Whispered conversations on woke overreach drove pro-Trump election backlash

We live in an age of whispered conversations.There are aspects of American life that everyone, or nearly everyone, knows are absurd but is too afraid to speak out against and feels powerless to reverse.It used to be said that if someone looked over his shoulder, he was about to tell an insensitive joke.Now people are worried about being overheard making what should be commonsensical observations.Below are the kinds of conversations that are happening all the time.The maternity-ward nurse in a low voice, “Where the form says ‘birthing parent,’ that means mother.They just changed it.

It’s crazy.”The staffer in a medical office explaining that the ethnic boxes need to be checked on another form even though the categories make no sense and confiding, “Maybe I should have checked ‘Hispanic’ myself at some point — I think we had a relative from Spain somewhere along the line.”The group of moms together at the local coffee shop, making sure that no one else can hear from a nearby table: “Did you see what happened in the high-school track competition? Why are guys competing against girls?”The staffer at a bank to a friend he or she can completely trust near the water cooler when it is absolutely certain no one else is around, “That training was ridiculous and a waste of time.”It’s a little like what it must have been like in, say, East Germany, when no one believed in the system, but no one dared let on what they were really thinking.This phenomenon surely had an influence on the outcome of the election.As the Financial Times has documented, progressive elites “hold views often well to the left of the average voter — and even the average Democratic voter — on cultural issues.”“America’s decades-long progress towards racial and sexual tolerance and equality,” the paper notes, “has been a gradual shift, led by progressives with the center and right quickly following.”The new cultural shifts are different.Largely driven by “th...