Afghanistan and the Limits of Woke Discourse
23rd August 2021
Immigration, housing policy, the staffing of symphony orchestras, minutiae of voting rules, the teaching of math—all these issues can be defined and dominated by reference to the legacy of white supremacy. In those few cases where race seems not to pertain, the contiguous domains of #MeToo, trans rights, or climate change usually cover the dispute and allow the Left to determine the direction of debate. But race blankets everything.
Until Afghanistan. The botched withdrawal of our small but persistent presence from the obstreperous, Central Asian shithole extraordinaire has stunned the Regime. We watch as one spokesperson after another stumbles nonplused into a linguistic void because there are no white supremacists to blame. Neither Ted Cruz nor Tucker Carlson nor “the Koch Brothers” (one of whom is dead, though that hasn’t changed the formulation) ordered the military out of Bagram Air Force Base. The Oath Keepers did not encourage a resurgent Taliban to seize Kandahar, nor did anti-vaxxers convince the Afghan army to sell its weapons. It would be a stretch even for Jen Psaki to connect the collapse of the Ghani Administration to the retreat of glacial ice cover in the Hindu Kush, and from there to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords.
“Everything Woke turns to shit.” — Donald Trump