A conservative reader writes to say that he is agnostic on whether or not the GOP victories this week are meaningful. I have edited this somewhat for clarity and concision:

The Left has won all the cultural fights because the backlash against progressive lunacy usually amounts to nothing more than voting Republican, and then letting a grifter class within the GOP run the government to satisfy the donor class. Think about how serious libertarians and hardcore neocons are only a small minority of the conservative coalition, but are heavily represented among the party’s elites. They get to decide who gets what.

You talk about “apocalypse” in the sense of “unveiling.” Well, one of the great unveilings of recent years for conservatives has been the mass defection of the consultant class Republicans to things like The Bulwark and the Lincoln Project, where not only their contempt for Trump is clear, but also for the ideological positions they used to claim to uphold. They have always thought of social and religious conservatives as rubes who can be manipulated as electoral cannon fodder. Conservatives might have won big this week, but unless they can understand and put into effect the truth that personnel is policy, then they are going to watch the Left end up winning in the long run.

Keep in mind that the educated young whites who aspire to being part of the ruling class elite in our society are still fully behind wokeness. The further away from the ruling class you are, the more freedom you have to hold “forbidden” opinions — but you also cut yourself out of power. The people who want to hold power and guarantee that it will be held only by them are more than willing to cut everybody else out. They claim to be doing it to help the oppressed, but they don’t give a damn about changing the economic situation in ways that stand to help, say, poor black people, in material ways. Who is going to be hurt the most economically by vaccine mandates and firing those who refuse to comply? Working-class black people.

He adds:

One more thing: you compared DEI officers in the military to Soviet commissars. That’s not quite it. The Soviets installed commissars into Red Army units because they wanted to make sure that officers and soldiers were loyal to the regime. These DEI officers don’t care about whether or not the troops are loyal to America. They are focused entirely on hunting down and casting out bigots, haters, and any enlisted personnel who hold to conservative beliefs. The more accurate analogy is the Red Guards of China’s Cultural Revolution. They were fanatically inspired by Mao, but clashed with the People’s Liberation Army, and had to be suppressed by them.

I have such interesting readers.

He’s right: if the political victories are going to mean anything, the winners are going to have to hit the woke within the baizuocracy — my term for the woke ruling class apparatchiks, based on the Chinese insult for “white leftists” — very hard in terms of policy and legislation. The time for words alone is long over. But there is also a role for the bully pulpit here. Youngkin’s victory shows that Republicans can run against wokeness — specifically Critical Race Theory — get smeared falsely as racist by the media, and still win. They can still win because for now in America, there remain enough voters of all races who still believe in basic color-blind fairness as an American political virtue. One of them is a black woman, Winsome Sears, who was just elected Virginia’s lieutenant governor. My sense is that Republican elites have been silent on this garbage for so long because they dwell in social circles where fear of being called a bigot is greatest. Maybe, just maybe, Tuesday’s results struck a blow against that groundless fear.

The liberal media and all elements of the baizuocracy are going to call us bigots no matter what — and we can still win power by appealing to the common sense and common decency of the American people. Might as well use that power to push back as hard against the baizuocracy as it has pushed against us. And that includes purging the baizuocracy from Republican ranks. If the baizuocracy, especially in its corporate branch, imposes a social credit system, it will be too late to fight them. We may be facing our last chance to use politics to stop them. Politics will not be sufficient — it won’t even be close to sufficient — but it is necessary.

UPDATE: This. This right here.

Look how excited they are! You could tell that crowd that the Democrats just enacted the agenda of every interest group in their coalition and as long as they have Brandon they’ll live in pure bliss. pic.twitter.com/NDF5lOeGhq

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) November 4, 2021