Isn't this counter-revolution already on the way? The same companies who as little as three years ago were telling their employees to include their pronouns in their email signature are now canceling whole diversity programs, because they want to continue business with the US government. A friend who works for a large consultancy firm told me the company is quietly deleting papers on diversity, and telling their employees who specialize in diversity hiring to change their job title on LinkedIn. The hypocrisy of it all is breathtaking.
I think the Trump led vibe shift is self consciously a counter revolution. As Ed says, it will be a future historian who records how that all turns out, but there is no question that Elon and co are looking to completely change this new settlement. We will, God willing, be able to say Merry Christmas again this year.
Where can you not say "Merry Christmas"? I've never encountered any sort of ban on that (I do live in the US which remains an outlier on Freedom of Speech issues)
Yes, I still don’t understand it. It’s like France in 1940…..the total collapse of what was assumed to be a solid, albeit battered, structure. It’s as though all the assumptions that stood the country in reasonable stead since Magna Carta have turned out to have been lighter than air; I say this because they’ve been displaced by an ideology lighter than helium.
Yes. It's bewildering. The centrist position for most of the period was civil partnerships, with marriage a long way off. I'd love to read an in depth analysis of this change. There seem to have been several key moments. Was it the Obergefell decision? Or was that already following the "vibe shift".
I think once society accepts that same-sex relations are valid, it's quite hard to argue against marriage. What is surprising and notable is how the issue was really the big trigger for what became called cancel culture, with the Brendan Eich sacking being the most notable example.
That's a good point. It fits in very well with the "love is love" ethic that's become hegemonic. The only angle on which it could be questioned was on the issue of what is best for children, but that hasn't held. I hadn't heard of the Eich sacking, that's very early in 2014 so a year after Obergefell.
Regarding woke and the cultural revolution - things are much better now than they were in 2020. Hopefully, by 2030 this whole wave of moralism will have broken, then receded.
One reason is that wokeness is a luxury belief - it flourishes only in societies where most people are prosperous, thus complacent and optimistic, thus given to liberal views.
When the prosperity starts disappearing - which for many (notably male job applicants and people Up North) is already happening - only the true believers in woke will be left and general public impact will evaporate.
And in Britain and Western Europe for certain - and in the USA quite probably - the prosperity is ending.
The UK Supreme Court has today ruled (9-0) that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refer to a ‘biological woman’ and biological sex’ respectively.
You need a re-think Ed!
Yes, censorship by the illiberal / far left is to be deplored. But so is the censorship of the far right - look at what is happening in the USA under the Trump presidency. What we need is genuine liberalism and tolerance.
Except that the present government may well be minded to amend the law such that 'woman' includes those with a GRC, or even those who self-identify as such. We may even find the great court above all mortal courts, the ECHR, casting its disapproving eye in our direction.
Once such a law is passed, with the blessing of the Euro judges, no Tory government will dare to demur. Nor would they want to, I suspect.
I think you're mostly right about this, but with a caution: "Idle hands are the Devil's workshop". Un- and underemployed people with too much time on their hands, can come up with some crazy and perfidious notions. Neither rich people nor poor people make revolutions (the latter riot, the former grift). Revolutions come from frustrated middle class people whose circumstances have taken a downturn.
That's possible, but State Communism was also a terrible set of luxury beliefs (with some continuity with woke, of course), and that lasted in Russia and Eastern Europe for the best part of a century before collapsing. The material conditions of those places was far worse than anything in the West in the present, which makes me think that things will have to get much worse here too before any substantial change occurs. Would be nice to be wrong about that.
Keep in mind that while the Communist nations fell behind the West, they were (economically, and often in regards to health and education) improvements over what had come before. Many people did see their situations improve. Even today that fuels some of the Ostalgie in Germany and elsewhere.
The moment I realised the shift was permanent was when Channel 4 News took an outside broadcast unit to Manchester to cover the ‘racist graffiti about Marcus Rashford’ story. Aside from the usual panel – a panel for some graffiti! – there was footage of people taking the knee by the holy wall, and John Snow delivering his sermon to camera. And then the next day, Greater Manchester Police put out a statement saying the graffiti wasn’t actually racist. But by then the cameras had gone home. And the legend had been written.
I have that ridiculous picture of Pelosi and her colleagues taking a knee in the Capitol clipped and saved and whenever a lefty friend tells me - "OMG Trump...", I send them the picture and ask, "please comment on this".
It’s only permanent if we can’t get a grip of immigration which we pro ably can’t and then it’s woke until no longer useful to the incomers which will be approximately when they have the numbers to install something new - which will be as far removed from woke as imaginable
Who gives a --- about graffiti or even tweets? They should have scored those penalties. Nobody deserves insults because of it, but to make the insults the bigger story rather than, you know, the failure to win struck me as very odd.
This is very helpful Ed. You provide a kind of counselling service for those of us bewildered by the Great Awokening. Nothing is directly changed by this essay but somehow this setting it all in context helps me make sense of it. And somehow that gives me hope!
Another nice article. The sudden need for football players to show their commitment to racial justice in 2020 reminded me of another incident in the sport three years earlier. In 2017 the British national teams won an argument with FIFA to bend its rules so that players could wear remembrance day poppy symbols (https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/sep/24/fifa-poppy-ban-armistice-day-home-nations-england). Once you open the door a little bit...
The woke are likely to achieve the precise opposite of what they intended - a fate that befalls sincere but opinionated people with little intuition or spiritual vision.
That was the fate of the first - and vastly most significant - of the great Western Revolutions, namely the Reformation.
The Protestant Reformers, correctly seeing that the Catholic Church had largely become worldly and corrupt, tried to restore the austerity of early Christianity, and create a more truly Christian Europe, by a fanatical onslaught on Catholicism.
But having mocked and trampled the authority of the Catholic Church, they found to their horror, that no one respected their authority either. End result, a secular freethinking Europe that they would have loathed beyond measure.
Good article. It seems that a major role in "beyond politics" controversy is indicated by a definite article: taking THE knee, for example. Other uses include THE Pill and THE vax (or I guess, in Britain, "THE jab".)
"Gay marriage went from something unthinkable to being beyond politics in just twenty years. And long before trans activists had become central players in the culture wars, numerous people in the US had lost jobs for their position on LGBT issues, or in Britain harassed by the police, a regular occurrence since the mid-2010s. The period in between – when the aims of the gay right’s movement had been achieved but people were free to disagree – was a transition"
Patrick Deneen has noted this with regards to Douglas Murray's complaints about BLM. Many tactics associated with"racial justice " began with those of gay marriage.
There was never anything wrong with civil partnerships -- and I say this as someone in a same-sex relationship.
Even now, look at the stats. Most of us don't actually seek or desire the legal status of marriage -- at best we feel ambivalent.
For the minority who find immense meaning and fulfillment in it -- and I have attended two friends' same-sex weddings so yes, they exist -- I am happy for them, but I am no longer certain that society gained anything, even though individuals clearly did.
My own preference would be to get the state out of the marriage business and into the business of civil partnerships for everyone instead, with the same rights and duties we now assign to marriage. Let marriage be Holy Matrimony again, a sacrament or rite conducted in churches, synagogues etc. The state can never bestow sanctity on anything and its hegemony over marriage has not improved the institution. If anything it has damaged it.
"There has also been political transition between left and right, so that today, Americans identifying as liberal are more opposed to free speech than Americans who see themselves as conservative, a total historic anomaly."
Although the stereotype of the PC liberal or PC leftist has existed since at least the late 1980s and that of the guilty white liberal has existed since the 1960s, I was pretty surprised to see that between the 1970s and the early 2010s, white liberals in the US were actually MORE tolerant of "racist speech " than white conservatives or white moderates!
I vividly recall how we had "hate preachers" at my university in the late 90s and when people suggested they should be banned, the libs there all said "no, they must have freedom of speech, even if we don't like it."
"People should conform their principles to those of their employers" ?
But their employers don't have any principles ! They seek only to maximise profit (if in the private sector) or administer some mock-altruistic racket, for good pay (if in the public or charitable sectors).
The young are confusing opinions with principles. Is this from youthful naivete ? Or are they well on the way to becoming selfish humbugs like their employers ?
It’s a nice story and I largely agree with it. However, it’s not correct to make out that surrey in 1966 was similar to Alabama, for example. Certainly there were the Mary whithouse types and those who still believed that God is an Englishman but you need only read the novels of Simon raven or Kingsley Amis to know that a degree of license was not just tolerated but ‘celebrated’ as the woke might say. Something Ed doesn’t specifically mention is the humourlessness of all this crap…I don’t recall the current levels of sanctimony and insistence on orthodoxy when I was growing up (born 1966 ) unless one had chosen to join some sort of Marxist cell. I’m also sure it wasn’t the young who were the enforcers of whatever codes existed pre 1966, on the contrary.
“In England the national football manager is one of the most important positions in the country, somewhere below the Prime Minister and above the Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s a hugely pressured job involving huge amounts of scrutiny, and one in which millions of men think they could do the job better than you.“
But I thought woke is so yesterday? The counter-revolution in full swing? At least in my house. The trans thing was a bridge too far. And Oct. 7 a real wakeup call.
You could be right, or it could be that Wokery is just pausing to replenish supplies after an effective counter-attack. Once DJT departs, it may claim another beachhead or two.
An excellent summary of where we are and how we got here. Hopefully part 2 (or 3?) will identify how a counter-revolution might occur.
Isn't this counter-revolution already on the way? The same companies who as little as three years ago were telling their employees to include their pronouns in their email signature are now canceling whole diversity programs, because they want to continue business with the US government. A friend who works for a large consultancy firm told me the company is quietly deleting papers on diversity, and telling their employees who specialize in diversity hiring to change their job title on LinkedIn. The hypocrisy of it all is breathtaking.
I think the Trump led vibe shift is self consciously a counter revolution. As Ed says, it will be a future historian who records how that all turns out, but there is no question that Elon and co are looking to completely change this new settlement. We will, God willing, be able to say Merry Christmas again this year.
Where can you not say "Merry Christmas"? I've never encountered any sort of ban on that (I do live in the US which remains an outlier on Freedom of Speech issues)
it’s just a joke
"Gay marriage went from something unthinkable to being beyond politics in just twenty years"
Even as late as 2008, if you were opposed to gay marriage you were Obama or Blair.
By 2013 you were Hitler!
Yes, I still don’t understand it. It’s like France in 1940…..the total collapse of what was assumed to be a solid, albeit battered, structure. It’s as though all the assumptions that stood the country in reasonable stead since Magna Carta have turned out to have been lighter than air; I say this because they’ve been displaced by an ideology lighter than helium.
Yes. It's bewildering. The centrist position for most of the period was civil partnerships, with marriage a long way off. I'd love to read an in depth analysis of this change. There seem to have been several key moments. Was it the Obergefell decision? Or was that already following the "vibe shift".
I think once society accepts that same-sex relations are valid, it's quite hard to argue against marriage. What is surprising and notable is how the issue was really the big trigger for what became called cancel culture, with the Brendan Eich sacking being the most notable example.
That's a good point. It fits in very well with the "love is love" ethic that's become hegemonic. The only angle on which it could be questioned was on the issue of what is best for children, but that hasn't held. I hadn't heard of the Eich sacking, that's very early in 2014 so a year after Obergefell.
Regarding woke and the cultural revolution - things are much better now than they were in 2020. Hopefully, by 2030 this whole wave of moralism will have broken, then receded.
One reason is that wokeness is a luxury belief - it flourishes only in societies where most people are prosperous, thus complacent and optimistic, thus given to liberal views.
When the prosperity starts disappearing - which for many (notably male job applicants and people Up North) is already happening - only the true believers in woke will be left and general public impact will evaporate.
And in Britain and Western Europe for certain - and in the USA quite probably - the prosperity is ending.
Could be. I actually originally wrote this in 2022 and sort of put it aside but a lot has changed since then. I will look at that in later posts.
The UK Supreme Court has today ruled (9-0) that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refer to a ‘biological woman’ and biological sex’ respectively.
You need a re-think Ed!
Yes, censorship by the illiberal / far left is to be deplored. But so is the censorship of the far right - look at what is happening in the USA under the Trump presidency. What we need is genuine liberalism and tolerance.
Except that the present government may well be minded to amend the law such that 'woman' includes those with a GRC, or even those who self-identify as such. We may even find the great court above all mortal courts, the ECHR, casting its disapproving eye in our direction.
Once such a law is passed, with the blessing of the Euro judges, no Tory government will dare to demur. Nor would they want to, I suspect.
I think you're mostly right about this, but with a caution: "Idle hands are the Devil's workshop". Un- and underemployed people with too much time on their hands, can come up with some crazy and perfidious notions. Neither rich people nor poor people make revolutions (the latter riot, the former grift). Revolutions come from frustrated middle class people whose circumstances have taken a downturn.
That's possible, but State Communism was also a terrible set of luxury beliefs (with some continuity with woke, of course), and that lasted in Russia and Eastern Europe for the best part of a century before collapsing. The material conditions of those places was far worse than anything in the West in the present, which makes me think that things will have to get much worse here too before any substantial change occurs. Would be nice to be wrong about that.
Keep in mind that while the Communist nations fell behind the West, they were (economically, and often in regards to health and education) improvements over what had come before. Many people did see their situations improve. Even today that fuels some of the Ostalgie in Germany and elsewhere.
But the majority of people in those countries had been peasants prior so didn't have a baseline comparison to what life could be like.
Here in the West we all know what's possible. At some point people won't accept decay and worsening standards... Or will they?
The moment I realised the shift was permanent was when Channel 4 News took an outside broadcast unit to Manchester to cover the ‘racist graffiti about Marcus Rashford’ story. Aside from the usual panel – a panel for some graffiti! – there was footage of people taking the knee by the holy wall, and John Snow delivering his sermon to camera. And then the next day, Greater Manchester Police put out a statement saying the graffiti wasn’t actually racist. But by then the cameras had gone home. And the legend had been written.
I have that ridiculous picture of Pelosi and her colleagues taking a knee in the Capitol clipped and saved and whenever a lefty friend tells me - "OMG Trump...", I send them the picture and ask, "please comment on this".
It’s only permanent if we can’t get a grip of immigration which we pro ably can’t and then it’s woke until no longer useful to the incomers which will be approximately when they have the numbers to install something new - which will be as far removed from woke as imaginable
Who gives a --- about graffiti or even tweets? They should have scored those penalties. Nobody deserves insults because of it, but to make the insults the bigger story rather than, you know, the failure to win struck me as very odd.
This is very helpful Ed. You provide a kind of counselling service for those of us bewildered by the Great Awokening. Nothing is directly changed by this essay but somehow this setting it all in context helps me make sense of it. And somehow that gives me hope!
Nice to see the article that turned me into a fan expanded like this!
Another nice article. The sudden need for football players to show their commitment to racial justice in 2020 reminded me of another incident in the sport three years earlier. In 2017 the British national teams won an argument with FIFA to bend its rules so that players could wear remembrance day poppy symbols (https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/sep/24/fifa-poppy-ban-armistice-day-home-nations-england). Once you open the door a little bit...
The woke are likely to achieve the precise opposite of what they intended - a fate that befalls sincere but opinionated people with little intuition or spiritual vision.
That was the fate of the first - and vastly most significant - of the great Western Revolutions, namely the Reformation.
The Protestant Reformers, correctly seeing that the Catholic Church had largely become worldly and corrupt, tried to restore the austerity of early Christianity, and create a more truly Christian Europe, by a fanatical onslaught on Catholicism.
But having mocked and trampled the authority of the Catholic Church, they found to their horror, that no one respected their authority either. End result, a secular freethinking Europe that they would have loathed beyond measure.
Good article. It seems that a major role in "beyond politics" controversy is indicated by a definite article: taking THE knee, for example. Other uses include THE Pill and THE vax (or I guess, in Britain, "THE jab".)
The Science.
Good example.
"Gay marriage went from something unthinkable to being beyond politics in just twenty years. And long before trans activists had become central players in the culture wars, numerous people in the US had lost jobs for their position on LGBT issues, or in Britain harassed by the police, a regular occurrence since the mid-2010s. The period in between – when the aims of the gay right’s movement had been achieved but people were free to disagree – was a transition"
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-anti-woke-girondist-s-lament/
Patrick Deneen has noted this with regards to Douglas Murray's complaints about BLM. Many tactics associated with"racial justice " began with those of gay marriage.
There was never anything wrong with civil partnerships -- and I say this as someone in a same-sex relationship.
Even now, look at the stats. Most of us don't actually seek or desire the legal status of marriage -- at best we feel ambivalent.
For the minority who find immense meaning and fulfillment in it -- and I have attended two friends' same-sex weddings so yes, they exist -- I am happy for them, but I am no longer certain that society gained anything, even though individuals clearly did.
My own preference would be to get the state out of the marriage business and into the business of civil partnerships for everyone instead, with the same rights and duties we now assign to marriage. Let marriage be Holy Matrimony again, a sacrament or rite conducted in churches, synagogues etc. The state can never bestow sanctity on anything and its hegemony over marriage has not improved the institution. If anything it has damaged it.
"There has also been political transition between left and right, so that today, Americans identifying as liberal are more opposed to free speech than Americans who see themselves as conservative, a total historic anomaly."
Although the stereotype of the PC liberal or PC leftist has existed since at least the late 1980s and that of the guilty white liberal has existed since the 1960s, I was pretty surprised to see that between the 1970s and the early 2010s, white liberals in the US were actually MORE tolerant of "racist speech " than white conservatives or white moderates!
https://x.com/ZachG932/status/1455961393597980677
I vividly recall how we had "hate preachers" at my university in the late 90s and when people suggested they should be banned, the libs there all said "no, they must have freedom of speech, even if we don't like it."
What planet do young people come from ?
"People should conform their principles to those of their employers" ?
But their employers don't have any principles ! They seek only to maximise profit (if in the private sector) or administer some mock-altruistic racket, for good pay (if in the public or charitable sectors).
The young are confusing opinions with principles. Is this from youthful naivete ? Or are they well on the way to becoming selfish humbugs like their employers ?
It’s a nice story and I largely agree with it. However, it’s not correct to make out that surrey in 1966 was similar to Alabama, for example. Certainly there were the Mary whithouse types and those who still believed that God is an Englishman but you need only read the novels of Simon raven or Kingsley Amis to know that a degree of license was not just tolerated but ‘celebrated’ as the woke might say. Something Ed doesn’t specifically mention is the humourlessness of all this crap…I don’t recall the current levels of sanctimony and insistence on orthodoxy when I was growing up (born 1966 ) unless one had chosen to join some sort of Marxist cell. I’m also sure it wasn’t the young who were the enforcers of whatever codes existed pre 1966, on the contrary.
😂😅
“In England the national football manager is one of the most important positions in the country, somewhere below the Prime Minister and above the Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s a hugely pressured job involving huge amounts of scrutiny, and one in which millions of men think they could do the job better than you.“
Great insights...but there may be a Counter Reformation taking place.
But I thought woke is so yesterday? The counter-revolution in full swing? At least in my house. The trans thing was a bridge too far. And Oct. 7 a real wakeup call.
You could be right, or it could be that Wokery is just pausing to replenish supplies after an effective counter-attack. Once DJT departs, it may claim another beachhead or two.