I don't think this analysis is right. People on the left, like Freddie Deborah, are generally more critical of the rhetorical moves that are typically what people mean by woken essential. That's because they view race issues more through a class lens, rather than the other way around. As such, they view the handwringing over terms characteristic of the woke as substance-less virtue signaling.
For a more obvious example, look at Bernie Sanders. More center-left figures in the Democratic Party, like Hillary Clinton and her allies, in part criticized him for not being woke enough. But really this wasn't based on substantive policy, just the kinds of language he used.
So you are letting yourself off the hook.
It's true that artifa types are a form of wokeness, but I think they are also a small minority of the left. Similarly the ideas of wokeness are a kind of mutated form of ideas like critical race theory that originated in leftwing universities, but that wasn't the political left.
Wokeness as we know it today is more the province of center-left institutions like corporate DEI divisions. It's more about putting a windows dressing on the status quo through language to prevent the kind of structural change that comes from actually implementing policy.
Even when it seems extreme, like defunding the police, the extremeness of what is proposed and the complete vagueness of how it would work, ends up blocking actual changes that would help address the issues, like ending no-knock warrants or qualified immunity. And so in the end we get things instead like a few old offense TV episodes being taken off streaming.
I think the problem with a climate like Last Week Tonight is people who are more concerned about seeming to have the Right Opinions than what is actually accurate or effective for change. And it's that kind of crowd-following mindset that allowed wokeness to proliferate.
And it will flourish under Harris too, because she will endorse it from the top. And she has always been more concerned about doing what she thinks would make her popular than what's right. That's what explains all her policy shifts during her career.
She is definitely better than Trump, but that's a low bar to clear. And she's not better for the reasons stated here.
Wokeness was around, and a problem, before Trump came to power. A lot of that was the slow recovery from the Great Recession, which damaged the center's credibility with the young and contributed to rising extremism on both the left and right. But you are absolutely right that Trump made it way worse, by impairing the center left's ability and will to police the far left. This is the best explanation I've seen of how that worked.
Trump also impaired the center right's ability to police the far right. He did this by building a cult of personality around himself and ruthlessly destroying any elected Republican who dared speak out against him. He made it clear that the far right (the set that Hillary called the "basket of deplorables") were welcome in the party because they supported him personally. The center right still has not regained control of the Republican Party even as the center left remains largely in control of the Democrats' elected wing (not the activists, sadly, who have gone whole-hog on wokeness and have not recovered from it as yet).
For anyone who prefers the center to the extreme, voting against Trump is a no-brainer. He empowers extremists on both ends, directly on the Right and indirectly on the Left.
> In my opinion, the two events were related: Wokeness rose largely because of Trump.
I am reasonably certain this is incorrect. Wokeness and cancel culture were already on the rise in the circles that presage the wider left as early as 2010 - I attended college in those circles - and those same circles have continued to be an early preview of the course of American leftism in the years since. I doubt it helped, but it would have happened anyway.
This was pretty funny and also inarguable. But David confirmed to me that comics, for the most part, are abject cowards and desperate to be liked by a specific crowd. All lacking the fortitude to really land a funny, sort of true and wickedly dark joke. I stopped watching John Oliver because I suspected as much from him and team.
Look at the Onion, which went from must read in print when I was in college to a useless blog of milquetoast crap. Or whatever Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel did to Gawker product Deadspin AND all of the former writerers who made Defector. SNL, it goes on and on.
The applause lights didn't do it for me (very 2010s humour, I left that behind in college), although the thesis is interesting. There's certainly a recurring narrative about horseshoe extremists feeding each other - first the ferriers on the right do something nuts, then the ferriers on the left respond in an even more nutty way - and I'll even concede that a second Pretty Boring Presidency is probably just what the doctor ordered to flush the body politic of that pesky Woke Mind Virus. So goes CNN's Nielsen ratings, so goes the sociopolitical fortunes of wokeness; both would, in some sense, secretly love to have a rerun of Orange-kun. But I would have liked some more explanatory meat than just anecdotes and theorizing. It's not terribly reassuring to be told voting for the lefter right-wing party will help keep the left wing in check, after watching various concessionary kowtows from the still-extant Pretty Boring President (frequently covered on this very blog, no less). 2020 Candidate Harris was, uh, very much Not For Me! She'll still get my vote anyway for other mostly-unrelated reasons, as you conclude, but on the axis of Won't Go Broke For Woke...colour me skeptical still. I'm just not convinced culture is as thermostatic as politics.
It’s not even really debatable that Trump is lighter fluid for wokeness. My wife is as normie as it gets - she hadn’t even heard Ron DeSantis voice until like 6 months ago despite living in Florida for her entire life and even she’s voting for Harris as a lifelong Republican bc of how much worse Trump makes our culture wars.
I do agree that Trump is abnormally divisive and like 80% of our culture war nonsense would disappear if he did. On the other hand, a lot of conservatives lost their mind when Obama was elected and I wouldn't see that as a convincing argument to vote for Romney in 2012. I think the point here needs to be really made clear that the problem isn't that the far left sucks and they will get really mad if Trump wins. The problem is that Trump is ACTUALLY terrible and divisive and that forces us to make unsavory alliances to defeat him.
I think you are way too optimistic about how much "culture war nonsense would disappear if" Trump did. I think Trump can be blamed at most for starting about 25% of it and the big problem at this point is that 25% has now been running long enough that there's a built-up infrastructure for it, such that when Trump disappears, only the most-Trump-dependent parts (maybe 5 to 10%) will disappear.
You could be right. On the other hand, to me it feels like there's already been a greater than 10% reduction in culture war nonsense since Trump left office. Even DeSantis seems like he's calming down relative to 2020.
Trump did not cause wokeness. He may have worsened it, but the "Great Awokening" started in 2014; Trump ran as the anti-political-correctness candidate in response to that. I feel it's very important to get the history right on this point, because there's going to be a great temptation to coalesce around a revisionist history that lets the wokesters save face; i.e. "it was a crazy time, Trump was a monster, people were frightened, etc."
No; spoiled rich kids at fancy schools who didn't want to talk about class preferred to lob hateful, dehumanizing rhetoric and men & white people. This had been going on for a while & was easy to ignore. What changed in 2014 was improved Web analytics, which showed editors and publishers that fomenting hate along racial & gender lines was great for their business. Also the ongoing collapse of the news business meant the only people who could afford to risk a journalism career (and work years of unpaid internships) were the aforementioned rich kids.
Since the message de-emphasized class & economic issues, it was a good fit for consumer culture & corporate HR departments. Social media echo chambers provided the infrastructure for purity spirals. And it produced a furious backlash, as anyone with an ounce of common sense could've predicted. If not for Trump, it would have taken some other form.
Of course, as this essay points out, none of this would have been possible without a lot of cowardice & groupthink from a lot of educated liberals who definitely knew better. I do not exempt myself from that, although I did try in the early years, before we went full Crucible. I stopped speaking out after I lost a very dear friendship over it. I'm trying to start up again, but it's hard after so many years of biting my tongue.
Also, it's not hard to define Wokeness. When I was in grad school we called it "cultural studies," a branch of critical theory rooted in post-modernism and post-colonialism. Of course the social media version is considerably mutated & dumbed down, but that is its lineage.
Excellent comment. "spoiled rich kids at fancy schools who didn't want to talk about class preferred to lob hateful, dehumanizing rhetoric and men & white people." is exactly right. More recently it also became the refuge of antisemites.
I’m surprised to see any significant portion of the comments disagreeing with Jeff here, because his logic is unassailable. His target audience here is moderates who, for whatever reason, have “defeating wokeness” as their top priority (likely not many SBers) and who are considering voting for Trump for that reason alone. And he is 1000% correct that this would backfire tremendously. Wokeness thrives in a perceived position of relative lack of power- the “good guys” taking the fight to “the man.” (Yes, even a University Provost can convince themselves they are part of a relatively powerless coalition when Republicans control the White House). It’s a lot cringeier when it comes from the side that’s theoretically “in charge.” And as discussed elsewhere, it frees up those of us in the center left to keep the lefty nutsos in check when the righty nutsos are sidelined. So let’s keep the good times going here team.
Wokeness is the current predominant form of illiberal leftism. It's just that simple. It is not more extreme liberalism, it is the antithesis of liberalism. Instead of traditional universal liberal principles, it sorts people into inherently good and bad demographics, champions the former, and demonizes the latter.
Preventing Trump from ever getting power again is certainly a necessary precondition to heal the country and save democracy. But it is insufficient. We ALSO must be much more effective at donating and voting in democratic primaries to get rid of the truly aweful and incentivize the opportunists to do better and steer clear of far left fanaticism.
We also must be braver. I know I personally - working in academia- am more vocal than I used to be, and I hope others will do the same however “far gone” their profession. It’s on us to fight back, and our rivals were largely unopposed for too long. Time to make clear enough is enough.
I am not going to vote for Harris, but I concede that the thesis here is correct. I sensed as much about the 2024 result already, given the temperature of the cope my company’s DEI group has been spinning, and this is a major reason why I’m ambivalent about who wins the election this year.
It’s kind of okay either way, but my number one issue is free speech and the Dems have a miserable record on that in post-covid times. This article saying the quiet part out loud about the incentives for conformity also confirm my feelings about what would happen if left wing reactionaries get their way.
I think the point of this article is don’t vote for reactionaries who turn up the temperature. The Harris/Walz ticket really appears to be trying to turn the temperature down - maybe not as much as would be ideal, but right now it’s the best option for anyone on any side who wants to do that. (Say what you will about RFK, a return to normalcy wasn’t his goal.)
I don't think this analysis is right. People on the left, like Freddie Deborah, are generally more critical of the rhetorical moves that are typically what people mean by woken essential. That's because they view race issues more through a class lens, rather than the other way around. As such, they view the handwringing over terms characteristic of the woke as substance-less virtue signaling.
For a more obvious example, look at Bernie Sanders. More center-left figures in the Democratic Party, like Hillary Clinton and her allies, in part criticized him for not being woke enough. But really this wasn't based on substantive policy, just the kinds of language he used.
So you are letting yourself off the hook.
It's true that artifa types are a form of wokeness, but I think they are also a small minority of the left. Similarly the ideas of wokeness are a kind of mutated form of ideas like critical race theory that originated in leftwing universities, but that wasn't the political left.
Wokeness as we know it today is more the province of center-left institutions like corporate DEI divisions. It's more about putting a windows dressing on the status quo through language to prevent the kind of structural change that comes from actually implementing policy.
Even when it seems extreme, like defunding the police, the extremeness of what is proposed and the complete vagueness of how it would work, ends up blocking actual changes that would help address the issues, like ending no-knock warrants or qualified immunity. And so in the end we get things instead like a few old offense TV episodes being taken off streaming.
I think the problem with a climate like Last Week Tonight is people who are more concerned about seeming to have the Right Opinions than what is actually accurate or effective for change. And it's that kind of crowd-following mindset that allowed wokeness to proliferate.
And it will flourish under Harris too, because she will endorse it from the top. And she has always been more concerned about doing what she thinks would make her popular than what's right. That's what explains all her policy shifts during her career.
She is definitely better than Trump, but that's a low bar to clear. And she's not better for the reasons stated here.
Wokeness was around, and a problem, before Trump came to power. A lot of that was the slow recovery from the Great Recession, which damaged the center's credibility with the young and contributed to rising extremism on both the left and right. But you are absolutely right that Trump made it way worse, by impairing the center left's ability and will to police the far left. This is the best explanation I've seen of how that worked.
Trump also impaired the center right's ability to police the far right. He did this by building a cult of personality around himself and ruthlessly destroying any elected Republican who dared speak out against him. He made it clear that the far right (the set that Hillary called the "basket of deplorables") were welcome in the party because they supported him personally. The center right still has not regained control of the Republican Party even as the center left remains largely in control of the Democrats' elected wing (not the activists, sadly, who have gone whole-hog on wokeness and have not recovered from it as yet).
For anyone who prefers the center to the extreme, voting against Trump is a no-brainer. He empowers extremists on both ends, directly on the Right and indirectly on the Left.
> In my opinion, the two events were related: Wokeness rose largely because of Trump.
I am reasonably certain this is incorrect. Wokeness and cancel culture were already on the rise in the circles that presage the wider left as early as 2010 - I attended college in those circles - and those same circles have continued to be an early preview of the course of American leftism in the years since. I doubt it helped, but it would have happened anyway.
Join the Kucinich revolution so that we can bring Cleveland Public Power to all Americans
This was pretty funny and also inarguable. But David confirmed to me that comics, for the most part, are abject cowards and desperate to be liked by a specific crowd. All lacking the fortitude to really land a funny, sort of true and wickedly dark joke. I stopped watching John Oliver because I suspected as much from him and team.
Look at the Onion, which went from must read in print when I was in college to a useless blog of milquetoast crap. Or whatever Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel did to Gawker product Deadspin AND all of the former writerers who made Defector. SNL, it goes on and on.
The applause lights didn't do it for me (very 2010s humour, I left that behind in college), although the thesis is interesting. There's certainly a recurring narrative about horseshoe extremists feeding each other - first the ferriers on the right do something nuts, then the ferriers on the left respond in an even more nutty way - and I'll even concede that a second Pretty Boring Presidency is probably just what the doctor ordered to flush the body politic of that pesky Woke Mind Virus. So goes CNN's Nielsen ratings, so goes the sociopolitical fortunes of wokeness; both would, in some sense, secretly love to have a rerun of Orange-kun. But I would have liked some more explanatory meat than just anecdotes and theorizing. It's not terribly reassuring to be told voting for the lefter right-wing party will help keep the left wing in check, after watching various concessionary kowtows from the still-extant Pretty Boring President (frequently covered on this very blog, no less). 2020 Candidate Harris was, uh, very much Not For Me! She'll still get my vote anyway for other mostly-unrelated reasons, as you conclude, but on the axis of Won't Go Broke For Woke...colour me skeptical still. I'm just not convinced culture is as thermostatic as politics.
It’s not even really debatable that Trump is lighter fluid for wokeness. My wife is as normie as it gets - she hadn’t even heard Ron DeSantis voice until like 6 months ago despite living in Florida for her entire life and even she’s voting for Harris as a lifelong Republican bc of how much worse Trump makes our culture wars.
Excellent article!
I do agree that Trump is abnormally divisive and like 80% of our culture war nonsense would disappear if he did. On the other hand, a lot of conservatives lost their mind when Obama was elected and I wouldn't see that as a convincing argument to vote for Romney in 2012. I think the point here needs to be really made clear that the problem isn't that the far left sucks and they will get really mad if Trump wins. The problem is that Trump is ACTUALLY terrible and divisive and that forces us to make unsavory alliances to defeat him.
I think you are way too optimistic about how much "culture war nonsense would disappear if" Trump did. I think Trump can be blamed at most for starting about 25% of it and the big problem at this point is that 25% has now been running long enough that there's a built-up infrastructure for it, such that when Trump disappears, only the most-Trump-dependent parts (maybe 5 to 10%) will disappear.
You could be right. On the other hand, to me it feels like there's already been a greater than 10% reduction in culture war nonsense since Trump left office. Even DeSantis seems like he's calming down relative to 2020.
>a vegan bakery
Speaking of which, if you have one of these in town, they are incredible:
https://www.cinnaholic.com/
“you don’t whine that they’re out of mini-license plates with your name on them in the Jurassic Park gift shop”
Speak for your self. If I get off the island alive, I’m getting off it with that fucking license plate. And maybe a hat.
The Good Fight once did an alternate-reality episode where MeToo never happened because Hillary won in 2016.
Trump did not cause wokeness. He may have worsened it, but the "Great Awokening" started in 2014; Trump ran as the anti-political-correctness candidate in response to that. I feel it's very important to get the history right on this point, because there's going to be a great temptation to coalesce around a revisionist history that lets the wokesters save face; i.e. "it was a crazy time, Trump was a monster, people were frightened, etc."
No; spoiled rich kids at fancy schools who didn't want to talk about class preferred to lob hateful, dehumanizing rhetoric and men & white people. This had been going on for a while & was easy to ignore. What changed in 2014 was improved Web analytics, which showed editors and publishers that fomenting hate along racial & gender lines was great for their business. Also the ongoing collapse of the news business meant the only people who could afford to risk a journalism career (and work years of unpaid internships) were the aforementioned rich kids.
Since the message de-emphasized class & economic issues, it was a good fit for consumer culture & corporate HR departments. Social media echo chambers provided the infrastructure for purity spirals. And it produced a furious backlash, as anyone with an ounce of common sense could've predicted. If not for Trump, it would have taken some other form.
Of course, as this essay points out, none of this would have been possible without a lot of cowardice & groupthink from a lot of educated liberals who definitely knew better. I do not exempt myself from that, although I did try in the early years, before we went full Crucible. I stopped speaking out after I lost a very dear friendship over it. I'm trying to start up again, but it's hard after so many years of biting my tongue.
Also, it's not hard to define Wokeness. When I was in grad school we called it "cultural studies," a branch of critical theory rooted in post-modernism and post-colonialism. Of course the social media version is considerably mutated & dumbed down, but that is its lineage.
Excellent comment. "spoiled rich kids at fancy schools who didn't want to talk about class preferred to lob hateful, dehumanizing rhetoric and men & white people." is exactly right. More recently it also became the refuge of antisemites.
I’m surprised to see any significant portion of the comments disagreeing with Jeff here, because his logic is unassailable. His target audience here is moderates who, for whatever reason, have “defeating wokeness” as their top priority (likely not many SBers) and who are considering voting for Trump for that reason alone. And he is 1000% correct that this would backfire tremendously. Wokeness thrives in a perceived position of relative lack of power- the “good guys” taking the fight to “the man.” (Yes, even a University Provost can convince themselves they are part of a relatively powerless coalition when Republicans control the White House). It’s a lot cringeier when it comes from the side that’s theoretically “in charge.” And as discussed elsewhere, it frees up those of us in the center left to keep the lefty nutsos in check when the righty nutsos are sidelined. So let’s keep the good times going here team.
"What is wokeness? No one knows"
Wokeness is the current predominant form of illiberal leftism. It's just that simple. It is not more extreme liberalism, it is the antithesis of liberalism. Instead of traditional universal liberal principles, it sorts people into inherently good and bad demographics, champions the former, and demonizes the latter.
well put!
Preventing Trump from ever getting power again is certainly a necessary precondition to heal the country and save democracy. But it is insufficient. We ALSO must be much more effective at donating and voting in democratic primaries to get rid of the truly aweful and incentivize the opportunists to do better and steer clear of far left fanaticism.
We also must be braver. I know I personally - working in academia- am more vocal than I used to be, and I hope others will do the same however “far gone” their profession. It’s on us to fight back, and our rivals were largely unopposed for too long. Time to make clear enough is enough.
I am not going to vote for Harris, but I concede that the thesis here is correct. I sensed as much about the 2024 result already, given the temperature of the cope my company’s DEI group has been spinning, and this is a major reason why I’m ambivalent about who wins the election this year.
It’s kind of okay either way, but my number one issue is free speech and the Dems have a miserable record on that in post-covid times. This article saying the quiet part out loud about the incentives for conformity also confirm my feelings about what would happen if left wing reactionaries get their way.
I think the point of this article is don’t vote for reactionaries who turn up the temperature. The Harris/Walz ticket really appears to be trying to turn the temperature down - maybe not as much as would be ideal, but right now it’s the best option for anyone on any side who wants to do that. (Say what you will about RFK, a return to normalcy wasn’t his goal.)