A lot of conservatives have abandoned conservative priorities and bet everything on anti-woke coalitions with Democrats, liberals and leftists. Culturally it makes a certain amount of sense, but it has hollowed out the movement. And it’s meant energy and money going to liberals and in some cases hard lefties, like Glenn Greenwald or outright Marxists, just because they’re opposed to some elements of wokeness.

At the political level, Sinema and Manchin were celebrated while a lot of Senate Republicans were condemned, even though even the most liberal Senate Republican is still a good deal less bad for America than Sinema and Manchin. 

Fast forward to Manchin, having played Democrats, has now played Republicans.

Manchin’s latest shocker: A $700B deal: The West Virginia centrist and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer struck agreement on a party-line bill that almost everyone in Washington had given up on.

Much as I hate to go to that old cliche, but, “You f___ up, you trusted us.”

Manchin got the best deal he could, for himself, for his party and he believes, probably, for his constituents, while he’s still in the driver’s seat. It wasn’t a huge surprise. Except that too many conservatives had invested political capital in propping up Manchin instead of preparing to beat and replace him. 

The idea that anti-wokeness would be more compelling than anything else has taken hold of conservatives to an unhealthy degree.

The conviction that politics is downstream of culture had come to mean that only culture mattered and politics would follow. Like any abstract formulation about human nature, it can only hold true in some cases.

Anti-wokeness as a movement is defined by opposition. And oppositionism makes it all too easy for people to be misled by forgetting what it is they’re for, not just what they’re against.

Manchin never forgot what he wanted, too many conservatives invested in anti-woke coalitions and believing that anyone opposed to wokeness must be their friend, have.