You’re equating progressive values with Wokeness. By “progressive” as opposed to classical liberalism, I’m talking about the reforms that are moderate and commonplace in functioning social democracies outside the US’s warped discourse, such as Canada and the Nordic countries. I reject Wokeness as a cult that approaches Trumpism in its level of degrading absurdity (and I’ve written as much), but that’s neither here nor there. The culture war wedge issues aren’t the whole of politics.

I’ve written a long series explaining why I don’t respect conservatism. Libertarianism, which is to say a doctrinaire return to the utopian boasts of the classical liberals isn’t far behind. Mind you, as a writer with a visual arts background, I’m a strong supporter of freedom of speech rights, and I admire some of the ideals of liberalism. But the notion that the capitalistic market should be left alone isn’t worthy of respect. That model has been tested many times, and we know what happens under laissez-faire conditions: monopolies form that are too-big-to-fail, and they capture the democratic institutions and eventually turn the country into a police state and a kakistocracy. That’s exactly what happened in Russia after communism, and it led to economic collapses in the US, including the Great Depression, the dotcom bubble, and the 2008 financial market meltdown.

You’ve said you’re in favour of moderate regulation, so that makes you a progressive liberal in my book. This is just semantics, though, and we’re free to use labels as we like. But the devil would be in those details of what we consider to be reasonable regulations.

I haven’t followed the ins and outs of the DNC recently, so I don’t know how woke it is. But what’s certain is that the cult of Trumpism dominates the Republican Party far more than the cult of Wokeness does the Democratic one.

By the way, did you vote for Trump? You said, ‘Biden’s first year plus in office demonstrates how much harm a strong powerful centralized government can impose on a country by trying to “manage” complex economies.’ Would you say the same about Trump’s anti-free trade policies (his tariff war with China, his picking of winners and losers with subsidies, etc)?

I suspect that most Americans are indeed with you regarding the need for moderate regulations of capitalism or the free market. It’s just that I call that progressive liberalism (because it’s an advance on classic liberalism/libertarianism), whereas you’re adopting the Fox News demonization of “progress.” The progressive economic and social regulations—civil rights, expanding the concept of “person” to women and minorities—are needed to account for the failure of early-modern utopian libertarianism.