"Vote for Harris, because voters like me will lose our minds if Trump wins and we'll be super-annoying"
Does not feel like a winning argument.
Let's be real: If Trump makes you lose control of your good judgement, that's your fault, not Trump's.
I would have much rather read the article "As a moderate liberal, I'm going to stand up to the woke wing of the party this time, so they will stop costing us supporters and elections."
"Vote for Harris because a vote for Trump will re-empower some of the worst excesses in our culture from the far left" would be a more accurate framing of what the article actually said.
Can you send me a link to the risky stand you took during the Trump/Peak-Woke era that demonstrates the courage you so quickly criticize others for lacking?
That does sound like an apt description of pro-Trump Republicans. Why can’t both sides be sane? They used to be, however much they denigrated the other side’s ideology/economic policy.
Where I live all the action is either in the Democratic primary locally, or Republican primary statewide, so depending on the race, yes, I'm voting for Republicans.
I have at times defended Kavanaugh and other times excoriated him, but I think you're talking about his nomination and yes I think we disagreed about that previously.
If the point you were trying to make is that most Republicans going along with Trump have also lost their minds, I would definitely agree with that!
I'm a Democrat and as far as Republican-nominated Justices go, I'll take Kavanaugh (or Barrett) over Thomas and Alito any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
One concern I have with Kavanaugh is really the same as the one I have with Thomas. They appear from all available evidence both to be ethically compromised (in terms of payments and favors) and willing to perjure themselves on the stand. That makes them unable to effectively carry out their duties.
I think I would be more specific. I think you shouldn't be too tough on other people who went along with people they find distasteful to accomplish a greater goal. You did it on Kavanagh. Maybe people in glass houses shouldn't throw too many stones.
If that was your takeaway from my defense of Kavanaugh, you didn't understand my perspective at all. I don't want to rehash it as we're not going to agree and ended up speaking past each other last time. Suffice it to say, I will agree with you that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. My takeaway from that is that we shouldn't throw stones, but also not live in glass houses that a thrown stone can break. I've been encouraged by Democrats backing away from the worst excesses highlighted in this article (moving out of glass houses). I wish Republicans would do the same, but instead they seem to be grabbing as many stones as they can hold instead.
Let's say two guys walk up to you. One looks normal, the other, slightly unhinged and has a gun. The first guys says to you, "I don't know this guy, but he looks crazy and has a gun, you should give him all your money."
Who mugged you, the normal guy, the guy with the gun, or both?
There have been a lot of articles in this genre since 2016, suggesting that center-rights would be better off electing someone from the left rather than someone from the right in order to neuter woke excess. As a Slow Boring sub, you won't be surprised to learn that I align with the outcome being advocated, but the reasoning is a pretty transparent threat. I don't think it is at all convincing to the purported target audience.
Let's say you're asking me, "Hey, that crazy guy over there—should I give him a gun?" I would probably say, "No, that's a bad idea—not only could he hurt a lot of people, but it might lead to a shootout with the police that could cause all sorts of destruction."
Am I threatening you? No, I'm talking about predictable effects of that action. I don't have the power to make the crazy guy shoot you or not, or the police return fire or not. I can't control where the bullets go. So how can it be a threat?
Similarly, I definitely don't want the progressives and the left to go all kookoo if Trump is elected. But it seems like something that would happen. Only you can judge what follows from that.
I can only speak for me personally, but I get quite annoyed with the excesses of the far left and was quite happy to see Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush get primaried.
But the reality is that, if Trump gets re-elected, I'm really not going to spend much time thinking about the far-left. It's not that I'm personally going to be "super annoying" or that I've lost "control of my good judgment." It's just that there will be more important and more harmful things for me to be concerned with. Maybe I'll go out of my way to criticize something particularly egregious from the far-left, but I certainly won't be doing it as much as I do now. And I think most moderate liberals would think similarly.
I do agree with you that Jeff's guest post reads like a hostage threat. But I do think that what he writes is factually accurate.
I read it as him pointing out that Trump's combativeness directly fueled the far left. That the best way of *ensuring* the worsening of wokeness would be to end up with Trump again.
It's the difference between saying, "I'm going to shoot the hostages if Trump wins the election" and "I'm a hostage and these people are going to start shooting hostages if Trump wins, and by the way Trump ENJOYS antagonizing these hostage-takers because it gets him votes from the cheap seats, so please please PLEASE for the love of God and whatever else you hold holy, can we not perpetuate this stupid cycle of hostage-taking?"
Like, you can criticize the guy for not rushing the hostage-takers, but he's also literally the most blameless person in the entire situation.
I would also note that for the right, the fact that Trump fueled the far left in his first term and would fuel the far left again in his second term is a feature, not a bug. It helps the far right politically in a "vicious circle" kind of way, and they know it. They justify it by reasoning that they aren't really fueling the far left but simply "revealing" the wokeness that's otherwise wearing sheep's clothing.
Couldn't agree more. Not sure if it's calculated or just instinct, but he seems to know that the more obnoxious he is, the more likely the left is to over-react, then he can just point at them and say 'see I told you'.
It's interesting, I remember watching John Oliver sometime after Charlottesville and he was reacting to Trump's comment that toppling statues of Robert E. Lee will lead to toppling statues of Washington and Jefferson. Oliver pointed out that this was absurd. That while Lee's only significant place in our history was to tear the country apart, which was not worthy of our celebration, Washington and Jefferson on the other hand made foundational contributions that we still strive to live up to to this day, and that despite their flaws are still worthy of our celebration. The left being made up of reasonable people that can deal with nuance would never topple their statues.
I hope this goes without saying, but I don't want anyone to think I'm justifying Trumps reaction to Charlottesville. It was unconscionable, and in a reasonable society would disqualify anybody from holding the office of county dog catcher.
And yet...in 2020, they toppled a statue of Ulysses S Grant in San Francisco. The man who Robert E Lee literally surrendered to. Statues of Washington and Jefferson have been vandalized, with calls for those statues to be removed as well.
Not to mention you can’t get more “kill the dogs and shoot the hostages” than the position of “yeah Trump might end democracy but I really don’t want millionaires to pay more taxes”.
I feel like one of the central Rorschach tests about Trump is the question of whether he provokes us into changing to something new, or whether he reveals us to be who we are.
I, like the author, basically think that Trump is a skilled manipulator who is incredibly good at appealing to the absolutely worst parts of people and amplifying them. This article focuses on what that means for the Left, but I think it also goes without saying that his influence on the Right is also deeply pernicious and horrifying for conservatives. Honestly I think it's probably worse for them because their preference for school vouchers or whatever means that they have to line up behind this transparent Garbage Person and explain his behavior to their children.
I think that other people, sometimes with motivated reasoning, imagine that there is something more "true" about how people behave inside of the Trump reality distortion field. They imagine that everyone is best understood to be, at heart, just as insecure, petty, and cruel as he reveals them to be. In the past everyone was always quietly thinking to themselves about conquest and hatred, but dressed it up behind a thin facade of suits and Sunday School and little league games.
I don't think you can really prove it one way or another- the interior lives of others are hidden to all of us. You just have to decide what world you live in and hope for the best.
>>they have to line up behind this transparent Garbage Person and explain his behavior to their children.
THIS is what scares me the most about Trumpism. All those children are a ticking political time bomb of future adults who will think that what happened during the Trump era was OKAY.
I don't think it's a threat either it's more describing coalitional alignment. Normie libs, progressives and some of the left can work together towards common directional goals. Progs and left would like to make normie libs march to their drummers but it gets harder to push back on tactics, policy, or general attidunal valence if the other option is Trump doing fascist-ish things along with far right signals and policy.
"Maybe I'll go out of my way to criticize something particularly egregious from the far-left, but I certainly won't be doing it as much as I do now" -> isn't this exactly the point he's making? We in the center left have been able to focus on cutting the far left down to size for the past 3.5 years because we haven't had to spend as much energy freaking out about Trump.
If you’re waiting for a candidate who treats that specific issue as a matter for presidential attention, I hope you wait the rest of your life and never get it.
>I would have much rather read the article "As a moderate liberal, I'm going to stand up to the woke wing of the party this time, so they will stop costing us supporters and elections."
You're going to love this substack blog I like to read every morning at work called 'Slow Boring', they write a lot of this kind of stuff.
More seriously, the point is that if the GOP is ascendant everyone's attention turns to them. That isn't our fault, that's the GOP's fault, because they nominated this guy yet again. This entire dynamic wouldn't exist if they just nominated some normal conservative guy (though I appreciate that the party's base is primarily morons and weirdos so there is little-to-no appetite for anything approaching a normal conservative)
There is, to be sure, a place for very fine-grained tracing of causality, and identifying each point in a casual chain, and the individual decisions at each point.
Other times, that kind of microscopic approach on each tree completely misses the forest. And it's better to step back and take a more descriptive approach and simply observe that, if X happens, then it's foreseeable and likely that Y will follow, based on everything we know about human behavior in the real world. Even if it is also true in theory that any number of people could have broken the causal chain by behaving differently, it's not realistic to expect that to happen.
I dunno, I liked Obama a lot. But something to be said for Biden and possibly Romney is they might have led to a saner right wing relative to Obama’s term. It’s not a slam dunk reason to prefer them by any means, but it’s something I put on the scales.
You can definitely read this as a sort of threat, similar to what a lot of GOP establishment types do, "the libs made us give power to Trump". But if you just read it as a simple comment on how Trump changes the culture through divisiveness, then it just seems like a pretty obvious statement of fact.
This is how moderation works, though. One reason I wouldn’t vote in a primary for a far left candidate (even if I thought they could win) is that the right would lose their minds, and the next republican administration would move hard to right.
I think you’re missing the point. He’s not saying “Vote for Harris b/c Trump will cause wokeness to run amok”, he’s saying the converse: the idea that Trump will somehow rein in wokeness is demonstrably false.
Is this like when people point out Trump was terrible for crime, but his defenders explain that that's because Trump was bullied by leftist mayors and BLM activists? Still means Trump is bad on crime.
Agreed. This piece is funny so I don't know how seriously to take it, but this is analogous to Ross Douthat arguing that Democrats are forcing Republicans to vote for Trump in primaries by prosecuting him.
So, I gotta ask…is this the only comment section you've ever visited? Because pseudonymous comments vastly outnumber real-name comments in every comment section on the internet. Do you think everyone on Reddit is a cowardly liberal?
It's such a bizarre take. Plenty of actual writers and pundits and political operatives and authors and actors and artists and SMEs etc etc etc are actively on record under their real names. But for some reason the existence of pseudonyms in online discourse is an endemic aspect of modern liberalism that demonstrates a movement wide lack of courage.
One potential explanation is that he is blissfully or intentionally unaware that the great majority of white-collar professionals (and blue-collar workers, for that matter) could not casually jump from their organization, hang their own shingle, and immediately be their own bosses and loudly broadcast whatever culture war pigslop they choose. As a lawyer, he is very much the exception in that he can (and, for God knows what reason, has chosen to) do that.
Unless your business actually *is* politics or cultural warfare, it's quite likely that you don't concretely know your boss's or your subordinates' views on those subjects, your boss and subordinates don't concretely know yours, none of you know your customers', and all parties like it that way.
If you work in the corporate world. At a midsize company like mine, you don't really want to be broadcasting your political views. I understand that the risk is very low but its mere existence warrants some caution.
This seems 100% correct to me, even as someone who's not thrilled with the direction the Democratic party has gone.
I also find it interesting that this post ran on Slow Boring. I usually got the impression that Matt thinks the cultural effects of elections aren't super interesting to think about relative to more concrete policy issues.
But changes in culture were definitely the biggest thing that affected me when Trump was president. I have no idea how exactly a small change in the corporate tax rate materially affected my life in some way, but I know for sure that while Trump was president, "Resistance" nonsense became dominant in my social circles, in all the media I consumed, and it even seeped into some of the academic seminars I went to. Very annoying! Harris 2024!
Trump cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, a 40% reduction. Tax receipts as a % of GDP decline by about 30% from ~1.6% to ~1.1%. That 0.5% of GDP is ~$135b/year at the current size of the US economy. It was not a small change.
I'm not sure what that graph is supposed to show, from your point of view. It seems to show a steady upward trajectory in corporate tax receipts interrupted by changes in the economy and one apparently temporary decline around 2016 that I guess was due to the corporate tax cut. However, the graph shows corporate tax receipts going up sharply since 2020 (after the likely COVID-related blip) to an all-time high, even though the corporate tax rate has not been raised again.
2) If you hit the edit button on my first link, you can calculate corporate tax receipts / GDP and/or corporate tax receipts / corporate profits and you'll see even after the Biden tax increase, corporate tax receipts remain clearly lower as a % of both GDP and profits than before.
You seemingly objected to lowering the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%; Biden has not raised that rate, though, as you point out, he has made other changes to corporate tax structure. With all of these changes, corporate tax receipts in 2023 were broadly in line (as a % of GDP, using the adjustment you recommended) with where they've been since 1980, to my naked eye.
I believe one of the arguments (the main argument?) for the marked lowering of the corporate tax rate was to stop encouraging the offshoring of corporate profits by having a baseline tax rate in the US that was significantly higher than that of other countries. That seems like a worthy goal.
I didn't object to the policy. I objected to describing it as small. The effective corporate tax rate, even after Biden's rises, remains clearly lower than before it.
On the policy, I think there's pretty much consensus that the US taxcode in general is a total shitshow and that the way it raises revenue could be much more equitable and efficient.
If my mortgage debt load increased by 0.5% of my household income, I would barely notice. Putting an additional 0.5% of gdp on the national equity line didn’t materially change many lives in the near term.
But since it did nothing to boost the economy it still has no effect on the average person's life. Debt is just a number on a paper...until it's not of course.
That’s true about this not being a typical slow boring piece. Matt is a pretty entertaining writer so I’m glad he picked someone who would write a short entertaining piece, I think it fits well here.
the lack of named license plates in the gift shop seems like an inventory management problem -especially at Jurassic Park. You don't just wander in off the street, you have to buy a ticket and fly out there. It seems like you'd have the names of the customers and you could have the high margin trinkets ready to purchase? I mean they even had the bed sheets and lunch boxes ready for customers by the time the movie happened, and inventory carrying costs aren't zero, so clearly they were pretty close to opening. If they didn't have the right named mini-license plates in the gift shop, that should have been a big red flag that the Park had serious problems under the surface -no wonder they didn't know how many dinosaurs they had in the pads. <smh>
The worst part is how the computer was designed to only track sales and assume that inventory levels could never rise above their initial values - if there were a large number of returns or unexpected positive change in inventory, that would lead to untracked product just floating around, loose in the warehouse. Imagine the kind of chaos that would break out if another, more important, park system had the same flaw!
I mean, it seems like you might also want to have a machine ready to pump those trinkets out at a moment's notice. The shipping costs from the mainland are already just plain MURDER, so you should probably vertically integrate and do a lot of your light manufacturing of merch on-site.
“Liberals bit our tongues — and that’s on us — but we did it in response to the climate Trump created.”
Trump has been out of office for 40 months and liberals are still biting their tongues. Look at how many commenters use pseudonyms. I put time and effort into deepening my world view, I offer it to humanity for $0, and I’ll be damned if I don’t get credit for it. I’ll accept whatever perdition my ideas bring- part of active citizenship is putting your ideas out there and taking the heat if the demos disagrees. However, most liberals care more about their careers than their ideas, whether or not Trump is in power.
Trump caused internet-anonymity and the use of pseudonyms? Tons of liberals didn't write or say things anonymously before Trump, during Trump, and after Trump. It's especially odd for you to claim otherwise on Matt Yglesias' substack. Outside of patting your own heroic-opinion-spewing on the back, what are you even saying here?
Of a set of philosophical and social maladaptations, David's insistence on the sanctity and fundamental superiority of own-name commenting has got to be one of the strangest.
Dude probably wants people to sign their name on their ballots. Dude probably thinks the Federalist Papers were somehow tainted.
He's a guy that just loves to make grandiose claims about how brilliant and courageous almost everything he does is. His comments are shockingly self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing given the tone and tenor of all the other commenters on this page, which is probably precisely why he signs his actual name to everything he posts. What good is bragging about how amazing you are if no one knows who you actually are?
You might be the regular SB commentor I most frequently find myself agreeing with and wishing I had been able to articulate my own thought so precisely.
I find it especially funny that this comes from someone called "Sharty." Please never change.
The claim that liberals haven’t been criticizing wokeness since almost immediately after every new development seems objectively wrong. I’d recommend subscribing to the Atlantic or NYT if that’s what you’re looking for. Or go follow NYT Pitchbot on Twitter and sincerely read the articles he’s posting to roll his eyes at. You should also apologize to Freddie down thread. He’s been doing what you want for ages (over and over again, much to his and others’ chagrin).
Liberals don't criticize wokeness. They capitulate to it at every opportunity. NYT will run piece after piece filled with woke language, framing and genuflection to pieties, then in graf 17 drop in a "to be sure" to let the careful reader know the whole premise of the article and especially the headline were total bullshit. But who has time for that?
This is the most true statement I've read in a long time! Cities burned! Police departments were abolished!
DISCLAIMER: Rioting in 2020 was wrong and people that rioted deserved to be prosecuted and too few of them were. Nevertheless, lots of people treat the summer of 2020 like it was World War 2 and we need to put some things in perspective. Also, this is why I use a poorly disguised pseudonym. Views even gently contextualizing the scale of rioting and looting in 2020 are cancel culture fuel for many.
Have you read the NYT opinion section at all in the last two years? Like genuinely I am so confused how you guys have come to such a radically incorrect conception of the world. Yes, they publish woke articles. They also publish a TON of liberal pushback on those same ideas. That's what one would expect from a healthy left-leaning opinion section.
You are correct that the last 2 years have been MUCH better at the NYT since Joseph Kahn took over as executive director. Prior to that however the times took a pretty severe reputational hit succumbing to (for lack of a better term) woke internal pressures under Dean Baquet. So yeah, a lot depends on whether the poster has read the NYT recently.
Ahh yes … Trump is living in our heads “rent free”. No mind that he, as a private citizen, has been operating as a Republican kingmaker and de facto congressional leader for those 40 months. And now there’s a coin flip shot he’ll be back in the White House. But we liberals are too preoccupied with the orange man!!!
What exactly do you think liberalism *is*? The whole history of liberalism is shockingly bloody and full of righteous war in the name of sacred ideals. I mean, there were several continent-wide wars ravaging Europe over this stuff.
I get that you're a giga-dove, but just as a factual matter the idea that 'peace above all' is anything close to a liberal value doesn't strike me as rationally grounded in anything other than your own feelings.
There's no more peaceful place than lying under six feet of dirt, slumbering blissfully because you did not stand up for yourself and your ideas. Yeah, there were some path dependency issues that caused some temporary stress and strain, but omelets and eggs amirite?
To take the idea seriously, poll support for Trump in Blue areas, then look at actual vote count to see what the Bradley factor (or whatever it's called when people lie about preferences for social reasons) is.
This wouldn't prove anyone was lying about their preferences. A much more parsimonious explanation would be that Trump supporters in those places aren't answering the polls as much.
I don't think that's parsimonious, because you need a mechanism to determine who is answering the polls, otherwise you're just making up just-so stories. I would think that you would poll people until you had the proper sample, just line any other poll. You're explanation is totally generalizable to all polling therefore probably not a good answer, because we seem to trust polls here.
I don't know, I feel way more empowered these days to call out the excesses of the left publicly than I did in 2018-2022. I realize that overlaps with Biden, but it's not like culture changes on a dime.
For the avoidance of doubt: you are saying here that you *do* get credit for it?
English is not my first language, but I believe that “I’ll be damned if not-X” means “X, and I am not happy about it.” (eg, “it was my birthday, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t rain all day.”)
I don’t object to your getting credit, I just wondered if you intended to complain about *not* getting credit, and had an extra negative.
I believe you are misinterpreting the idiom in this context. Here, David is saying “I insist with utter, unshakeable resolve that I get credit for it.” The idea being that damnation is so unthinkable an option that in the expression one is metaphorically staking one’s immortal soul on the outcome X, preferring perdition to not-X.
The usages you are alluding to are often less emphatic and sometimes forgo the leading “I’ll be,” instead simply expressing a more observational tone with “Damned” standing in for either great surprise / impressiveness (“Joey Chestnut said he’d win the contest, and damned if he didn’t eat eighty-three hot dogs!”) or genuine but somewhat ironically mild (in view of the word “damned”) disappointment - your birthday example *could* be an example here.
The specific usage of your sentence and its attendant tone (genuine upset at the state of affairs X) parses just fine and would be readily understood by native speakers, but it’s by no means the exclusive, nor I think even the most common, form of employment of the idiom.
I think "I'll be damned if I don't X" means "I will X with bitter determination, as if I swore to do it on pain of damnation." But often used more casually than that -- there's often a mildly humorous intent. The "I'll be damned" part is an oath, in the old sense of invoking supernatural enforcement to bind yourself to do something, except most people don't believe the expression has any real power, so it can be used lightly.
"I offer my worldview for free, and I'll be damned if I don't get credit for it" = "I want credit for it, dammit!"
Ah, interesting. So the “don’t “ is effectively future-tensed “won’t “. Eg, “I’m going to start digging this hole, and I’ll be damned if I don’t get to China!”
You may be right about Mr. Abbott’s meaning. But I’d still advise him to stop digging.
Yes -- "I'll be damned if I don't X" is future-tensed. "I will X, or accept damnation otherwise." It's not a statement about whether or not X is already happening, though the oath would be pointless if X is already happening without my intervention.
Related -- "well, I'll be damned!" as an expression of surprise -- I swore I would be damned if X happened (it's impossible and I'm vehement about that, or I won't let it happen), and then, against my expectations, X just happened and was not that bad.
This is great for nastygrams at work too! Hit reply to the sh*tty email you received, delete the email address from the "To:" bar, and then type your nastygram. Read it and then send it to the ether! This allows you the satisfaction of hitting back without sacrificing the moral high ground.
There’s a difference between, on the one hand, worrying that you might be saying something offensive so you don’t say it, and on the other hand, thinking that someone is going overboard in identifying possibly offensive things but deciding it’s better to focus your attention on bigger problems.
He’s talking about the latter. You’re talking about the former.
Just to be clear, though, Trump was a one-term president who might not be the candidate now if the capitulation to woke hadn’t continued—and arguably accelerated—after he left office. Kicking and screaming and Jan 6ing and everything, granted, but Biden and Harris have been in charge for years and we haven’t seen any center left courage at all. What we have seen is a scarier entrenchment with censorship from the govt, lack of commitment to free speech, gutting Title IX, and more capitulation to identity extremism. Might you be wrong?
The idea that Trump only ran and won the Republican primaries because of the relative strength of wokeness after he left office is extremely under-baked. The short fat Governor of Florida tried that for half his campaign, and yet...
No center-left courage post-Trump? Compare how the NYT responded to complaints about publishing the Tom Cotton editorial (by capitulating) with how it responded to complaints about publishing Emily Bazelon's critical article about youth gender therapy (holding its ground).
I think this is probably right but isn’t trying to pin down subtle shifts in the overall editorial slant of the NYT kind of like trying to figure out how many tenths of a degree the planet has warmed by monitoring the weather outside your window? I just think many people are going to find what they’re expecting to find.
I think that there has clearly been less "capitulation to woke" from the center left after 2020 than during Trump's Presidency. Perhaps not enough, but definitely less.
Accelerated???? How in the world could one possibly observe the world and come to that idea? What is the great center-left failure that sticks in your mind? Surely you have at least one post-Trump example of how the center-left is spineless and gutless to a degree even greater than during Trump.
I'll grant you that those are pretty extreme and seem like an acceleration since before.
However - for that specific issue, the situation really did change on the ground to suddenly bring up the salience of the issue. So I agree with you that it's pretty bad, but it's hard to say whether this would have been worse/better if the war in Gaza had happened 4 years earlier.
There's also a _lot_ more pushback on this from the center left than there was on protests during the Trump years. This article is arguing that that pushback is easier when Trump isn't in charge.
I shudder to think what I could've rationalized to myself back in October-November last year in the face of Trump gearing up to violate the Constitution and run for a third term.
The university administrations responded much more forcefully to those protests than they did to the BLM protests of the Trump years. Many of the protesters encampment were forcibly broken up after university administration called the cops on them. Maybe they haven't grown a spine since the Trump years, but they've at least grown a notochord.
My sense is that MAGA has been forced to magnify wokeness well beyond its actual influence and people inclined to view wokeness as the only real threat to the republic have been happy go along with the charade.
I definitely see more online criticism of wokeness than I used to, from both sides. The power of wokeness has truly withered under Biden. Under Trump people were too scared to criticize it.
Nate Silver’s post about the lack of support for free speech on college campuses was about the scariest thing I’ve read. I may spend my declining years in an American style gulag.
I'd like to hear some examples for entrenchment with censorship, lack of commitment to free speech, and capitulation for identity extremism. Haven't seen any of that myself, I've seen the left completely give up on Affirmative Action and DEI.
I find it fascinating how Trump is hugely flawed and people spend a lot of time criticising him, but the criticism is almost unrelated to his flaws. They want him to be a right wing fire brand Russian agent, when he is a typical Latin American caudillo authoritarian, unprincipled (but more moderate than most of the GOP), corrupt and protectionist.
I think you’re partially right. I would go one step past unprincipled and describe his politics as incoherent. Take foreign policy. He definitely tried to position himself as more moderate than the GOP establishment in the 2016 elections. But then in office, he generally hired lots of GOP establishment people who did GOP establishment things, for example John Bolton. More recently, his foreign policy seems to focus on cutting off aid to Ukraine and strongly supporting Israel. In between, he publicly feuded with North Korea, negotiated some Middle East deals and praised a ton of right wing world leaders. Some of that is moderate, but some of that is very right wing, so either label has some truth to it.
His politics are incoherent primarily because he's corrupt and unprincipled.
And I say "primarily" because his first two questions on any given issue are always "Will it make me money?" and "Will it let me play 'president' on TV?". The incoherence springs from the fact that any set of answers to any set of issues on those two questions will always be incoherent from the perspective of any given coherent foreign policy ideology.
IE, you can't get to the Abraham Accords and Suleimani assassination from any particular whacko formulation of realpolitik or hawkishness or dovishness.
Lots of people in his orbit are anti-Ukraine and he indulges them, but I have never actually seen him attack Ukraine aid (apart from saying some it should be a loan but still provided).
"Woke" and "left" have nothing to do with each other. It's convenient for people with conservative politics to pretend otherwise, but most woke people are standard issue liberals economically. The original critics of identity politics were all socialists. It's so senseless and unhelpful to pretend that Bernie Sanders and Robin Diangelo are the same person.
Freddie, I know that you promote a version of leftism that focuses on economics, not identity, and you know that I like that about you, but wokeness is definitely a left-wing thing.
If you have a one-dimensional political axis, then wokeness is definitely more aligned with the left than the right. But if you use Left to refer to a traditional set of economic concerns of the proletariat and labor movements (as it historically was), then wokeness is not as much a part of the left as many other things (including many things the Democratic Party does).
If we distinguish liberalism and leftism, there are ways in which wokeness is more connected to liberalism than to leftism. (Even though wokeness is a fundamentally illiberal movement, it grows out of the idea of respecting individual differences, though it illiberally enshrines those differences rather than just liberally creating space for them.)
Woke is progressive-liberal aligned, not Left. You can argue that progressivism is left aligned and there is some transitive carryover, but leftism is fundamentally an economic position.
I think this is mostly correct. However I would say that the wokest of the woke very much *consider* themselves to be on the left. They just seem to think that those economic concerns are best addressed by doing a lot of language-police nonsense.
I don’t disagree but the DSA in NYC went from advocating for workers rights and economic commitments to the poor in 2015 to identity politics in 2017. I was in the room and remember the meetings. So I think the confusion can be somewhat understandable even if localized.
To the extent that "most woke people are standard issue liberals economically," it's because woke causes were successful in colonizing a large amount of the Democrats in a way that socialism has never been.
Of course there exist people like Freddy who are left-wing economically but aren't woke, but there are many, many, many people who are both left-wing economically and woke. And then what happened in the 2010s is they won factional arguments on their social views (but had less success with their economic views) and spread that social ideology wider (and it is now suffering at least some rollback).
"they won factional arguments on their social views (but had less success with their economic views)"
What basically happened is that Obama-era "conscious capitalism" became the in-thing because activists were basically told that the only acceptable strategy for social change was to put their ideas out into the "marketplace" and see if they float or die. This is the origin of "cancel culture" and the PR era of social justice. Left-leaning people took on pressure campaigns and social-media fueled signaling because that's literally what they were told the *only acceptable form of protest* was. So they used capitalism to do the thing they were told capitalism *was for*. Then when that became captured by the PMC, like anyone on the leftist fringe would have been able to tell you would absolutely happen, the same cohort that once crowed that marketplace signaling was the sin qua non of change-making began hyperventilating about illiberal leftism. I don't disagree that there were issues with how this all played out, but let's be clear that "wokeism" as we now know it was and still is a fully neoliberal strategy. Not even an ideology really, but a kind of praxis. It was a sword forged in neoliberal praxis, even if it was composed of raw material cobbled from the academic/marxist left.
I broadly disagree. I think that what explains the rise of wokeism (and I think also the right wing) is the rise of moderated ideological echo chambers on the internet.
The arguments and tactics that are rewarded in moderated fora are ones of defining your opponents into rule-breaking activities and then getting them censured by the moderators. So you had fora that forbade, say, racism (generally a rule put into place with the general idea that you didn't want out-and-out Nazis coming to your forum and saying "death to blacks"), and forum members worked to gradually expand the definition of "racism" to be "anything I disagree with," eventually formalizing this kind of thing in say, Kendi's work. So you work to define your opponents as rule-breakers, then you work the refs to have them banned. This naturally lends itself to identity concerns, because fora didn't generally have any kind of rule like "no advocating for extreme capitalism" that you could gradually expand into "no advocating for anything other than marxism."
Once this approach to advocacy reached critical mass in subreddits, blogs, personal fora, etc, people just naturally tried to export the same tactics to universities, Twitter, Facebook, and people's jobs. Cancel culture, then, is the export of "how to win the argument on a small moderated forum" to the general public arena.
I think Beals has it 70/30 or perhaps 60/40 to you.
But I'd also clarify that I think the most important thing that happened with your "30-40" was the Tumblr-Twitter phenomenon that FdB has outlined -- basically, that (1) Tumblr concentrated almost all of the internet's most neurotic left-leaning misfits and wierdos onto one platform, where (2a) they fermented into an extremely wierd culture of in-jokes, fan- and slash-fic, and memes, while (2b) misappropriating a bunch of academic social-justice and psychotherapy jargon to wield in their own little oppression olympics against each other, who were then (3) violently turfed out by Tumblr's change in ownership, and exiled onto the larger Twittersphere, which they turned toxic.
It's not so much something about forums in general, it's about Tumblr and the kind of people it attracted and then unleashed on the world.
But I think this is mainly only responsible for the worst excesses and the manufacturing of the sort of "culture of silence" that Jeff Maurer describes in the article. It's not responsible for the corporate infiltration that Beals describes here, which constituted a much larger share of the Obama and post-Obama era turnover in corporate culture. THAT would have happened *regardless* of Tumblr.
I think this massively overstates the uniqueness of Tumblr.
Tumblr was part of this dynamic, certainly. But it existed in lots of places besides Tumblr, and if Tumblr hadn't existed, its users would've gone somewhere else and done broadly similar things.
Tumblr was unique because of not merely its superficial uniqueness -- I agree that there were other corners of the internet where the Tumblr Syndrome was developing -- but because it was uniquely *MASSIVE*.
I don't think it's a massive overstatement to state that it was much more massive than most other platforms.
Not to go all "reductio ad hitlerum" on you, but just because there were branches of the Axis in, like, Thailand**, doesn't mean that the Nazis weren't the core of the coalition. Without Germany in the middle of everything, Italy and Japan are just bumbling over-aggressive colonial powers.
That dynamic was certainly part of it. I'd push back on it mostly in that I see that as epiphenomenal to my above point. The targets of most of these campaigns were people with money (businesses, corporate brands or celebrities). Here's a good example. There was the case of that bakery that wouldn't sell cakes for same-sex weddings. When they were taken to court and decided against (later reversed, I think), people screamed that if you don't like someone's business decisions, then you should refuse to patronize them. The logical extension of this, we were even told by critics, was to "tell your friends not to shop there". Social media basically made "anyone who could see your message" a potential socio-economic ally. So the logical extension of "just don't support them and try to convince others not to as well" was "OK, we'll put them on blast, and if they go out of business then I guess enough people agreed with us".
The bakery campaign is a little different. Situation A: "This bakery refused to bake a cake for a gay couple, so please stop patronizing them" feels different to me than, say, Situation B: "An employee at this bakery said he would prefer not to bake cakes for gay couples, and they haven't fired him, so let's boycott that place" (or see Mozilla's ouster of Brendan Eich)
(Also, A is about _actions_ the bakery took B is about _speech_)
I'm a bit uneasy with boycotting in Situation A mainly because I'm not sure where to draw the line. I would probably personally not give them my business anymore but I don't know about making a whole boycott campaign - and I'd have to be willing to revise that if they changed stances. But I agree that broadly, "A" seems like an acceptable tactic.
But I saw way too much of "B" which is more of what Michael Sullivan is mentioning with "working the refs"
I take your point that telling people to patronize businesses according to their conscience bleeds quickly over into cancel culture.
But I think that your account has a temporal problem in terms of being the crux explanation for the rise of wokeness: why not 20 years earlier? It's certainly not the case that only in Obama's administration were people told to boycott businesses that didn't agree with them, and indeed there were plenty of attempts to use that tactic back earlier, in the 90s, probably before.
And it's also not like prior to Obama, people who wanted a business to conform to their social views had some powerful channel that WASN'T "don't patronize the business." The 00's and 90's and 80's weren't some hotbed time of the government directly intervening with a business and saying, "You must make cakes for gay couples" (or for Jewish couples or Black couples or whatever the equivalent cause was in the 90's and 80's to gay rights in the 00's and 10's).
What changed, what catalyzed the rise of wokeness, I think, was the internet culture thing. Also maybe the rapid advance of gay rights in the 00's left cultural liberals both energized (feeling that history was moving rapidly in their direction) and casting around for new places to go.
"Also maybe the rapid advance of gay rights in the 00's left cultural liberals both energized (feeling that history was moving rapidly in their direction) and casting around for new places to go."
I think this is it. Mixed with some pessimism about the effectiveness of street protest. Anyone who grew up during the 9/11 Bush years saw all the street protests and demonstrations against the war and basically knew that was a great way to be ignored. I saw the same 10 people protesting in our downtown every week for years against the war on terror. History has largely exonerated that movement now, but it still took basically two decades for it to happen, and it wasn't the protests that killed it, it was pure stubborn reality. In contrast gay marriage was won in the span of a decade or so based largely on public messaging/PR and interpersonal experience with family members/friends.
"Cancel culture" is not putting your ideas out into the marketplace to see if they float or die. It's putting your ideas out and then attempting to drown all the others instead of just showing that yours float better.
Except that is exactly how PR campaigns work. "Cancel culture" was just counter-PR. Conservatives eventually grokked this too when Bud Light became a pariah for printing a couple cans with a trans woman on it. Eventually people realized that "cancelling" largely works internally, and is basically in-group morality policing. The option for corporations and culture at large to ignore the loud people was always there, it just took corporations awhile to find where the new lines were where they could safely ignore things.
PR campaigns don't work that way. Most PR campaigns are "this is why we are awesome" or _even_ "this is why you are wrong" but _not_ punishing people for putting up their billboards in the first place.
To the extent that cancel culture convinces anyone of your ideas it's only by suppressing all opposition, not by showing yours are better. The "marketplace of ideas" needs people to be able to look at more than one idea.
"suppressing all opposition" is not and never was how cancel culture worked though. People always had the option of dissenting, and many did, loudly. Many didn't, probably because they didn't care enough to put up a fight, which from the standpoint of a dialectical dynamic is basically assent via apathy.
To the extent that there was ever real "suppression" it was through interpersonal choices of whether or not to associate with people based on their views, which is absolutely a normal option for people to consider. Maybe not the most constructive, but certainly one that's above board based on a liberal conception of "freedom of association".
Ibram X. Kendi and TNC both backed Sanders. Pretty much every writer at Jezebel backed Sanders. Pretty much all of the woke writers at Slate backed Sanders. The DSA just rescinded its endorsement of AOC over Gaza.
I think GuyInPlace's point was that thought leaders on the woke/social/identity left backed Sanders (who is stipulated to be on the economic but not the woke left).
It's natural that Jacobin (economic left) backs Sanders (also economic left). But Freddy's claim was that the economic left was broadly separate from the social left, and GuyInPlace's point was that when you look at the people who drove the social left, they all are on the economic left as well, as you can tell by seeing that they backed Sanders.
In 2020, yes. But did Kendi and Coates back Sanders in 2016? Back in 2016, when the Black Lives Matter people protested a Sanders rally, he said “all lives matter” (before that had become a rallying cry against them) while Clinton studied their language to adopt parts of it.
I can't find who Kendi supported in 2016 since he did not yet have the position at The Atlantic, but Coates was quite public with his support for Sanders in the 2016 primary:
Searching Kendi's books in Google Books doesn't directly turn up anything, but he was very clearly NOT a Bill Clinton fan, which makes me doubtful he would have supported Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Basically every single person who believes in the most extreme 'woke' ideas is also a communist, it's silly to pretend otherwise. Yes, there's a lot of liberals who care about identity politics, but they're not the ones who want prison abolition and landback. They're not the afro-pessimists or gender abolitionists.
This screenshot Noah Smith posted today of a tweet from the National Students for Justice in Palestine pretty neatly encapsulates the convergence of left-wingness and wokeness, I think.
So their demand is that Columbia University should take on the task of destroying America?
I hope they bought the really high end REI tents for their encampment, because they're going to have to campout for a long time to get the Trustees to go for that one.
I want to like these people, but they always let me down. Yes, it's absolutely incrementalist. No, you don't have to engage in performative revolutionary rhetoric to justify it. You're just making it worse. Pretending like getting some Ivies to drop a few stocks is going to cause the death of all forms of exploitation and destroy capitalism is, to use the parlance of our times, "delulu".
I don't use the term "woke," but it seems pretty clear to me that, while left identitarians are not classical Marxists, they largely practice a form of "folk Marxism" -- they rant against "late-stage capitalism," claim there's no such thing as meritocratic advancement, lean heavily into "blank slatism," demand large-scale government redistribution of wealth, advocate for positions that implicitly necessitate the ultimate abolition of private property, etc.
In addition to everything else everyone said in response, I would note that wokeness absolutely does at least bleed into stuff you believe as a Marxist. For instance a lot of trans activism is woke, and you kind of famously have no patience for criticism of its excesses.
(Don't believe me? Weird pronouns like "ze", pretending the only reason there are women's sports is because men were afraid to compete with women, claiming no youths get gender hormones, claiming peer effects have nothing to do with assigned female teens transitioning, claiming strange trendy nonbinary identities have the same degree of reality as a binary trans woman with severe dysphoria, calling things like asexuality and demisexuality oppressed minority sexual orientations, and calling ordinary straight girls "queer". This is all woke.)
My point isn't a "gotcha"- it's simply to say that there is absolutely a connection between this stuff and civil rights projects that Marxists consider important.
This. The loudest and shrillest of the original online left may have been Marxist lefties, but even before Trump it had started to become captured by bog-standard liberal PMC people and the PR firms in very-much-not-socialist elite circles. Trump certainly cemented that trajectory, but he didn't create it.
Hillary provided a huge push in 2016. Half the white women I knew began hectoring people on Facebook about their “privilege” in 2016, started saying things like “you sound white”, etc.
I don’t know it seems to me that a huge question in American politics is how much do people not succeeding just need to suck less.
Identify politics left and right and socialists seem to agree that it’s very little and traditional left right politics seems to think it’s between significant but not deterministic and not significant. Bernie and Robin both don’t believe people not succeeding need to suck less almost at all.
Just registering a rare disagreement here. I don't think you can make any case that Matt has conservatives politics from any midpoint. You can only make the case from a radical Marxist left point - where 99.98% of the US has "conservative politics".
So happy to read this piece. Last Week Tonight remains wonderfully funny, but it definitely ties itself to the zeitgeist of the left. It risks what happened to Samantha Bee: quite funny the first season but a rapid spiral into indoctrination with dying embers of wit
The last Sam Bee episode that I remember watching put forward the hypothesis that adults who are not of average height are discriminated against because adult crash-test dummies only come in one size. Their shortest correspondent was indignant that cars might be slightly less safe for her to drive... that is, if she actually drove a car. That was right around the peak of the "everything has to be activism" movement, which made me realize that progressives had become the modern version of the bible-thumping joyless scolds of my youth. It coincided with the rise of Substack and presaged red-pilled Matt Taibbi and woke Jon Stuart. It was all very disorienting.
That's like worrying about whether sunscreen is protecting you enough from skin cancer while smoking three packs a day. If you chose not to drive your car one single time, it would decrease your risk of injury in a car accident far more than whatever additional risk comes from undersized crash dummies for your entire life. Perspective is important.
There's nothing wrong with taking calculated risks. I drive everywhere, I'm not some urban liberal that takes buses everywhere and hates cars. I just don't sweat the small stuff.
A lot of people saying this is "hostage taking" but honestly I think a better comparison is the idea of the cycle of violence.
You can't beat the violence out of someone. You can force a person or group to submit with harsh treatment, but it's going to make them hate you more than ever. Now is electing Trump "violence"? No, but neither is woke. The point is that when one side escalates it creates a counter-escalation. That's not hostage taking. That's reaction.
It’s ironic that moderate, rational right wingers would criticize the moderate, rational left wing for not standing up to our crazy extremists. You guys nominated Trump! Normal, level-headed people are in charge of one party, and clever rationalizations about “giving in to woke” don’t justify voting for the guy who loves the culture wars and wants to keep fighting them instead.
And that's why I have so much respect for Biden. It takes a lot of emotional restraint to de-escalate, and it's a thankless job to be the one who buries the hatchet. And it seems rare to get that personality trait along with the ego and ambition that drives someone to be president.
I think "calls to violence" or "advocating violence" or "ordering violence" work much better than "indirect violence" because it's more clear what's going on.
But someone suffering physical real life injury has to be at the end point in the chain or it's not violence.
That may be right - but I do wonder about the moral significance of a category of "violence" that is so wide that it includes giving someone a papercut or stubbing their toe, but so narrow that it leaves out things like ostracism and denial of health insurance.
I'm equally perplexed as to why some people are so insistent that every kind of harm has to be categorized within an ever expanding definition of violence, rather than allowing other terms to more specifically and accurately describe the "indirect violence" that they want to expand the definition to include.
I actually suspect that "violence" just isn't a particularly useful category. It might be useful to have "acts that likely lead to someone's death", "acts that likely lead to substantial impairment of someone's quality of life", and "acts that make someone temporarily unhappy", even though any definition of "violence" is going to include some actions of all three types and leave out other actions of all three types, unless you go so broad as to include all of them.
Wokeness indeed grew under Trump. But it took root and sprouted under Obama first and then found a new lease on life under Biden wherein it expanded even further.
Not Biden himself so much as his administration for whom Biden was mostly an irrelevant figurehead. All the ways in which the admin pushes schools to punish disorderly black kids less in the name of fighting "the School to Prison Pipeline", come up with new measurements to hide the facial achievement gap in the name of equity, promote transgender ideology more across the whole federal govt while pressuring private employers to do the same; continuing the Title VII sexual harassment kangaroo courts liberals required universities to open etc etc.
I do hope if Harris wins we'll see comedy being funny again but if the last four years are any indication we'll continue to be seen comics being forced to genuflect to the new state religion following the lead of cringe losers like Colbert eagerly setting the pace.
> I do hope if Harris wins we'll see comedy being funny again but if the last four years are any indication we'll continue to be seen comics being forced to genuflect to the new state religion following the lead of cringe losers like Colbert eagerly setting the pace.
I don't watch a lot of stand-up, but comics who don't "genuflect to the new state religion", like Shane Gillis for example, seem to be doing quite well. It's notable that he was invited to host SNL in Feb. 2024 after having been hired and then fired before even performing once by them in 2019. If that isn't a sign of the changing times, I don't know what more you are looking for.
I've always thought this focus on the super famous and successful comedians misses the forest for the trees. It's like saying that steroids didn't make much of a difference in baseball because Randy Johnson was able to strike out Barry Bonds. So sure, Barry Bonds wasn't invincible, but it took guys like Randy Johnson to have success against him! (to be clear- this is a hypothetical. All the stats nerds, please don't come at me with actual numbers about Barry vs. Randy or anything). But if you actually look at the picture as a whole, it is undeniable that guys were juiced were absolutely wrecking opposing pitchers and having a huge amount of success, so steroids clearly had a huge impact.
With stand up comedy, guys like Dave Chappelle and Shane Gillis are the Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux's of the world. They're so good that it doesn't matter what the hitters do, they're still going to be successful. The more interesting question is what's happening in comedy clubs and bars across the country with the upcoming crop of comedians that don't have the fame and money to fall back on and maybe aren't quite as skilled as Chappelle and Gillis. Are the new rules about what's acceptable to laugh about not having any impact on them? Or are they refusing to make jokes that would get laughs but also offend some people because they know if they upset the wrong person they could face serious consequences?
To be clear, I think that the blowback to "cancel culture" in comedy is frequently overblown. But I am genuinely curious about the answer to those questions, but it seems to me no one is even asking them, let alone answering them. Instead, one side is saying "woke broke comedy!" while the other side is saying "Shane Gillis and Dave Chappelle are doing just fine!", and to me it seems like both of those arguments might actually be right because the truth is in the middle.
I don’t know, but some of the funniest comedy in the past 2-3 years has been Jost and Che’s bit where they gift each other jokes for Christmas. And the takeaway to me seems to be that the key element in potentially racist humor is establishing that the racist idea is the butt of the joke. Same as Chapelle’s Clayton Bigsby sketch. Comedians are smart-they’ll figure it out. And the ones that don’t evolve will complain about being “cancelled” when most of the time, they just weren’t very funny.
I'm not trying to say "Gillis is fine so it means nothing ever was wrong"; I'm just using him as an example of shifting norms and their reversion back to the previous standard. And while I don't know anything about the field, I would guess the smaller time folks might have an easier time actually? Gillis only got pseudo-canceled when he got big enough to be hired by SNL.
I couldn’t have said it better. The energetic anti woke types in 2024 sometimes feel like those Japanese soldiers on small islands who never found out World War 2 ended. It’s been really sad to see this happen to people whose judgement I used to respect like Megan Daumn or John McWhorter.
Wokeness didn't find a new lease on life under Biden. It weakened and withered. Violent protests are a fraction of the size ans frequency they once were. DEI bureacrsts are being laid off all actoss the country. More people are speaking up against it than before. Its starting to become "cringe." People are complaining about wokeness more than ever, but that's because they now have the courage to complain.
I hope you're right but I really doubt you are. It's not so much Biden himself who runs the administration like an aging, rocking chair, absentee landlord. It's the people he has promoted.
I can't believe that anti-racism is not behind this crazy lurch to the left on immigration where the de facto Democrat position is now immigration enforcement is illegitimate because it has a disparate effect on black and brown people.
The Biden justice department guidance has brought back the sexual harassment kangaroo courts back to universities. It has filed amicus curiae briefs in support of racial quotas in university admissions. It has published guidance facilitating the distrubution of puberty blockers embracing a policy well to the left of every developed country in the world.
Obama definitely did promote it. Trayvon Martin who should have been left as a forgotten local police blotter story became a household name largely because someone high up in the Obama administration thought this was a story that would help motivate black and liberal voters to show up again in 2012 despite the high unemployment.
Ta Nehisi Coates one of the earlier exponents of wokism would not have been a jackpot career success were it not for Obama. He said so himself.
I agree with this piece (also thought it was funny). A vote for Harris is a vote for normalcy in a number of ways. For the reasons outlined in this article, as a signal to the GOP to stop nominating crazy people, the correct game theory response to norm shattering, international standing, rewards Democrats for ditching the incumbent when he became too ridiculous, and other reasons I am sure. I don’t like much of the policy platform (and hate the agency picks) but that’s very compelling to me. It’s been an annoying few years.
Plus it gives you a nice chance to vote against Kamala when the Republicans nominate a normal person in 2028 and reinforce the “just be normal” message!
Hard for me to be excited about Haley winning the primary in 2028 after she ran cover for Trump. In another universe I would have happily voted for her, today I think I'd take the average Democrat instead.
Yeah, it's hard to imagine that the cucks who have bent the knee to Trump will suddenly seize the ship back once Trump is gone. They can't change the direction of the party without admitting that Trump was bad and their voters don't want to hear that.
It’s delightfully refreshing to have content that doesn’t, even one time, mention permitting reform or Baumol’s cost disease. No macro or microeconomics to be found here, just cultural vibes.
I’m cackling with particular glee at how it has made the comments section crazy. People are trying to adhere to the old ways and shoehorn in argumentation about the meaning of a graph depicting corporate tax revenue, and a(n admittedly amusing) discussion of management information systems at Jurassic Park, but at the most basic level, the commentariat can’t even agree whether our poster is the good guy or the bad guy (hint: he’s the good guy), and because it’s not an issue that can be quantified and our commenters lean *heavily* against qualitative analysis, it’s like chaos at the monkey house today. It’s absolutely awesome.
Matt, can we get one of these posts every Wednesday, as a little treat? 😁
Good essay. Further to the analogy of repairing vs junking a car, I'd add, in what hopefully does not turn out to be wishful thinking, that a vote for Harris-Walz is a vote to put grownups back in charge - people mature enough to see complexity and nuance, and able to recognize that just because a thing (or a person) contains both good and bad, is animated by mixed motives, it can on the whole still be good.
Imperfection is inherent in any human creation. And the patriotic American thing to do in this election is support the side that seems more psychologically capable of responding to imperfection not by wanting to smash or stifle the imperfect thing in a fit of Manichean rigidity, but by optimistically, patiently working to make it more perfect.
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.
As much as I appreciate you writing this article, the inability of the reasonables to stand up to the crazies was a choice. Granted, it's a choice with a collective action problem, but a choice nonetheless. I really do think the "woke" were and are a paper tiger and if we just collectively tell them "no" they can't do anything. I get that easier said than done, but if he wins (and there's a 50/50 shot he does), I think us reasonables will have less of an excuse for giving the crazy shit a pass because we've seen this routine before.
No, this is not a "go ahead and vote for Trump then hurr hurr" point.
I feel like we’re living in different realities. Did Democrats nominate Kathy Griffin or Rashida Tlaib for president in 2020 or something? I seem to remember Democrats putting forward a string of moderate, unifying candidates that tried to work across the aisle while Republicans have been voting down every single candidate for leadership who was even a little bit bipartisan for the past decade and a half.
Which side is unable to stand up to its extremists again?
But in every practical sense, left wing crazies are powerless; meanwhile, right wing crazies control the Republican Party. It’s not an “inability” to stand up to the crazies, it’s a sense that it’s more important to stand up to the right wing crazies.
What point do you think I'm making? My whole point was "annoying woke people in your daily life are paper tigers. Just tell them no.". Somehow this got turned in to a thing about how the right is worse. Ok? I never said they were or they weren't. This article was about a guy who worked on a TV show and the hive mind that existed on the show.
Right, I think you’re glossing over the actual reason the dynamic he’s talking about came about. It’s hard to focus on paper tigers when there are actual tigers to worry about.
At the risk of repeating myself, I'm referring to interpersonal relations in blue America. If Trump wins, and there's a good chance he might, and you live in a liberal/woke/whatever environment, you don't have to spend the next four years going crazy and making excuses for people who do. You can just not do that.
To be honest, if you're only talking about culture when we have actual data on institutions like the parties themselves, then you're basically giving yourself permission to use flimsy evidence. In a country of 300 million people, you can point to anything weird as culture since there will be at least tens of thousands of people who do or believe anything in particular.
Well if this article had been about a guy who worked in Republican politics and tried to stop the tide of Trumpism, then I'd be talking about that, but since it was about the John Oliver show, I'm talking about that.
Think about it this way: the fact is that NOW conformists such as the guy writing this essay feel it’s in both “safe” and in their interest to write articles such as the above explicitly and publicly castigating wokeness (in however benign a framing). This in itself is evidence of the improvement in public discourse since trump left office and this kind of illustrates its point in its very existence, doesn’t it ?
"Vote for Harris, because voters like me will lose our minds if Trump wins and we'll be super-annoying"
Does not feel like a winning argument.
Let's be real: If Trump makes you lose control of your good judgement, that's your fault, not Trump's.
I would have much rather read the article "As a moderate liberal, I'm going to stand up to the woke wing of the party this time, so they will stop costing us supporters and elections."
"Vote for Harris because a vote for Trump will re-empower some of the worst excesses in our culture from the far left" would be a more accurate framing of what the article actually said.
It's not the far left, it's the progressives, who are pretty moderate in many ways except the identitarian stuff, IMHO.
Exactly.
Which we won't push back against because we value our jobs over our principles.
Can you send me a link to the risky stand you took during the Trump/Peak-Woke era that demonstrates the courage you so quickly criticize others for lacking?
"Vote for Harris, because voters like me will lose our minds if Trump wins and we'll be super-annoying" is at the very least a *funny* argument.
10/10 would click again.
But his point is that he didn’t lose his mind. Other people did.
If you feel like you have to go along with the people who lost their minds...!
That does sound like an apt description of pro-Trump Republicans. Why can’t both sides be sane? They used to be, however much they denigrated the other side’s ideology/economic policy.
Yep, both sides got unfortunately comfortable with insanity, but Democrats seem to be pulling back a bit, while the Republicans double down with MAGA.
Aren't you voting Republican regularly? Didn't you defend Kavanagh?
Where I live all the action is either in the Democratic primary locally, or Republican primary statewide, so depending on the race, yes, I'm voting for Republicans.
I have at times defended Kavanaugh and other times excoriated him, but I think you're talking about his nomination and yes I think we disagreed about that previously.
If the point you were trying to make is that most Republicans going along with Trump have also lost their minds, I would definitely agree with that!
I'm a Democrat and as far as Republican-nominated Justices go, I'll take Kavanaugh (or Barrett) over Thomas and Alito any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
One concern I have with Kavanaugh is really the same as the one I have with Thomas. They appear from all available evidence both to be ethically compromised (in terms of payments and favors) and willing to perjure themselves on the stand. That makes them unable to effectively carry out their duties.
I think I would be more specific. I think you shouldn't be too tough on other people who went along with people they find distasteful to accomplish a greater goal. You did it on Kavanagh. Maybe people in glass houses shouldn't throw too many stones.
If that was your takeaway from my defense of Kavanaugh, you didn't understand my perspective at all. I don't want to rehash it as we're not going to agree and ended up speaking past each other last time. Suffice it to say, I will agree with you that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. My takeaway from that is that we shouldn't throw stones, but also not live in glass houses that a thrown stone can break. I've been encouraged by Democrats backing away from the worst excesses highlighted in this article (moving out of glass houses). I wish Republicans would do the same, but instead they seem to be grabbing as many stones as they can hold instead.
Let's say two guys walk up to you. One looks normal, the other, slightly unhinged and has a gun. The first guys says to you, "I don't know this guy, but he looks crazy and has a gun, you should give him all your money."
Who mugged you, the normal guy, the guy with the gun, or both?
There have been a lot of articles in this genre since 2016, suggesting that center-rights would be better off electing someone from the left rather than someone from the right in order to neuter woke excess. As a Slow Boring sub, you won't be surprised to learn that I align with the outcome being advocated, but the reasoning is a pretty transparent threat. I don't think it is at all convincing to the purported target audience.
Surprised to see it on this Substack.
Let's say you're asking me, "Hey, that crazy guy over there—should I give him a gun?" I would probably say, "No, that's a bad idea—not only could he hurt a lot of people, but it might lead to a shootout with the police that could cause all sorts of destruction."
Am I threatening you? No, I'm talking about predictable effects of that action. I don't have the power to make the crazy guy shoot you or not, or the police return fire or not. I can't control where the bullets go. So how can it be a threat?
Similarly, I definitely don't want the progressives and the left to go all kookoo if Trump is elected. But it seems like something that would happen. Only you can judge what follows from that.
"electing someone from the left rather than someone from the right"
is not what is being advocated.
"electing someone from the left rather than TRUMP".
If Haley were the nominee and this same article were saying to defeat woke you had to vote against Republicans _in general_ I'd agree with you.
"I don't know this guy, but he looks (whispers)crazy and he has a gun. Whatever you do, _don't_ tell him he looks (whispers)crazy."
I can only speak for me personally, but I get quite annoyed with the excesses of the far left and was quite happy to see Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush get primaried.
But the reality is that, if Trump gets re-elected, I'm really not going to spend much time thinking about the far-left. It's not that I'm personally going to be "super annoying" or that I've lost "control of my good judgment." It's just that there will be more important and more harmful things for me to be concerned with. Maybe I'll go out of my way to criticize something particularly egregious from the far-left, but I certainly won't be doing it as much as I do now. And I think most moderate liberals would think similarly.
I do agree with you that Jeff's guest post reads like a hostage threat. But I do think that what he writes is factually accurate.
I didn't read it as a hostage threat at all.
I read it as him pointing out that Trump's combativeness directly fueled the far left. That the best way of *ensuring* the worsening of wokeness would be to end up with Trump again.
It's the difference between saying, "I'm going to shoot the hostages if Trump wins the election" and "I'm a hostage and these people are going to start shooting hostages if Trump wins, and by the way Trump ENJOYS antagonizing these hostage-takers because it gets him votes from the cheap seats, so please please PLEASE for the love of God and whatever else you hold holy, can we not perpetuate this stupid cycle of hostage-taking?"
Like, you can criticize the guy for not rushing the hostage-takers, but he's also literally the most blameless person in the entire situation.
I would also note that for the right, the fact that Trump fueled the far left in his first term and would fuel the far left again in his second term is a feature, not a bug. It helps the far right politically in a "vicious circle" kind of way, and they know it. They justify it by reasoning that they aren't really fueling the far left but simply "revealing" the wokeness that's otherwise wearing sheep's clothing.
Couldn't agree more. Not sure if it's calculated or just instinct, but he seems to know that the more obnoxious he is, the more likely the left is to over-react, then he can just point at them and say 'see I told you'.
It's interesting, I remember watching John Oliver sometime after Charlottesville and he was reacting to Trump's comment that toppling statues of Robert E. Lee will lead to toppling statues of Washington and Jefferson. Oliver pointed out that this was absurd. That while Lee's only significant place in our history was to tear the country apart, which was not worthy of our celebration, Washington and Jefferson on the other hand made foundational contributions that we still strive to live up to to this day, and that despite their flaws are still worthy of our celebration. The left being made up of reasonable people that can deal with nuance would never topple their statues.
I hope this goes without saying, but I don't want anyone to think I'm justifying Trumps reaction to Charlottesville. It was unconscionable, and in a reasonable society would disqualify anybody from holding the office of county dog catcher.
And yet...in 2020, they toppled a statue of Ulysses S Grant in San Francisco. The man who Robert E Lee literally surrendered to. Statues of Washington and Jefferson have been vandalized, with calls for those statues to be removed as well.
I think that's the point Todd was making, in context.
There’s a lot in common with the behavior of Netanyahu and Hamas.
Not to mention you can’t get more “kill the dogs and shoot the hostages” than the position of “yeah Trump might end democracy but I really don’t want millionaires to pay more taxes”.
I feel like one of the central Rorschach tests about Trump is the question of whether he provokes us into changing to something new, or whether he reveals us to be who we are.
I, like the author, basically think that Trump is a skilled manipulator who is incredibly good at appealing to the absolutely worst parts of people and amplifying them. This article focuses on what that means for the Left, but I think it also goes without saying that his influence on the Right is also deeply pernicious and horrifying for conservatives. Honestly I think it's probably worse for them because their preference for school vouchers or whatever means that they have to line up behind this transparent Garbage Person and explain his behavior to their children.
I think that other people, sometimes with motivated reasoning, imagine that there is something more "true" about how people behave inside of the Trump reality distortion field. They imagine that everyone is best understood to be, at heart, just as insecure, petty, and cruel as he reveals them to be. In the past everyone was always quietly thinking to themselves about conquest and hatred, but dressed it up behind a thin facade of suits and Sunday School and little league games.
I don't think you can really prove it one way or another- the interior lives of others are hidden to all of us. You just have to decide what world you live in and hope for the best.
>>they have to line up behind this transparent Garbage Person and explain his behavior to their children.
THIS is what scares me the most about Trumpism. All those children are a ticking political time bomb of future adults who will think that what happened during the Trump era was OKAY.
I don't think it's a threat either it's more describing coalitional alignment. Normie libs, progressives and some of the left can work together towards common directional goals. Progs and left would like to make normie libs march to their drummers but it gets harder to push back on tactics, policy, or general attidunal valence if the other option is Trump doing fascist-ish things along with far right signals and policy.
"Maybe I'll go out of my way to criticize something particularly egregious from the far-left, but I certainly won't be doing it as much as I do now" -> isn't this exactly the point he's making? We in the center left have been able to focus on cutting the far left down to size for the past 3.5 years because we haven't had to spend as much energy freaking out about Trump.
Elect Harris or else we’ll insist gender dysphoric men can compete as women and call you bigots if you disagree!
Sorry, I don’t pay ransom.
If you’re waiting for a candidate who treats that specific issue as a matter for presidential attention, I hope you wait the rest of your life and never get it.
The Biden administration is literally working on a Title IX rulemaking about this now. So it is a matter of presidential attention already.
On trans women in women's sports? Do you mind sharing a link? (Sorry, I didn't see your comment when you posted it for some reason.)
That's not even remotely close to what he said or what his argument is.
Were they? What was the most egregious one?
Please do! I mean it's a really provocative thing to say. He got nominated and elected twice, right?
and then he crossed the zionists
Did you come across what you were thinking of?
>I would have much rather read the article "As a moderate liberal, I'm going to stand up to the woke wing of the party this time, so they will stop costing us supporters and elections."
You're going to love this substack blog I like to read every morning at work called 'Slow Boring', they write a lot of this kind of stuff.
More seriously, the point is that if the GOP is ascendant everyone's attention turns to them. That isn't our fault, that's the GOP's fault, because they nominated this guy yet again. This entire dynamic wouldn't exist if they just nominated some normal conservative guy (though I appreciate that the party's base is primarily morons and weirdos so there is little-to-no appetite for anything approaching a normal conservative)
If you follow Jeff at all, I don't think you can accuse him of not standing up to the woke wing.
"voters like me will lose our minds"?? Did you not read the article? It doesn't say that at all. You should read the article.
There is, to be sure, a place for very fine-grained tracing of causality, and identifying each point in a casual chain, and the individual decisions at each point.
Other times, that kind of microscopic approach on each tree completely misses the forest. And it's better to step back and take a more descriptive approach and simply observe that, if X happens, then it's foreseeable and likely that Y will follow, based on everything we know about human behavior in the real world. Even if it is also true in theory that any number of people could have broken the causal chain by behaving differently, it's not realistic to expect that to happen.
I dunno, I liked Obama a lot. But something to be said for Biden and possibly Romney is they might have led to a saner right wing relative to Obama’s term. It’s not a slam dunk reason to prefer them by any means, but it’s something I put on the scales.
You can definitely read this as a sort of threat, similar to what a lot of GOP establishment types do, "the libs made us give power to Trump". But if you just read it as a simple comment on how Trump changes the culture through divisiveness, then it just seems like a pretty obvious statement of fact.
This is how moderation works, though. One reason I wouldn’t vote in a primary for a far left candidate (even if I thought they could win) is that the right would lose their minds, and the next republican administration would move hard to right.
The woke Democratic electorate nominated… *checks notes* … Joe Biden.
Seems good
Didn’t you know he’s the most radical leftist in history since the democrats nominated Barack Hussein Obama?!?!
I read the argument more like “Fighting wokeness with Trump is like fighting a fire with kerosene.”
I think you’re missing the point. He’s not saying “Vote for Harris b/c Trump will cause wokeness to run amok”, he’s saying the converse: the idea that Trump will somehow rein in wokeness is demonstrably false.
Is this like when people point out Trump was terrible for crime, but his defenders explain that that's because Trump was bullied by leftist mayors and BLM activists? Still means Trump is bad on crime.
Agreed. This piece is funny so I don't know how seriously to take it, but this is analogous to Ross Douthat arguing that Democrats are forcing Republicans to vote for Trump in primaries by prosecuting him.
More like arguing that democrats are forcing republicans to tolerate election deniers by giving them an election to deny.
Liberals ran towards covid cowardice and still refuse to speak freely without pseudonyms. The needed thing is courage.
So, I gotta ask…is this the only comment section you've ever visited? Because pseudonymous comments vastly outnumber real-name comments in every comment section on the internet. Do you think everyone on Reddit is a cowardly liberal?
It's such a bizarre take. Plenty of actual writers and pundits and political operatives and authors and actors and artists and SMEs etc etc etc are actively on record under their real names. But for some reason the existence of pseudonyms in online discourse is an endemic aspect of modern liberalism that demonstrates a movement wide lack of courage.
One potential explanation is that he is blissfully or intentionally unaware that the great majority of white-collar professionals (and blue-collar workers, for that matter) could not casually jump from their organization, hang their own shingle, and immediately be their own bosses and loudly broadcast whatever culture war pigslop they choose. As a lawyer, he is very much the exception in that he can (and, for God knows what reason, has chosen to) do that.
Unless your business actually *is* politics or cultural warfare, it's quite likely that you don't concretely know your boss's or your subordinates' views on those subjects, your boss and subordinates don't concretely know yours, none of you know your customers', and all parties like it that way.
If you work in the corporate world. At a midsize company like mine, you don't really want to be broadcasting your political views. I understand that the risk is very low but its mere existence warrants some caution.
Totally true. I work in an incredibly liberal field and I've never met a CEO who wasn't pretty right-wing.
I mean, my name really *is* Joseph, but there's a reason none of you know my last name. 😉
This seems 100% correct to me, even as someone who's not thrilled with the direction the Democratic party has gone.
I also find it interesting that this post ran on Slow Boring. I usually got the impression that Matt thinks the cultural effects of elections aren't super interesting to think about relative to more concrete policy issues.
But changes in culture were definitely the biggest thing that affected me when Trump was president. I have no idea how exactly a small change in the corporate tax rate materially affected my life in some way, but I know for sure that while Trump was president, "Resistance" nonsense became dominant in my social circles, in all the media I consumed, and it even seeped into some of the academic seminars I went to. Very annoying! Harris 2024!
Trump cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, a 40% reduction. Tax receipts as a % of GDP decline by about 30% from ~1.6% to ~1.1%. That 0.5% of GDP is ~$135b/year at the current size of the US economy. It was not a small change.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=FCTAX#0
I'm not sure what that graph is supposed to show, from your point of view. It seems to show a steady upward trajectory in corporate tax receipts interrupted by changes in the economy and one apparently temporary decline around 2016 that I guess was due to the corporate tax cut. However, the graph shows corporate tax receipts going up sharply since 2020 (after the likely COVID-related blip) to an all-time high, even though the corporate tax rate has not been raised again.
1) Biden did enact a corporate tax increase, despite not raising the headline rate.
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-clarifies-rules-for-corporate-alternative-minimum-tax
2) If you hit the edit button on my first link, you can calculate corporate tax receipts / GDP and/or corporate tax receipts / corporate profits and you'll see even after the Biden tax increase, corporate tax receipts remain clearly lower as a % of both GDP and profits than before.
You seemingly objected to lowering the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%; Biden has not raised that rate, though, as you point out, he has made other changes to corporate tax structure. With all of these changes, corporate tax receipts in 2023 were broadly in line (as a % of GDP, using the adjustment you recommended) with where they've been since 1980, to my naked eye.
I believe one of the arguments (the main argument?) for the marked lowering of the corporate tax rate was to stop encouraging the offshoring of corporate profits by having a baseline tax rate in the US that was significantly higher than that of other countries. That seems like a worthy goal.
I didn't object to the policy. I objected to describing it as small. The effective corporate tax rate, even after Biden's rises, remains clearly lower than before it.
On the policy, I think there's pretty much consensus that the US taxcode in general is a total shitshow and that the way it raises revenue could be much more equitable and efficient.
To be fair, $135 billion is a lot, but also about 2.4% of federal spending this year.
If my mortgage debt load increased by 0.5% of my household income, I would barely notice. Putting an additional 0.5% of gdp on the national equity line didn’t materially change many lives in the near term.
But since it did nothing to boost the economy it still has no effect on the average person's life. Debt is just a number on a paper...until it's not of course.
That’s true about this not being a typical slow boring piece. Matt is a pretty entertaining writer so I’m glad he picked someone who would write a short entertaining piece, I think it fits well here.
Matt's very analytical, but that's what the rest of us are here for: to fill out the perspectives.
the lack of named license plates in the gift shop seems like an inventory management problem -especially at Jurassic Park. You don't just wander in off the street, you have to buy a ticket and fly out there. It seems like you'd have the names of the customers and you could have the high margin trinkets ready to purchase? I mean they even had the bed sheets and lunch boxes ready for customers by the time the movie happened, and inventory carrying costs aren't zero, so clearly they were pretty close to opening. If they didn't have the right named mini-license plates in the gift shop, that should have been a big red flag that the Park had serious problems under the surface -no wonder they didn't know how many dinosaurs they had in the pads. <smh>
When I went the only name license plates they had left all read “Bort.”
I came here to make this joke, because my son is also named Bort.
Pfft, with how much demand there is for Bort license plates?! Those would be the first ones they'd run out of!
The worst part is how the computer was designed to only track sales and assume that inventory levels could never rise above their initial values - if there were a large number of returns or unexpected positive change in inventory, that would lead to untracked product just floating around, loose in the warehouse. Imagine the kind of chaos that would break out if another, more important, park system had the same flaw!
“… no wonder they didn't know how many dinosaurs they had in the pads. ”
Good content.
I mean, it seems like you might also want to have a machine ready to pump those trinkets out at a moment's notice. The shipping costs from the mainland are already just plain MURDER, so you should probably vertically integrate and do a lot of your light manufacturing of merch on-site.
“Liberals bit our tongues — and that’s on us — but we did it in response to the climate Trump created.”
Trump has been out of office for 40 months and liberals are still biting their tongues. Look at how many commenters use pseudonyms. I put time and effort into deepening my world view, I offer it to humanity for $0, and I’ll be damned if I don’t get credit for it. I’ll accept whatever perdition my ideas bring- part of active citizenship is putting your ideas out there and taking the heat if the demos disagrees. However, most liberals care more about their careers than their ideas, whether or not Trump is in power.
Trump caused internet-anonymity and the use of pseudonyms? Tons of liberals didn't write or say things anonymously before Trump, during Trump, and after Trump. It's especially odd for you to claim otherwise on Matt Yglesias' substack. Outside of patting your own heroic-opinion-spewing on the back, what are you even saying here?
Of a set of philosophical and social maladaptations, David's insistence on the sanctity and fundamental superiority of own-name commenting has got to be one of the strangest.
Dude probably wants people to sign their name on their ballots. Dude probably thinks the Federalist Papers were somehow tainted.
He's a guy that just loves to make grandiose claims about how brilliant and courageous almost everything he does is. His comments are shockingly self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing given the tone and tenor of all the other commenters on this page, which is probably precisely why he signs his actual name to everything he posts. What good is bragging about how amazing you are if no one knows who you actually are?
You might be the regular SB commentor I most frequently find myself agreeing with and wishing I had been able to articulate my own thought so precisely.
I find it especially funny that this comes from someone called "Sharty." Please never change.
Same, but I presumed it’s because we’re both aerospace engineers in the midwest.
I'm a documentary filmmaker in New York, but I grew up in Huntsville, AL so aerospace engineering is in my blood.
Finest hockey team in the south, for some mysterious reason!
(I'm counting the erstwhile Thrashers, and you should too)
SHHHH
Many people are saying (TM)
Your comprehension of my post is dubious.
Not really. You seem wildly unaware of your own tone and subtext.
I renew my inquiry about what your actual point was besides making yet another self-aggrandizing remark about your own behavior.
Liberals engage in almost as much self censorship today as under Trump.
And you heroically don't. Don't forget to mention the real point you were trying to make.
I need not underscore that. You are the one hiding your identity.
The claim that liberals haven’t been criticizing wokeness since almost immediately after every new development seems objectively wrong. I’d recommend subscribing to the Atlantic or NYT if that’s what you’re looking for. Or go follow NYT Pitchbot on Twitter and sincerely read the articles he’s posting to roll his eyes at. You should also apologize to Freddie down thread. He’s been doing what you want for ages (over and over again, much to his and others’ chagrin).
Liberals don't criticize wokeness. They capitulate to it at every opportunity. NYT will run piece after piece filled with woke language, framing and genuflection to pieties, then in graf 17 drop in a "to be sure" to let the careful reader know the whole premise of the article and especially the headline were total bullshit. But who has time for that?
Just wild to post these thoughts out in the open in a forum essentially built around criticism of wokeness in favor of liberalism.
It's still the summer of 2020 for some people.
This is the most true statement I've read in a long time! Cities burned! Police departments were abolished!
DISCLAIMER: Rioting in 2020 was wrong and people that rioted deserved to be prosecuted and too few of them were. Nevertheless, lots of people treat the summer of 2020 like it was World War 2 and we need to put some things in perspective. Also, this is why I use a poorly disguised pseudonym. Views even gently contextualizing the scale of rioting and looting in 2020 are cancel culture fuel for many.
"The summer when a very large portion of the population suddenly spent a lot of time marinating in silly bullshit online and arguing about it"
For me, it was summer 2004. My friends and I started a listserv and almost solved racism.
Some commenters are just this far away from doing "liberals drive like this" jokes.
Liberals drive like this: *sits perfectly still, since liberals don't drive, they all ride transit*
"...since liberals don't drive...."
yes, except that their intolerant Wokeness drove me to vote for Trump!
I never would have done it, if they hadn't driven me to it!
It's true! It's true! We're so lame!
Compare the size of the readership...
Have you read the NYT opinion section at all in the last two years? Like genuinely I am so confused how you guys have come to such a radically incorrect conception of the world. Yes, they publish woke articles. They also publish a TON of liberal pushback on those same ideas. That's what one would expect from a healthy left-leaning opinion section.
You are correct that the last 2 years have been MUCH better at the NYT since Joseph Kahn took over as executive director. Prior to that however the times took a pretty severe reputational hit succumbing to (for lack of a better term) woke internal pressures under Dean Baquet. So yeah, a lot depends on whether the poster has read the NYT recently.
Ahh yes … Trump is living in our heads “rent free”. No mind that he, as a private citizen, has been operating as a Republican kingmaker and de facto congressional leader for those 40 months. And now there’s a coin flip shot he’ll be back in the White House. But we liberals are too preoccupied with the orange man!!!
Right, Trump makes himself impossible to ignore, and his Congressional mini-mes even more so.
You don’t strike me as a liberal or even particularly left-wing. Aren’t you the guy who is in favor of total appeasement to China and Russia?
If peace is not a liberal value, I don’t know what is.
What exactly do you think liberalism *is*? The whole history of liberalism is shockingly bloody and full of righteous war in the name of sacred ideals. I mean, there were several continent-wide wars ravaging Europe over this stuff.
I get that you're a giga-dove, but just as a factual matter the idea that 'peace above all' is anything close to a liberal value doesn't strike me as rationally grounded in anything other than your own feelings.
There's no more peaceful place than lying under six feet of dirt, slumbering blissfully because you did not stand up for yourself and your ideas. Yeah, there were some path dependency issues that caused some temporary stress and strain, but omelets and eggs amirite?
I genuinely have no idea what you are trying to say in this comment.
Laying down to get run over by a tank, the Ukrainian defense policy that David seems to regularly endorse, is "peaceful" once you're already dead.
I think you're just describing extreme pacifism, or more specifically, demanding extreme pacifism from Ukraine and Taiwan.
Thinking the US should not go to war with China over the political status of Taiwan is not extreme pacifism.
You don't know what is.
This is not accurate. I wish it were swinging faster, of course, but the pendulum is for sure swinging. It’s not 2019 or even 2021 by any stretch.
If self censorship peaked at a value of 100 in mid 2020, what would the current value be? What would be ideal?
My answers— 80 and 35.
How do you measure this?
To take the idea seriously, poll support for Trump in Blue areas, then look at actual vote count to see what the Bradley factor (or whatever it's called when people lie about preferences for social reasons) is.
This wouldn't prove anyone was lying about their preferences. A much more parsimonious explanation would be that Trump supporters in those places aren't answering the polls as much.
I don't think that's parsimonious, because you need a mechanism to determine who is answering the polls, otherwise you're just making up just-so stories. I would think that you would poll people until you had the proper sample, just line any other poll. You're explanation is totally generalizable to all polling therefore probably not a good answer, because we seem to trust polls here.
I don't know, I feel way more empowered these days to call out the excesses of the left publicly than I did in 2018-2022. I realize that overlaps with Biden, but it's not like culture changes on a dime.
“… I’ll be damned if I don’t get credit for it.”
For the avoidance of doubt: you are saying here that you *do* get credit for it?
English is not my first language, but I believe that “I’ll be damned if not-X” means “X, and I am not happy about it.” (eg, “it was my birthday, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t rain all day.”)
I don’t object to your getting credit, I just wondered if you intended to complain about *not* getting credit, and had an extra negative.
Or possibly I have not learned the idiom.
I believe you are misinterpreting the idiom in this context. Here, David is saying “I insist with utter, unshakeable resolve that I get credit for it.” The idea being that damnation is so unthinkable an option that in the expression one is metaphorically staking one’s immortal soul on the outcome X, preferring perdition to not-X.
The usages you are alluding to are often less emphatic and sometimes forgo the leading “I’ll be,” instead simply expressing a more observational tone with “Damned” standing in for either great surprise / impressiveness (“Joey Chestnut said he’d win the contest, and damned if he didn’t eat eighty-three hot dogs!”) or genuine but somewhat ironically mild (in view of the word “damned”) disappointment - your birthday example *could* be an example here.
The specific usage of your sentence and its attendant tone (genuine upset at the state of affairs X) parses just fine and would be readily understood by native speakers, but it’s by no means the exclusive, nor I think even the most common, form of employment of the idiom.
Thanks! All tuition gratefully accepted.
But here as with TR, you seem to take it with a future tensed sense.
“ “I insist with utter, shakeable resolve that I get credit for it.” “
is a claim that I will, should, or intend to get credit, not that I already do get the credit.
"I demand I get credit for it" in this case is being used in the subjunctive, as in "I insist you apologize."
I think "I'll be damned if I don't X" means "I will X with bitter determination, as if I swore to do it on pain of damnation." But often used more casually than that -- there's often a mildly humorous intent. The "I'll be damned" part is an oath, in the old sense of invoking supernatural enforcement to bind yourself to do something, except most people don't believe the expression has any real power, so it can be used lightly.
"I offer my worldview for free, and I'll be damned if I don't get credit for it" = "I want credit for it, dammit!"
“… = "I want credit for it, dammit!"…”
Ah, interesting. So the “don’t “ is effectively future-tensed “won’t “. Eg, “I’m going to start digging this hole, and I’ll be damned if I don’t get to China!”
You may be right about Mr. Abbott’s meaning. But I’d still advise him to stop digging.
Yes -- "I'll be damned if I don't X" is future-tensed. "I will X, or accept damnation otherwise." It's not a statement about whether or not X is already happening, though the oath would be pointless if X is already happening without my intervention.
In a somewhat older idiom, "X or bust!"
Not sure if older or just milder. Both expressions seem pretty old to me, but "X or bust" is inoffensive even if you believe in damnation.
Related -- "well, I'll be damned!" as an expression of surprise -- I swore I would be damned if X happened (it's impossible and I'm vehement about that, or I won't let it happen), and then, against my expectations, X just happened and was not that bad.
I've often found the "cancel" and "delete" buttons very useful for comments I might regret having anyone read.
This is great for nastygrams at work too! Hit reply to the sh*tty email you received, delete the email address from the "To:" bar, and then type your nastygram. Read it and then send it to the ether! This allows you the satisfaction of hitting back without sacrificing the moral high ground.
There’s a difference between, on the one hand, worrying that you might be saying something offensive so you don’t say it, and on the other hand, thinking that someone is going overboard in identifying possibly offensive things but deciding it’s better to focus your attention on bigger problems.
He’s talking about the latter. You’re talking about the former.
Just to be clear, though, Trump was a one-term president who might not be the candidate now if the capitulation to woke hadn’t continued—and arguably accelerated—after he left office. Kicking and screaming and Jan 6ing and everything, granted, but Biden and Harris have been in charge for years and we haven’t seen any center left courage at all. What we have seen is a scarier entrenchment with censorship from the govt, lack of commitment to free speech, gutting Title IX, and more capitulation to identity extremism. Might you be wrong?
The idea that Trump only ran and won the Republican primaries because of the relative strength of wokeness after he left office is extremely under-baked. The short fat Governor of Florida tried that for half his campaign, and yet...
Gahh, it's only been 8 months, but I kinda miss ole' Puddin Fingers...
LOL.
The GOP has spent 9 years capitulating to Orange Julius Caesar, but, no, it's the LEFT who capitulated to WOKE that MADE him run again!
Thanks for that, I needed a good chuckle this morning.
Seriously, 5-6 GOP senators could have ended his political career with a vote, yet did not.
No center-left courage post-Trump? Compare how the NYT responded to complaints about publishing the Tom Cotton editorial (by capitulating) with how it responded to complaints about publishing Emily Bazelon's critical article about youth gender therapy (holding its ground).
I think this is probably right but isn’t trying to pin down subtle shifts in the overall editorial slant of the NYT kind of like trying to figure out how many tenths of a degree the planet has warmed by monitoring the weather outside your window? I just think many people are going to find what they’re expecting to find.
IDK, the recent change in slant at the New York Times is quite noticeable and reflects deliberate change established by Joseph Kahn in 2022
Could be! I can’t say I’ve noticed a huge difference but I’m also not really applying that lens when I read it.
I think that there has clearly been less "capitulation to woke" from the center left after 2020 than during Trump's Presidency. Perhaps not enough, but definitely less.
I'll be sure to let Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush know that the center left wing of the party doesn't have any courage
Accelerated???? How in the world could one possibly observe the world and come to that idea? What is the great center-left failure that sticks in your mind? Surely you have at least one post-Trump example of how the center-left is spineless and gutless to a degree even greater than during Trump.
Anti Jew student protests at elite universities
I'll grant you that those are pretty extreme and seem like an acceleration since before.
However - for that specific issue, the situation really did change on the ground to suddenly bring up the salience of the issue. So I agree with you that it's pretty bad, but it's hard to say whether this would have been worse/better if the war in Gaza had happened 4 years earlier.
There's also a _lot_ more pushback on this from the center left than there was on protests during the Trump years. This article is arguing that that pushback is easier when Trump isn't in charge.
I shudder to think what I could've rationalized to myself back in October-November last year in the face of Trump gearing up to violate the Constitution and run for a third term.
The university administrations responded much more forcefully to those protests than they did to the BLM protests of the Trump years. Many of the protesters encampment were forcibly broken up after university administration called the cops on them. Maybe they haven't grown a spine since the Trump years, but they've at least grown a notochord.
If you think the discourse on the left hasn't changed under Biden, you're simply not paying attention.
My sense is that MAGA has been forced to magnify wokeness well beyond its actual influence and people inclined to view wokeness as the only real threat to the republic have been happy go along with the charade.
I definitely see more online criticism of wokeness than I used to, from both sides. The power of wokeness has truly withered under Biden. Under Trump people were too scared to criticize it.
I don’t believe we have seen that. Can you name some examples?
Nate Silver’s post about the lack of support for free speech on college campuses was about the scariest thing I’ve read. I may spend my declining years in an American style gulag.
I would argue that "identity extremist" and racial politics etc. have VASTLY retreated over the past 18 months or so.
I'd like to hear some examples for entrenchment with censorship, lack of commitment to free speech, and capitulation for identity extremism. Haven't seen any of that myself, I've seen the left completely give up on Affirmative Action and DEI.
Acute concern and mobilization in response to J6 is in a different category than woke overreaching
I find it fascinating how Trump is hugely flawed and people spend a lot of time criticising him, but the criticism is almost unrelated to his flaws. They want him to be a right wing fire brand Russian agent, when he is a typical Latin American caudillo authoritarian, unprincipled (but more moderate than most of the GOP), corrupt and protectionist.
I think you’re partially right. I would go one step past unprincipled and describe his politics as incoherent. Take foreign policy. He definitely tried to position himself as more moderate than the GOP establishment in the 2016 elections. But then in office, he generally hired lots of GOP establishment people who did GOP establishment things, for example John Bolton. More recently, his foreign policy seems to focus on cutting off aid to Ukraine and strongly supporting Israel. In between, he publicly feuded with North Korea, negotiated some Middle East deals and praised a ton of right wing world leaders. Some of that is moderate, but some of that is very right wing, so either label has some truth to it.
His politics are incoherent primarily because he's corrupt and unprincipled.
And I say "primarily" because his first two questions on any given issue are always "Will it make me money?" and "Will it let me play 'president' on TV?". The incoherence springs from the fact that any set of answers to any set of issues on those two questions will always be incoherent from the perspective of any given coherent foreign policy ideology.
IE, you can't get to the Abraham Accords and Suleimani assassination from any particular whacko formulation of realpolitik or hawkishness or dovishness.
Lots of people in his orbit are anti-Ukraine and he indulges them, but I have never actually seen him attack Ukraine aid (apart from saying some it should be a loan but still provided).
"Woke" and "left" have nothing to do with each other. It's convenient for people with conservative politics to pretend otherwise, but most woke people are standard issue liberals economically. The original critics of identity politics were all socialists. It's so senseless and unhelpful to pretend that Bernie Sanders and Robin Diangelo are the same person.
Freddie, I know that you promote a version of leftism that focuses on economics, not identity, and you know that I like that about you, but wokeness is definitely a left-wing thing.
If you have a one-dimensional political axis, then wokeness is definitely more aligned with the left than the right. But if you use Left to refer to a traditional set of economic concerns of the proletariat and labor movements (as it historically was), then wokeness is not as much a part of the left as many other things (including many things the Democratic Party does).
If we distinguish liberalism and leftism, there are ways in which wokeness is more connected to liberalism than to leftism. (Even though wokeness is a fundamentally illiberal movement, it grows out of the idea of respecting individual differences, though it illiberally enshrines those differences rather than just liberally creating space for them.)
Yeah we all remember famously left wing politicians Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling in kente cloth
Wait, I genuinely don't know if you're saying Nancy Pelosi is left wing or not.
Woke is progressive-liberal aligned, not Left. You can argue that progressivism is left aligned and there is some transitive carryover, but leftism is fundamentally an economic position.
I think this is mostly correct. However I would say that the wokest of the woke very much *consider* themselves to be on the left. They just seem to think that those economic concerns are best addressed by doing a lot of language-police nonsense.
I don’t disagree but the DSA in NYC went from advocating for workers rights and economic commitments to the poor in 2015 to identity politics in 2017. I was in the room and remember the meetings. So I think the confusion can be somewhat understandable even if localized.
The DSA seems primarily concerned with the concerns of downwardly mobile children of elites.
To the extent that "most woke people are standard issue liberals economically," it's because woke causes were successful in colonizing a large amount of the Democrats in a way that socialism has never been.
Of course there exist people like Freddy who are left-wing economically but aren't woke, but there are many, many, many people who are both left-wing economically and woke. And then what happened in the 2010s is they won factional arguments on their social views (but had less success with their economic views) and spread that social ideology wider (and it is now suffering at least some rollback).
"they won factional arguments on their social views (but had less success with their economic views)"
What basically happened is that Obama-era "conscious capitalism" became the in-thing because activists were basically told that the only acceptable strategy for social change was to put their ideas out into the "marketplace" and see if they float or die. This is the origin of "cancel culture" and the PR era of social justice. Left-leaning people took on pressure campaigns and social-media fueled signaling because that's literally what they were told the *only acceptable form of protest* was. So they used capitalism to do the thing they were told capitalism *was for*. Then when that became captured by the PMC, like anyone on the leftist fringe would have been able to tell you would absolutely happen, the same cohort that once crowed that marketplace signaling was the sin qua non of change-making began hyperventilating about illiberal leftism. I don't disagree that there were issues with how this all played out, but let's be clear that "wokeism" as we now know it was and still is a fully neoliberal strategy. Not even an ideology really, but a kind of praxis. It was a sword forged in neoliberal praxis, even if it was composed of raw material cobbled from the academic/marxist left.
I broadly disagree. I think that what explains the rise of wokeism (and I think also the right wing) is the rise of moderated ideological echo chambers on the internet.
The arguments and tactics that are rewarded in moderated fora are ones of defining your opponents into rule-breaking activities and then getting them censured by the moderators. So you had fora that forbade, say, racism (generally a rule put into place with the general idea that you didn't want out-and-out Nazis coming to your forum and saying "death to blacks"), and forum members worked to gradually expand the definition of "racism" to be "anything I disagree with," eventually formalizing this kind of thing in say, Kendi's work. So you work to define your opponents as rule-breakers, then you work the refs to have them banned. This naturally lends itself to identity concerns, because fora didn't generally have any kind of rule like "no advocating for extreme capitalism" that you could gradually expand into "no advocating for anything other than marxism."
Once this approach to advocacy reached critical mass in subreddits, blogs, personal fora, etc, people just naturally tried to export the same tactics to universities, Twitter, Facebook, and people's jobs. Cancel culture, then, is the export of "how to win the argument on a small moderated forum" to the general public arena.
I think Beals has it 70/30 or perhaps 60/40 to you.
But I'd also clarify that I think the most important thing that happened with your "30-40" was the Tumblr-Twitter phenomenon that FdB has outlined -- basically, that (1) Tumblr concentrated almost all of the internet's most neurotic left-leaning misfits and wierdos onto one platform, where (2a) they fermented into an extremely wierd culture of in-jokes, fan- and slash-fic, and memes, while (2b) misappropriating a bunch of academic social-justice and psychotherapy jargon to wield in their own little oppression olympics against each other, who were then (3) violently turfed out by Tumblr's change in ownership, and exiled onto the larger Twittersphere, which they turned toxic.
It's not so much something about forums in general, it's about Tumblr and the kind of people it attracted and then unleashed on the world.
But I think this is mainly only responsible for the worst excesses and the manufacturing of the sort of "culture of silence" that Jeff Maurer describes in the article. It's not responsible for the corporate infiltration that Beals describes here, which constituted a much larger share of the Obama and post-Obama era turnover in corporate culture. THAT would have happened *regardless* of Tumblr.
I think this massively overstates the uniqueness of Tumblr.
Tumblr was part of this dynamic, certainly. But it existed in lots of places besides Tumblr, and if Tumblr hadn't existed, its users would've gone somewhere else and done broadly similar things.
Tumblr was unique because of not merely its superficial uniqueness -- I agree that there were other corners of the internet where the Tumblr Syndrome was developing -- but because it was uniquely *MASSIVE*.
I don't think it's a massive overstatement to state that it was much more massive than most other platforms.
Not to go all "reductio ad hitlerum" on you, but just because there were branches of the Axis in, like, Thailand**, doesn't mean that the Nazis weren't the core of the coalition. Without Germany in the middle of everything, Italy and Japan are just bumbling over-aggressive colonial powers.
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_powers
That dynamic was certainly part of it. I'd push back on it mostly in that I see that as epiphenomenal to my above point. The targets of most of these campaigns were people with money (businesses, corporate brands or celebrities). Here's a good example. There was the case of that bakery that wouldn't sell cakes for same-sex weddings. When they were taken to court and decided against (later reversed, I think), people screamed that if you don't like someone's business decisions, then you should refuse to patronize them. The logical extension of this, we were even told by critics, was to "tell your friends not to shop there". Social media basically made "anyone who could see your message" a potential socio-economic ally. So the logical extension of "just don't support them and try to convince others not to as well" was "OK, we'll put them on blast, and if they go out of business then I guess enough people agreed with us".
The bakery campaign is a little different. Situation A: "This bakery refused to bake a cake for a gay couple, so please stop patronizing them" feels different to me than, say, Situation B: "An employee at this bakery said he would prefer not to bake cakes for gay couples, and they haven't fired him, so let's boycott that place" (or see Mozilla's ouster of Brendan Eich)
(Also, A is about _actions_ the bakery took B is about _speech_)
I'm a bit uneasy with boycotting in Situation A mainly because I'm not sure where to draw the line. I would probably personally not give them my business anymore but I don't know about making a whole boycott campaign - and I'd have to be willing to revise that if they changed stances. But I agree that broadly, "A" seems like an acceptable tactic.
But I saw way too much of "B" which is more of what Michael Sullivan is mentioning with "working the refs"
I take your point that telling people to patronize businesses according to their conscience bleeds quickly over into cancel culture.
But I think that your account has a temporal problem in terms of being the crux explanation for the rise of wokeness: why not 20 years earlier? It's certainly not the case that only in Obama's administration were people told to boycott businesses that didn't agree with them, and indeed there were plenty of attempts to use that tactic back earlier, in the 90s, probably before.
And it's also not like prior to Obama, people who wanted a business to conform to their social views had some powerful channel that WASN'T "don't patronize the business." The 00's and 90's and 80's weren't some hotbed time of the government directly intervening with a business and saying, "You must make cakes for gay couples" (or for Jewish couples or Black couples or whatever the equivalent cause was in the 90's and 80's to gay rights in the 00's and 10's).
What changed, what catalyzed the rise of wokeness, I think, was the internet culture thing. Also maybe the rapid advance of gay rights in the 00's left cultural liberals both energized (feeling that history was moving rapidly in their direction) and casting around for new places to go.
"Also maybe the rapid advance of gay rights in the 00's left cultural liberals both energized (feeling that history was moving rapidly in their direction) and casting around for new places to go."
I think this is it. Mixed with some pessimism about the effectiveness of street protest. Anyone who grew up during the 9/11 Bush years saw all the street protests and demonstrations against the war and basically knew that was a great way to be ignored. I saw the same 10 people protesting in our downtown every week for years against the war on terror. History has largely exonerated that movement now, but it still took basically two decades for it to happen, and it wasn't the protests that killed it, it was pure stubborn reality. In contrast gay marriage was won in the span of a decade or so based largely on public messaging/PR and interpersonal experience with family members/friends.
"Cancel culture" is not putting your ideas out into the marketplace to see if they float or die. It's putting your ideas out and then attempting to drown all the others instead of just showing that yours float better.
Except that is exactly how PR campaigns work. "Cancel culture" was just counter-PR. Conservatives eventually grokked this too when Bud Light became a pariah for printing a couple cans with a trans woman on it. Eventually people realized that "cancelling" largely works internally, and is basically in-group morality policing. The option for corporations and culture at large to ignore the loud people was always there, it just took corporations awhile to find where the new lines were where they could safely ignore things.
PR campaigns don't work that way. Most PR campaigns are "this is why we are awesome" or _even_ "this is why you are wrong" but _not_ punishing people for putting up their billboards in the first place.
To the extent that cancel culture convinces anyone of your ideas it's only by suppressing all opposition, not by showing yours are better. The "marketplace of ideas" needs people to be able to look at more than one idea.
"suppressing all opposition" is not and never was how cancel culture worked though. People always had the option of dissenting, and many did, loudly. Many didn't, probably because they didn't care enough to put up a fight, which from the standpoint of a dialectical dynamic is basically assent via apathy.
To the extent that there was ever real "suppression" it was through interpersonal choices of whether or not to associate with people based on their views, which is absolutely a normal option for people to consider. Maybe not the most constructive, but certainly one that's above board based on a liberal conception of "freedom of association".
I know the *left* doesn't like being called woke, but the leaders of groups like BLM and M4BL are clearly to the left.
https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/economic-justice/
Ibram X. Kendi and TNC both backed Sanders. Pretty much every writer at Jezebel backed Sanders. Pretty much all of the woke writers at Slate backed Sanders. The DSA just rescinded its endorsement of AOC over Gaza.
You left out Jacobin in that list. Gag.
I think GuyInPlace's point was that thought leaders on the woke/social/identity left backed Sanders (who is stipulated to be on the economic but not the woke left).
It's natural that Jacobin (economic left) backs Sanders (also economic left). But Freddy's claim was that the economic left was broadly separate from the social left, and GuyInPlace's point was that when you look at the people who drove the social left, they all are on the economic left as well, as you can tell by seeing that they backed Sanders.
In 2020, yes. But did Kendi and Coates back Sanders in 2016? Back in 2016, when the Black Lives Matter people protested a Sanders rally, he said “all lives matter” (before that had become a rallying cry against them) while Clinton studied their language to adopt parts of it.
I can't find who Kendi supported in 2016 since he did not yet have the position at The Atlantic, but Coates was quite public with his support for Sanders in the 2016 primary:
https://www.vox.com/2016/2/10/10959622/ta-nehisi-coates-bernie-sanders-vote
I was interested in whether Kendi was in the Sanders camp in 2016, did some searching, couldn't find anything myself, and ChatGPT also came up blank https://chatgpt.com/share/9dde577f-4373-458f-98db-281022f1ad86
Searching Kendi's books in Google Books doesn't directly turn up anything, but he was very clearly NOT a Bill Clinton fan, which makes me doubtful he would have supported Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Basically every single person who believes in the most extreme 'woke' ideas is also a communist, it's silly to pretend otherwise. Yes, there's a lot of liberals who care about identity politics, but they're not the ones who want prison abolition and landback. They're not the afro-pessimists or gender abolitionists.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F65621375-6993-49c1-8746-87418cdc4c4e_579x579.jpeg
This screenshot Noah Smith posted today of a tweet from the National Students for Justice in Palestine pretty neatly encapsulates the convergence of left-wingness and wokeness, I think.
So their demand is that Columbia University should take on the task of destroying America?
I hope they bought the really high end REI tents for their encampment, because they're going to have to campout for a long time to get the Trustees to go for that one.
Interesting. I see that de-growth idiots have now moved all the way to "total collapse". Sounds fun.
I want to like these people, but they always let me down. Yes, it's absolutely incrementalist. No, you don't have to engage in performative revolutionary rhetoric to justify it. You're just making it worse. Pretending like getting some Ivies to drop a few stocks is going to cause the death of all forms of exploitation and destroy capitalism is, to use the parlance of our times, "delulu".
I can accept this if and only if you agree that "MAGA" has nothing to do with "right".
I don't use the term "woke," but it seems pretty clear to me that, while left identitarians are not classical Marxists, they largely practice a form of "folk Marxism" -- they rant against "late-stage capitalism," claim there's no such thing as meritocratic advancement, lean heavily into "blank slatism," demand large-scale government redistribution of wealth, advocate for positions that implicitly necessitate the ultimate abolition of private property, etc.
I think “vulgar Marxism” might even be the established term for that.
Bookchin also referred to the anarchist branch of it as "lifestyle anarchism".
In addition to everything else everyone said in response, I would note that wokeness absolutely does at least bleed into stuff you believe as a Marxist. For instance a lot of trans activism is woke, and you kind of famously have no patience for criticism of its excesses.
(Don't believe me? Weird pronouns like "ze", pretending the only reason there are women's sports is because men were afraid to compete with women, claiming no youths get gender hormones, claiming peer effects have nothing to do with assigned female teens transitioning, claiming strange trendy nonbinary identities have the same degree of reality as a binary trans woman with severe dysphoria, calling things like asexuality and demisexuality oppressed minority sexual orientations, and calling ordinary straight girls "queer". This is all woke.)
My point isn't a "gotcha"- it's simply to say that there is absolutely a connection between this stuff and civil rights projects that Marxists consider important.
This. The loudest and shrillest of the original online left may have been Marxist lefties, but even before Trump it had started to become captured by bog-standard liberal PMC people and the PR firms in very-much-not-socialist elite circles. Trump certainly cemented that trajectory, but he didn't create it.
Hillary provided a huge push in 2016. Half the white women I knew began hectoring people on Facebook about their “privilege” in 2016, started saying things like “you sound white”, etc.
I don’t know it seems to me that a huge question in American politics is how much do people not succeeding just need to suck less.
Identify politics left and right and socialists seem to agree that it’s very little and traditional left right politics seems to think it’s between significant but not deterministic and not significant. Bernie and Robin both don’t believe people not succeeding need to suck less almost at all.
This guy doesn’t have conservative politics so what are you even talking about.
Freddie thinks Matt has conservative politics. From a particular setting of the midpoint, you could even make that case.
Just registering a rare disagreement here. I don't think you can make any case that Matt has conservatives politics from any midpoint. You can only make the case from a radical Marxist left point - where 99.98% of the US has "conservative politics".
I dunno. He's against historical preservation rules!
So happy to read this piece. Last Week Tonight remains wonderfully funny, but it definitely ties itself to the zeitgeist of the left. It risks what happened to Samantha Bee: quite funny the first season but a rapid spiral into indoctrination with dying embers of wit
The last Sam Bee episode that I remember watching put forward the hypothesis that adults who are not of average height are discriminated against because adult crash-test dummies only come in one size. Their shortest correspondent was indignant that cars might be slightly less safe for her to drive... that is, if she actually drove a car. That was right around the peak of the "everything has to be activism" movement, which made me realize that progressives had become the modern version of the bible-thumping joyless scolds of my youth. It coincided with the rise of Substack and presaged red-pilled Matt Taibbi and woke Jon Stuart. It was all very disorienting.
That's like worrying about whether sunscreen is protecting you enough from skin cancer while smoking three packs a day. If you chose not to drive your car one single time, it would decrease your risk of injury in a car accident far more than whatever additional risk comes from undersized crash dummies for your entire life. Perspective is important.
There's nothing wrong with taking calculated risks. I drive everywhere, I'm not some urban liberal that takes buses everywhere and hates cars. I just don't sweat the small stuff.
I am some urban liberal who takes buses everywhere and hates cars and I still agree with you.
A lot of people saying this is "hostage taking" but honestly I think a better comparison is the idea of the cycle of violence.
You can't beat the violence out of someone. You can force a person or group to submit with harsh treatment, but it's going to make them hate you more than ever. Now is electing Trump "violence"? No, but neither is woke. The point is that when one side escalates it creates a counter-escalation. That's not hostage taking. That's reaction.
It’s ironic that moderate, rational right wingers would criticize the moderate, rational left wing for not standing up to our crazy extremists. You guys nominated Trump! Normal, level-headed people are in charge of one party, and clever rationalizations about “giving in to woke” don’t justify voting for the guy who loves the culture wars and wants to keep fighting them instead.
Right. If you don't want reactionary politics, don't put reactionaries in charge.
And that's why I have so much respect for Biden. It takes a lot of emotional restraint to de-escalate, and it's a thankless job to be the one who buries the hatchet. And it seems rare to get that personality trait along with the ego and ambition that drives someone to be president.
I don’t know why people are so insistent on denying that some things are violence, rather than allowing the term to include indirect violence.
I think "calls to violence" or "advocating violence" or "ordering violence" work much better than "indirect violence" because it's more clear what's going on.
But someone suffering physical real life injury has to be at the end point in the chain or it's not violence.
That may be right - but I do wonder about the moral significance of a category of "violence" that is so wide that it includes giving someone a papercut or stubbing their toe, but so narrow that it leaves out things like ostracism and denial of health insurance.
I'm equally perplexed as to why some people are so insistent that every kind of harm has to be categorized within an ever expanding definition of violence, rather than allowing other terms to more specifically and accurately describe the "indirect violence" that they want to expand the definition to include.
I actually suspect that "violence" just isn't a particularly useful category. It might be useful to have "acts that likely lead to someone's death", "acts that likely lead to substantial impairment of someone's quality of life", and "acts that make someone temporarily unhappy", even though any definition of "violence" is going to include some actions of all three types and leave out other actions of all three types, unless you go so broad as to include all of them.
What is indirect violence?
Because "violence" and "indirect violence" are very different.
Wokeness indeed grew under Trump. But it took root and sprouted under Obama first and then found a new lease on life under Biden wherein it expanded even further.
Not Biden himself so much as his administration for whom Biden was mostly an irrelevant figurehead. All the ways in which the admin pushes schools to punish disorderly black kids less in the name of fighting "the School to Prison Pipeline", come up with new measurements to hide the facial achievement gap in the name of equity, promote transgender ideology more across the whole federal govt while pressuring private employers to do the same; continuing the Title VII sexual harassment kangaroo courts liberals required universities to open etc etc.
I do hope if Harris wins we'll see comedy being funny again but if the last four years are any indication we'll continue to be seen comics being forced to genuflect to the new state religion following the lead of cringe losers like Colbert eagerly setting the pace.
> I do hope if Harris wins we'll see comedy being funny again but if the last four years are any indication we'll continue to be seen comics being forced to genuflect to the new state religion following the lead of cringe losers like Colbert eagerly setting the pace.
I don't watch a lot of stand-up, but comics who don't "genuflect to the new state religion", like Shane Gillis for example, seem to be doing quite well. It's notable that he was invited to host SNL in Feb. 2024 after having been hired and then fired before even performing once by them in 2019. If that isn't a sign of the changing times, I don't know what more you are looking for.
I've always thought this focus on the super famous and successful comedians misses the forest for the trees. It's like saying that steroids didn't make much of a difference in baseball because Randy Johnson was able to strike out Barry Bonds. So sure, Barry Bonds wasn't invincible, but it took guys like Randy Johnson to have success against him! (to be clear- this is a hypothetical. All the stats nerds, please don't come at me with actual numbers about Barry vs. Randy or anything). But if you actually look at the picture as a whole, it is undeniable that guys were juiced were absolutely wrecking opposing pitchers and having a huge amount of success, so steroids clearly had a huge impact.
With stand up comedy, guys like Dave Chappelle and Shane Gillis are the Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux's of the world. They're so good that it doesn't matter what the hitters do, they're still going to be successful. The more interesting question is what's happening in comedy clubs and bars across the country with the upcoming crop of comedians that don't have the fame and money to fall back on and maybe aren't quite as skilled as Chappelle and Gillis. Are the new rules about what's acceptable to laugh about not having any impact on them? Or are they refusing to make jokes that would get laughs but also offend some people because they know if they upset the wrong person they could face serious consequences?
To be clear, I think that the blowback to "cancel culture" in comedy is frequently overblown. But I am genuinely curious about the answer to those questions, but it seems to me no one is even asking them, let alone answering them. Instead, one side is saying "woke broke comedy!" while the other side is saying "Shane Gillis and Dave Chappelle are doing just fine!", and to me it seems like both of those arguments might actually be right because the truth is in the middle.
I don’t know, but some of the funniest comedy in the past 2-3 years has been Jost and Che’s bit where they gift each other jokes for Christmas. And the takeaway to me seems to be that the key element in potentially racist humor is establishing that the racist idea is the butt of the joke. Same as Chapelle’s Clayton Bigsby sketch. Comedians are smart-they’ll figure it out. And the ones that don’t evolve will complain about being “cancelled” when most of the time, they just weren’t very funny.
I'm not trying to say "Gillis is fine so it means nothing ever was wrong"; I'm just using him as an example of shifting norms and their reversion back to the previous standard. And while I don't know anything about the field, I would guess the smaller time folks might have an easier time actually? Gillis only got pseudo-canceled when he got big enough to be hired by SNL.
I couldn’t have said it better. The energetic anti woke types in 2024 sometimes feel like those Japanese soldiers on small islands who never found out World War 2 ended. It’s been really sad to see this happen to people whose judgement I used to respect like Megan Daumn or John McWhorter.
The tiniest of violins for all these over-burdened comedians that are still making more money than ever. Please. STFU. (Gillis is hilarious too)
“come up with new measurements to hide the facial achievement gap in the name of equity”
Pretty sure that one is from the anti-Chad fever swamps of incel land, not wokeness.
This is just autocorrect of racial to facial.
Well done!
Wokeness didn't find a new lease on life under Biden. It weakened and withered. Violent protests are a fraction of the size ans frequency they once were. DEI bureacrsts are being laid off all actoss the country. More people are speaking up against it than before. Its starting to become "cringe." People are complaining about wokeness more than ever, but that's because they now have the courage to complain.
I hope you're right but I really doubt you are. It's not so much Biden himself who runs the administration like an aging, rocking chair, absentee landlord. It's the people he has promoted.
I can't believe that anti-racism is not behind this crazy lurch to the left on immigration where the de facto Democrat position is now immigration enforcement is illegitimate because it has a disparate effect on black and brown people.
The Biden justice department guidance has brought back the sexual harassment kangaroo courts back to universities. It has filed amicus curiae briefs in support of racial quotas in university admissions. It has published guidance facilitating the distrubution of puberty blockers embracing a policy well to the left of every developed country in the world.
Off the top of my head....
Obama and Biden didn’t promote it, though they did happen to be president during the era of social media.
Obama definitely did promote it. Trayvon Martin who should have been left as a forgotten local police blotter story became a household name largely because someone high up in the Obama administration thought this was a story that would help motivate black and liberal voters to show up again in 2012 despite the high unemployment.
Ta Nehisi Coates one of the earlier exponents of wokism would not have been a jackpot career success were it not for Obama. He said so himself.
That's just two examples of many.
That’s a good point.
I agree with this piece (also thought it was funny). A vote for Harris is a vote for normalcy in a number of ways. For the reasons outlined in this article, as a signal to the GOP to stop nominating crazy people, the correct game theory response to norm shattering, international standing, rewards Democrats for ditching the incumbent when he became too ridiculous, and other reasons I am sure. I don’t like much of the policy platform (and hate the agency picks) but that’s very compelling to me. It’s been an annoying few years.
Plus it gives you a nice chance to vote against Kamala when the Republicans nominate a normal person in 2028 and reinforce the “just be normal” message!
Will they nominate a "normal candidate?" I feel like 2028 will be Vance, Hawley, or another politician that reads too much Patrick Daneen.
I think if they lose again, especially with Vance on the ticket, you’ll see a Haley type.
I'll go to their primary again and vote again for a Haley type and hope I'm not alone.
Hard for me to be excited about Haley winning the primary in 2028 after she ran cover for Trump. In another universe I would have happily voted for her, today I think I'd take the average Democrat instead.
Yeah, it's hard to imagine that the cucks who have bent the knee to Trump will suddenly seize the ship back once Trump is gone. They can't change the direction of the party without admitting that Trump was bad and their voters don't want to hear that.
Loved this column. Vote Harris before they add more letters to DEI!
I love this post. LOVE IT.
It’s delightfully refreshing to have content that doesn’t, even one time, mention permitting reform or Baumol’s cost disease. No macro or microeconomics to be found here, just cultural vibes.
I’m cackling with particular glee at how it has made the comments section crazy. People are trying to adhere to the old ways and shoehorn in argumentation about the meaning of a graph depicting corporate tax revenue, and a(n admittedly amusing) discussion of management information systems at Jurassic Park, but at the most basic level, the commentariat can’t even agree whether our poster is the good guy or the bad guy (hint: he’s the good guy), and because it’s not an issue that can be quantified and our commenters lean *heavily* against qualitative analysis, it’s like chaos at the monkey house today. It’s absolutely awesome.
Matt, can we get one of these posts every Wednesday, as a little treat? 😁
Good essay. Further to the analogy of repairing vs junking a car, I'd add, in what hopefully does not turn out to be wishful thinking, that a vote for Harris-Walz is a vote to put grownups back in charge - people mature enough to see complexity and nuance, and able to recognize that just because a thing (or a person) contains both good and bad, is animated by mixed motives, it can on the whole still be good.
Imperfection is inherent in any human creation. And the patriotic American thing to do in this election is support the side that seems more psychologically capable of responding to imperfection not by wanting to smash or stifle the imperfect thing in a fit of Manichean rigidity, but by optimistically, patiently working to make it more perfect.
If voting for Harris-Walz is putting the grown ups back in charge, then the current Biden-Harris admin are not grown ups?
Biden was taking the toddler out of the White House but he turned out to be a bit too old to remain fully in charge.
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.
As much as I appreciate you writing this article, the inability of the reasonables to stand up to the crazies was a choice. Granted, it's a choice with a collective action problem, but a choice nonetheless. I really do think the "woke" were and are a paper tiger and if we just collectively tell them "no" they can't do anything. I get that easier said than done, but if he wins (and there's a 50/50 shot he does), I think us reasonables will have less of an excuse for giving the crazy shit a pass because we've seen this routine before.
No, this is not a "go ahead and vote for Trump then hurr hurr" point.
I feel like we’re living in different realities. Did Democrats nominate Kathy Griffin or Rashida Tlaib for president in 2020 or something? I seem to remember Democrats putting forward a string of moderate, unifying candidates that tried to work across the aisle while Republicans have been voting down every single candidate for leadership who was even a little bit bipartisan for the past decade and a half.
Which side is unable to stand up to its extremists again?
I'm not talking about politics, I'm referring to the article which is about culture.
But in every practical sense, left wing crazies are powerless; meanwhile, right wing crazies control the Republican Party. It’s not an “inability” to stand up to the crazies, it’s a sense that it’s more important to stand up to the right wing crazies.
What point do you think I'm making? My whole point was "annoying woke people in your daily life are paper tigers. Just tell them no.". Somehow this got turned in to a thing about how the right is worse. Ok? I never said they were or they weren't. This article was about a guy who worked on a TV show and the hive mind that existed on the show.
Right, I think you’re glossing over the actual reason the dynamic he’s talking about came about. It’s hard to focus on paper tigers when there are actual tigers to worry about.
At the risk of repeating myself, I'm referring to interpersonal relations in blue America. If Trump wins, and there's a good chance he might, and you live in a liberal/woke/whatever environment, you don't have to spend the next four years going crazy and making excuses for people who do. You can just not do that.
To be honest, if you're only talking about culture when we have actual data on institutions like the parties themselves, then you're basically giving yourself permission to use flimsy evidence. In a country of 300 million people, you can point to anything weird as culture since there will be at least tens of thousands of people who do or believe anything in particular.
Well if this article had been about a guy who worked in Republican politics and tried to stop the tide of Trumpism, then I'd be talking about that, but since it was about the John Oliver show, I'm talking about that.
Think about it this way: the fact is that NOW conformists such as the guy writing this essay feel it’s in both “safe” and in their interest to write articles such as the above explicitly and publicly castigating wokeness (in however benign a framing). This in itself is evidence of the improvement in public discourse since trump left office and this kind of illustrates its point in its very existence, doesn’t it ?