No, woke is not on the way out. It's just the latest explosion of an ideology that has done so before in the 1910s, 1960s, late 80s~early 90s, and since 2013ish. Eric Kaufmann ably documented and described all this in Whiteshift. It does recede after each explosion but leaves in place a horrible new baseline of PC awfulness that is higher than its last baseline, and it will be from this new baseline (in the case of 2010s wokeness, the ideology becoming institutionalized throughout all power centers and not just academia) that the next woke wave will be launched. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Ed I think I might actually be getting to where I can out-pessimism you haha.
I grew up in the 90s and entered university in 1998. There was a great deal of optimism and prosperity, people were more laid back, laws were liberalizing, we drank and smoked with abandon and no one judged nor took photos to be posted online the next day! I can see why the increasingly middle aged cohorts are looking back to the 1990s with fondness when the greatest crisis was Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. The crime and violence Ed alluded to was always more abstract than real, highly localized in certain urban areas.
As for wokery, there are noises being made that people are getting tired of the extremity of it. On the other hand, certain oppositions are emerging that show themselves fully willing to battle it in courts and laws, at least on the local and state level. Florida and Texas threatening to outlaw tenure for university professors, for example. Will the woke DEI bureaucracy roll over with a whimper? I suspect not. Time will tell. So many educational institutions remain completely captured by the woke mindset thanks to the predominance of single women who run these institutions, and that is where the real problem lies.
Trump backlash is a big part of the reason that wokeness has gained and held this much ground. Middle and upper class people are increasingly acknowledging the problems with race and gender wokeness—to themselves, if not out loud—but Trump is the face of the Republicans and anti-wokeness to them, and they’re so repulsed by him that they’d sooner cut off a toe than affiliate themselves with that in any way.
Yep. I was talking about a major factor preventing some Democrats from acknowledging and fighting woke excesses here in 2023, not making assertions about how the whole thing started. My reasonably intelligent, basically well-intentioned liberal aunt agrees with conservatives about some of the woke stuff…but she hasn’t realized that yet because of her blinding hatred for Orange Man and, by extension, all things that are branded conservative by John Oliver. She hasn’t researched the history of how much of Trumpism was a response to 2014 wokeness and how much of 2018 wokeness was in turn a counter-response to Trump. She just knows (“knows”) that Republicans are fascists and everything they do is evil. She only has the vaguest idea what, for example, DeSantis is pushing in Florida WRT wokeness, but she knows it’s bad because he’s the one doing it. (Yes, I know—the way I’m describing her, she doesn’t sound intelligent or reasonable, but she was before TDS set in.) And she’s pretty representative of the lefties, and even some of the moderates, in my family and social circles.
Yes. more people are anti-anti-woke than woke. They just feel that conservatives are still a greater threat. I think I can see their point in that I believe a lot of political norms/beliefs are quite thinly-held, which is why they have to be enforced so strictly.
The woke spin is that wokeness is a response to Trumpism. The reality is that Trumpism was a response to wokeness. The woke want you to buy the spin so that you attack Trump instead of wokeness, and so that you settle for pruning wokeness's most extreme symptoms without addressing its roots.
My comment was not necessarily an attack on Trump. It was an observation about the thought processes of many middle and upper class people I know. Wokeness and Trumpism feed each other. Whose “fault” it ultimately might be is beside the point for what I’m saying.
"The more important race aspect of wokeism will continue to get more extreme because the taboo around it is simply too strong. I also used to think that upper-middle-class liberals would change their minds when these things start to affect their own families, but I now believe that most would willingly sacrifice their own wellbeing for sacred issues."
I think you are exactly correct, in both cases. The first is, nevertheless, capable of some kind of self-correction, not least of all because of the reasonableness of many within our minority communities. There appears to be a trend to allowing those with minority backgrounds to lead the pushback, where the timid white middle classes fear to tread.
Which leads to the second and much more pernicious trend: the enfeeblement, I am tempted to emasculation, of the middle classes. I can just about recall the state of things in the 1950s when the middling sort were ex-military officers who had fought in the War; some had fought in several, and not a few had been imperial administrators of various sorts.
They were far from the Marxist stereotype of self-serving oppressors; they, on the whole, exuded the kind of liberalism that one gets from reading Locke and Mill. That they did so with the stalwart confidence that came, (in addition to defeating Nazism) from a couple of centuries of imperial rule, is why the left hated them, of course.
The self-enervation of their grandchildren was far from inevitable; whether it is now beyond correction is in the lap of the gods.
I wouldn't worry about looking for lighter subjects. I find historical analysis of current matters a relief really. Nothing new under the sun and all that.
Noah Smith on his substack likened wokeness to a prairie fire - burning hottest on its edges, while burning out in their centre.
Think there's a lot in that, if you look at the tastemakers (writers, artists, young people in cities like New York) who've moved past it and dismiss much of it as "cringe".
Wokeness is now firmly at home among middle managers in large companies, HR departments, people who work at stolid institutions like big national museums... but while these people can make life annoying, not convinced they can set the tone of the cultural conversation that much.
Declaring yourself nonbinary has become something irritating 35 year old women do - not teenagers. Claiming deadlines are white supremacy culture has become a punchline. So expect young people to invent something new, even if we don't know what that is yet.
No, I'm afraid not. For a start, what we call "wokism" or "wokery" is really just Americanism - a unifying ideology of their empire. As long as we remain a US colony, we will continue to live by it. Secondly, Americanism has captured all our institutions now and that is not going to change any time soon. Thirdly, "wokery" has been woven into the fabric of British life by means of the Equality Act 2010. Even if that Act were repealed (which is never going to happen), it is probably too late to turn back the tide. It's baked-in now.
I am not Irish and I cannot speak for the Irish but I suspect these protests represent nothing more than nuisance value. A little embarrassing maybe but not any sort of threat. The ringleaders will be rounded-up and punished and the movement (to the extent that it is a movement at all) will be infiltrated up to the eyeballs and broken up. End of story.
Americanism may have plateaued but its only temporary. Once NATO loses the war in Ukraine, and maybe long before that, it will crank up again and move on to the next phase.
Three points- SF were always a coalition. Coogan and others noted how the posters in the office would change depending on if the visitors were Boston Irish RCs or Palestinians. Palestinians were playing their own game. Someone will defect
Beyond that there is a massive empty space in Irish politics- Roughly anything about National Security - Nuclear power ,Defence- Nato etc,
Or put another way why don't the Healy Raes have an Airbase in Kerry.
2- Your ok groomer post. Its not that I fear the legalisation of paedophilic love. Its Telford and the Trans movement shows how indifferent the powers that be can be on this matter.
No, woke is not on the way out. It's just the latest explosion of an ideology that has done so before in the 1910s, 1960s, late 80s~early 90s, and since 2013ish. Eric Kaufmann ably documented and described all this in Whiteshift. It does recede after each explosion but leaves in place a horrible new baseline of PC awfulness that is higher than its last baseline, and it will be from this new baseline (in the case of 2010s wokeness, the ideology becoming institutionalized throughout all power centers and not just academia) that the next woke wave will be launched. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Ed I think I might actually be getting to where I can out-pessimism you haha.
I grew up in the 90s and entered university in 1998. There was a great deal of optimism and prosperity, people were more laid back, laws were liberalizing, we drank and smoked with abandon and no one judged nor took photos to be posted online the next day! I can see why the increasingly middle aged cohorts are looking back to the 1990s with fondness when the greatest crisis was Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. The crime and violence Ed alluded to was always more abstract than real, highly localized in certain urban areas.
As for wokery, there are noises being made that people are getting tired of the extremity of it. On the other hand, certain oppositions are emerging that show themselves fully willing to battle it in courts and laws, at least on the local and state level. Florida and Texas threatening to outlaw tenure for university professors, for example. Will the woke DEI bureaucracy roll over with a whimper? I suspect not. Time will tell. So many educational institutions remain completely captured by the woke mindset thanks to the predominance of single women who run these institutions, and that is where the real problem lies.
Indeed, therein lies the tail, except they're never the sort one would go running after.
Trump backlash is a big part of the reason that wokeness has gained and held this much ground. Middle and upper class people are increasingly acknowledging the problems with race and gender wokeness—to themselves, if not out loud—but Trump is the face of the Republicans and anti-wokeness to them, and they’re so repulsed by him that they’d sooner cut off a toe than affiliate themselves with that in any way.
the data shows the radicalisation starting before Trump though. from 2012
https://unherd.com/thepost/where-did-the-great-awokening-come-from/
Trump obviously didn't help though.
Yep. I was talking about a major factor preventing some Democrats from acknowledging and fighting woke excesses here in 2023, not making assertions about how the whole thing started. My reasonably intelligent, basically well-intentioned liberal aunt agrees with conservatives about some of the woke stuff…but she hasn’t realized that yet because of her blinding hatred for Orange Man and, by extension, all things that are branded conservative by John Oliver. She hasn’t researched the history of how much of Trumpism was a response to 2014 wokeness and how much of 2018 wokeness was in turn a counter-response to Trump. She just knows (“knows”) that Republicans are fascists and everything they do is evil. She only has the vaguest idea what, for example, DeSantis is pushing in Florida WRT wokeness, but she knows it’s bad because he’s the one doing it. (Yes, I know—the way I’m describing her, she doesn’t sound intelligent or reasonable, but she was before TDS set in.) And she’s pretty representative of the lefties, and even some of the moderates, in my family and social circles.
Yes. more people are anti-anti-woke than woke. They just feel that conservatives are still a greater threat. I think I can see their point in that I believe a lot of political norms/beliefs are quite thinly-held, which is why they have to be enforced so strictly.
Some people—socialists, feminists—have criticized specific woke excesses from a left-wing point of view. We need more of that.
This is naive.
The woke spin is that wokeness is a response to Trumpism. The reality is that Trumpism was a response to wokeness. The woke want you to buy the spin so that you attack Trump instead of wokeness, and so that you settle for pruning wokeness's most extreme symptoms without addressing its roots.
My comment was not necessarily an attack on Trump. It was an observation about the thought processes of many middle and upper class people I know. Wokeness and Trumpism feed each other. Whose “fault” it ultimately might be is beside the point for what I’m saying.
"The more important race aspect of wokeism will continue to get more extreme because the taboo around it is simply too strong. I also used to think that upper-middle-class liberals would change their minds when these things start to affect their own families, but I now believe that most would willingly sacrifice their own wellbeing for sacred issues."
I think you are exactly correct, in both cases. The first is, nevertheless, capable of some kind of self-correction, not least of all because of the reasonableness of many within our minority communities. There appears to be a trend to allowing those with minority backgrounds to lead the pushback, where the timid white middle classes fear to tread.
Which leads to the second and much more pernicious trend: the enfeeblement, I am tempted to emasculation, of the middle classes. I can just about recall the state of things in the 1950s when the middling sort were ex-military officers who had fought in the War; some had fought in several, and not a few had been imperial administrators of various sorts.
They were far from the Marxist stereotype of self-serving oppressors; they, on the whole, exuded the kind of liberalism that one gets from reading Locke and Mill. That they did so with the stalwart confidence that came, (in addition to defeating Nazism) from a couple of centuries of imperial rule, is why the left hated them, of course.
The self-enervation of their grandchildren was far from inevitable; whether it is now beyond correction is in the lap of the gods.
I wouldn't worry about looking for lighter subjects. I find historical analysis of current matters a relief really. Nothing new under the sun and all that.
I hate the fucking 90s. That Cobain pussy had to come around and ruin it all.
A great film!
Noah Smith on his substack likened wokeness to a prairie fire - burning hottest on its edges, while burning out in their centre.
Think there's a lot in that, if you look at the tastemakers (writers, artists, young people in cities like New York) who've moved past it and dismiss much of it as "cringe".
Wokeness is now firmly at home among middle managers in large companies, HR departments, people who work at stolid institutions like big national museums... but while these people can make life annoying, not convinced they can set the tone of the cultural conversation that much.
Declaring yourself nonbinary has become something irritating 35 year old women do - not teenagers. Claiming deadlines are white supremacy culture has become a punchline. So expect young people to invent something new, even if we don't know what that is yet.
No, I'm afraid not. For a start, what we call "wokism" or "wokery" is really just Americanism - a unifying ideology of their empire. As long as we remain a US colony, we will continue to live by it. Secondly, Americanism has captured all our institutions now and that is not going to change any time soon. Thirdly, "wokery" has been woven into the fabric of British life by means of the Equality Act 2010. Even if that Act were repealed (which is never going to happen), it is probably too late to turn back the tide. It's baked-in now.
I am not Irish and I cannot speak for the Irish but I suspect these protests represent nothing more than nuisance value. A little embarrassing maybe but not any sort of threat. The ringleaders will be rounded-up and punished and the movement (to the extent that it is a movement at all) will be infiltrated up to the eyeballs and broken up. End of story.
Americanism may have plateaued but its only temporary. Once NATO loses the war in Ukraine, and maybe long before that, it will crank up again and move on to the next phase.
Three points- SF were always a coalition. Coogan and others noted how the posters in the office would change depending on if the visitors were Boston Irish RCs or Palestinians. Palestinians were playing their own game. Someone will defect
Beyond that there is a massive empty space in Irish politics- Roughly anything about National Security - Nuclear power ,Defence- Nato etc,
Or put another way why don't the Healy Raes have an Airbase in Kerry.
2- Your ok groomer post. Its not that I fear the legalisation of paedophilic love. Its Telford and the Trans movement shows how indifferent the powers that be can be on this matter.
3- I survived the 90s by the skin of my balls.