clear. High Woke is a political disaster. I told you so.
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