Woke 1 is dead. We’ve learned nothing.

Blatant indifference to facts is all too common across ideologies

Someone scrolls on their phone. (Photo by Guido Mieth via Getty Images)

I’m of two minds about the “Woke 1 was crazy” discourse.

1. I agree with those who find this to be inadequately apologetic to the individuals whose lives and careers were unjustifiably upended.

2. No one likes to admit that they were wrong about anything, and if this evasive formulation allows people to shift to new, better views, that’s good.

I’ll offer this Idrees Kahloon article in The Atlantic if you want a taste of (1), but there are lots of articles along those lines and, rather than chime in with one of my own, I want to make a different observation: Whatever you think Woke 1 was, it arose under structural conditions that are very much still with us and that extend well beyond the specific politics of the left.

Many of the themes that dominated Woke 1 discourse have died down. And institutional leaders, to their credit, have gotten a lot better at not reacting in a dysfunctional way to social-media outrage mobs.

But it’s still very much the case that in a world without strong gatekeepers, false or absurd ideas can spread like wildfire and become a kind of instant conventional wisdom.

And what I personally remember most bitterly about Woke 1 is not the behavior of the most hysterical people; it’s the behavior of the people who knew perfectly well that others were behaving hysterically and who carefully avoided saying false or insane things (that’s how you can know that they knew) but who also avoided actively contesting them.

This was, for the most part, savvy behavior.

Those who actually said nutty things have suffered for it to an extent, which is exactly why there’s now this effort to slink away from them. But those who ended up on the wrong side of Woke 1 fads also suffered. The winners were those who ducked the storm — budget experts who knew it wasn’t true that cities spend more money on police than schools but didn’t say so — and emerged with their reputations unscathed.

That incentive structure to avoid being the “well, actually” guy is still very much with us and means that any kind of discourse could go wildly off the rails. And unfortunately, while we are now deeply into an anti-woke backlash on the right, the backlash isn’t taking the form of resisting the poor epistemic practices of the woke left — it’s resisting the value of caring about the weak and unfortunate while replicating the same toxic dynamics.

It’s what it says about you