Paul Krugman links to this video in his Substack dispatch this morning — America will not die in darkness. The video has been watched almost 13 million times. Krugman writes about the video, “A few commenters on this video called it ‘woke propaganda.'”
It must be a terrible thing to be the kind of person who feels threatened by a group of happy young people singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” But they hear the subtext, I think, and even a slow and illiberal mind catches on to the implication that the lion is going to wake up. It’s a woke dog whistle.
Until now I thought that the original of this song was the 1961 version by the Tokens, which reached No. 1 on U.S. charts. But actually the song was composed in 1939 by a Black South African, Solomon Linda. The subtext, I think, has always been there. Linda grew up desperately poor under apartheid.
The theme of Krugman’s dispatch is that fascist blacksliding in the U.S. has been remarkably fast compared with other fascist backslidings. Krugman quotes Steven Levitsky on Hungary: “Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists. And in Hungary if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people. That doesn’t happen in Hungary.”
The upside, as Krugman points out, is that the backlash in the United States has been huge and took the White House by surprise. We know now, months in advance, that Trump will try to stop or steal the November mid-terms. We also know now what will happen if he tries. It won’t just be Minneapolis that MAGA will have to reckon with.
I’m constantly amazed by things posted on social media by people I know aren’t bots, who take the position that Renee Goode or Alexi Pretti deserved what they got. We all watched the same videos, right? These people assure me they’re just “telling it like it is,” but it’s tangilbe evidence of this backslide, and likely the same demographic who would call that song “woke propaganda.”
Hi Eric: I have often said that authoritarian personalities have defective cognition, in addition to defective moral reasoning. They’re not just different; there is something wrong with them. My guess is that what they see in the Minneapolis videos is people they’ve been trained to hate getting what they’ve been trained to think such people deserve. They get off on it.