Is this the moment when America finally goes from woke to joke? Probably not, but it might be the moment when Americans realize what a fringe movement wokery actually is. A new Hill-HarrisX poll shows large majorities in all political demos think cancel culture has gone too far, and another from Pew shows the narrowness of the faction pushing it.

We’ll start with the Hill-HarrisX national poll on cancel culture, taken in the midst last week’s elections in Virginia:

Interestingly, Democrats are a little more likely to say it’s gone too far than independents, although that difference is still within the margin of error. For that matter, the difference between Democrats and Republicans nearly falls into the MoE too. This is not just a consensus, it’s an overwhelming consensus.

It’s a bit late for Democrats in Virginia. Will they learn a lesson from it for the midterms? There isn’t much evidence for that yet, but the humiliation is still setting into their collective psyche, too.

The consensus here is more than just political, as these numbers clearly suggest. There’s a gender consensus (men 77%, women 65%), an age consensus (the lowest too-far rating is 62% among 50-64YOs), and even an ethnic consensus:

• White: 72%
• Hispanic: 74%
• Black: 57%
• “Other”: 85%

That diversity of consensus is of interest when looking at this Pew study on political factions within the two-party system. Jazz will have more on this later, but most of the observations from this are entirely mundane and predictable. Democratic factions are far more inclined to tear down institutions than Republican factions, and GOP factions much more inclined toward free-market policies and national security. This is the natural result of the American two-party dynamic in its federal rather than parliamentary system. In parliamentary systems, factions form parties, contest elections, and then create coalitions for governance afterward. In the American system, factions form coalitions within the two parties for control before elections get contested.

On the wokery that has driven cancel culture, however, Newsweek deputy editor makes an important point about which faction drives it the most:

The Great Awokening in one Pew graph: When it comes to issues of race, the Progressive Left—the smallest, most white, most highly educated of the Democratic-aligned subgroups—far outpaces the moderate groups that the vast majority of Black and Latino Americans identify with. pic.twitter.com/gEEOYq11bJ

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) November 10, 2021

Here’s how Pew describes the “progressive Left,” emphasis mine:

The most liberal group – nearly 80% call themselves liberal, including 42% who describe themselves as “very liberal” – Progressive Left make up a relatively small share of the party, 12% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. However, this group is the most politically engaged segment of the coalition, extremely liberal in every policy domain and, notably, 68% White non-Hispanic. In contrast, the three other Democratic-oriented groups are no more than about half White non-Hispanic.

There’s another Pew graph that demonstrates just how radical this group is on this point even within the Democratic coalition:

Only 31% of establishment liberals buy the woke/CRT line that success is outside of our control and buy into determinism. Twice as many by percentage of the progressive Left buy into determinism. Not surprisingly, 71% of those want to demolish “most US laws and major institutions” to fix that problem, while only 29% of establishment liberals and 38% “Democratic mainstays” embrace that approach.

And who are the Democratic mainstays?

Democratic Mainstays make up 28% of the Democratic coalition – the largest single group. But they are an even larger share of Black Democrats: Four-in-ten Black Democrats are Democratic Mainstays. By comparison, the share of Black Democrats who are Establishment Liberals is nearly identical to the overall share of Democrats who fall into this group. And just 12% of Black Democrats are Outsider Left, while only 6% are Progressive Left, in both cases substantially smaller shares than in the overall Democratic population.

The nihilists pushing wokery and CRT are the fringe, mainly white radical progressives within the Democratic Party. The non-white members of that coalition largely stay out of that faction, which prompts the question of exactly who and what those policies and demands actually serve. And that question may well be why we see a large majority of Democrats as well as Republicans and independents getting sick and tired of the totalitarian Wokeists.