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Freddie deBoer is a writer, academic, and critic. He writes the Freddie deBoer Substack, and is the author of books including the Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice and, most recently, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Freddie deBoer discuss whether "woke" ideas have, rather than receding, become institutionalized; how the movement for black lives was co-opted for elite liberal ends; and why a genuinely anti-racist, anti-poverty movement needs material objectives.
The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: There has been this idea that there is a vibe shift, that there was a number of years in which “woke” ideas were really ascendant in the United States and perhaps more broadly, but that that moment has passed.
What do you think about that? Have we reached—and I hate this term—“peak woke?”
Freddie deBoer: The first thing to say is that these things never end—they just mutate. I do think we are past “peak woke” in the way that most people would understand it, but that doesn't mean that woke has ceased to exist. It's the same thing with neoconservatism; its influence receded, but, of course, it didn't cease to exist. It just sort of fell back into the shadows for a little while to reorganize itself and to come up with new arguments. And I think you can see its influence in American foreign policy discussion right now. It will be the same way with woke.
But I do think that it is simply just the case that people are getting away with things they wouldn't have gotten away with in 2018 or 2019. That has a lot to do with politics, and has a lot to do with the ongoing economic destruction of media. I pointed this out as a little minor bellwether—not that this is in and of itself is important, but that it is remarkable in context with things that had happened before: So last October, the New York Times published a piece about television by Roy Price, who was formerly the head of Amazon Studios. But as he said in the piece, he was forced out at Amazon during the Me Too era because of allegations of sexual misconduct. In the piece, Roy Price said: “I left Amazon Studios in 2017 (after accusations I dispute)...” And that was it. And as I said, it would be absolutely extraordinary to be living through 2018, and what was happening in media, to think that the New York Times would have published a piece by Roy Price. It's also unthinkable that they would have let him dismiss those accusations literally in a parenthetical. But what's really unthinkable is that the rest of the media would not have exploded into a huge controversy—if that happens in 2018, it is a days-long Twitter meltdown conducted by people at the height of media. And that didn't happen in October 2023. In fact, I looked all over for reactions to this. I could not find a single piece that was published anywhere. I obviously have no idea whether Roy was guilty of anything. It's not really my business. But there was a very sort of hegemonic control over a great deal of media, particularly cultural and artistic media. There was hegemonic control from a certain sort of cohort of people, typically expressed through what happens on media Twitter.
In 2018, that would never have allowed that to happen. And by October of 2023, not only is it happening, no one is around to notice. That whole edifice of the cathedral of media Twitter had disintegrated.
Mounk: I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but yet I'm a little bit skeptical that we've reached the sort of high point of this movement. There was an article in the Free Press that went very viral by an editor at NPR called Uri Berliner, who is arguing that the institution really got ideologically captured by the far left and that it, as a result, lost a lot of its actually quite ideologically diverse readership. And the CEO of NPR sort of angrily rejected this and said nothing is woke at NPR and this is completely untrue. And at that point, people dug out these tweets from her from May and June of 2020, which really, I think, give a window into a different world: She's going on about how horrible white women are, and how private property is not something we should worry about given the stakes of this racial reckoning. So there's definitely a kind of collective mania that happened that’s subsided. At the same time, I think there's all kinds of indications that the basic framework for thinking about or looking at the world has continued to seep more deeply into our social fabric. So I'm thinking, for example, of two stories I've read in the New Yorker about a middle school in Amherst and in the New York Times about a high school in New Jersey. And what you see there is just a social world in liberal leaning towns where these intersectional fights over race and gender identity and other things just completely destroy a community, and in which the only way that people relate to each other is as members of particular identity groups, because that becomes the weapon you wield. That's just one example of where the basic set of ideological assumptions and social norms behind what I call the identity synthesis, behind the woke moment, has just continued to seep into the social fabric of so much of America.
So, yes, Katherine Maher would no longer tweet that the destruction of private property is something that should be celebrated (or at least shouldn't be rued). But the way we relate to each other in so many American institutions seems to still fundamentally be shaped by these norms. And I don't see that going away. What do you make of that?
deBoer: Yeah, as I said, things change, and there's a great deal of cyclicality to American politics, but they never change back exactly to the way that they were, right? NPR is the tip of the spear—as much as as much as any place sort of exemplifies the takeover of establishment media by what are really quite obscure and strange academic politics that are filtered through many layers of French critical theory and post colonialism, etc. NPR is the most intense expression of that. However, I was given an hour to explain and to defend and to promote my latest book on NPR this past fall. I was invited to have that sort of opportunity.
As you said, she wouldn't tweet that right now. And it's not just that she wouldn't choose to, but that there's no doubt that a person in her position, which was a white woman in a sort of liberal milieu coming from the heights of achievement culture, media and nonprofits, etc., felt intense pressure not just to avoid saying the wrong thing in 2020, but to affirmatively say the right thing. And that kind of pressure, I think, has largely disappeared and, to many people, feels quite quaint. I read those tweets from her and it just seems kitschy now. What was once this extremely passionate, sincerely held opinion now really seems to be a matter of embarrassing millennial sincerity. So it's not like other ideas have conquered all of this. It's that there's a sense that you're just behind the times if you're still talking that way.
And it reminds me very much of the post 9/11 period: For a few years after 9/11, it seemed like that sort of mandatory nationalism and militarism could never end. The climate of fear could never end. And that everyone was sort of locked into that. And then all of a sudden, in a very short order, it became this embarrassing thing. And nobody acts like it's post-9/11 America now. So I just think that there are lagging indicators. And I also think that the kind of people you're talking about—parents on school boards—are the kind of people who are not as savvy and who don't follow the curve as quickly as other people do.
Mounk: We've been skirting a little bit around the central thesis of your book, but I do want to delve into it a little bit more closely. So the book is called How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.
There's an implication here that what bills itself as a bottom-up social movement that is challenging the elites actually became appropriated by elites. What do you mean by that?
deBoer: So if you look at the progress of American social movements, even very successful, very noble social movements over time, there's inevitably a key moment in which a grassroots bottom-up thing becomes institutionalized in organizations that have their own interests and their own agendas. And the question is, to what degree is the initial intent and passion and radicalism of the movement preserved in the more institutionalized form?
A really good example of this is the American Civil Rights Movement, which was remarkably successful up until about the mid-1960s, achieving just incredibly sweeping reform with the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. Getting to those points took decades and took a ton of long term, slow, grassroots organizing often at the level of the black church. But eventually it results in organizations like the NAACP—the actual administration of anti-discrimination justice falls into the purview of the Department of Justice. The various elements of that movement get broken up and distributed into different organizations. And the record will show that part of the reason you had responses like the growth of the Nation of Islam or the Black Panthers, the Black Power movement is because of growing black dissatisfaction with what the organizational civil rights movement had become—a profound sense that the civil rights movement had stalled out, that it was incapable of advancing to new things. In the last couple years of Martin Luther King's life, he's talking a lot about this sense that things have stalled. That's always going to happen with any movement. So one of the things I take time to spell out in the book is that part of the alternative to being too institutionalized is that you just never have organizations, which means you never have power—Occupy Wall Street is a good example of this; it was never co-opted. But it was never co-opted because it never articulated goals, and never did anything.
The problem is that the goals of the Black Lives Matter moment, specifically, were never well articulated. To the degree that they were articulated, they were found in “defund the police,” a demand that the vast majority even of black Americans reject, which made it very easy for power to ignore them. And so what you ended up being left with, after all the dust settles, is the creation of all these organizational structures within various elite American institutions that address racism, care about racism, demonstrate interest in racism; you hire a bunch of people to be in the role of worrying about racism. But the actual structures of American life that dictate day-to-day racial equality are unchanged.
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Mounk: One of the kind of silent assumptions of the title of the book is that there was in fact a grassroots social justice movement. Now, in certain senses, I think that's absolutely right. But in another sense, I think this ideology has always come from the top down. When you look at, for example, the Movement for Black Lives and the protests against the police shootings of unarmed black people, I think there was a pretty grassroots movement. There was certainly a lot of funding from foundations very early on which helped to shape the way that this movement worked and which forced it to speak a certain kind of language. There were certainly a lot of people involved who had quite elite pedigrees. But I buy, from my medium knowledge of the movement, that there was a genuine grassroots energy within some of the most disadvantaged communities in the United States that were understandably angered about not just the most visible examples of police violence, but the broader pattern of interaction with police that they had to endure.
So I don't want to deny that there is a genuine grassroots element, but on the other hand, I think a lot of the language of the social justice movement and a lot of the places where actually it had the most visibility has always been elite. When I tell the intellectual history of these ideas in The Identity Trap, the kind of pantheon of thinkers who are influencing these ideas in my mind goes from Michel Foucault through Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak to, finally, Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw. And of those, certainly the first three thinkers were in various ways, as one would say today, quite privileged—relative to genuine grassroots movement, Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw were as well. So, you know, in what ways can we say that elites aid the social justice movement and in what ways might it be more accurate to say that elites, in certain respects, created the social justice movement from the beginning?
deBoer: There's always going to be a certain degree of sort of like wiggling with the word “elite” when it comes to the title itself. I say every time I talk about this book that I am obviously elite myself—I have a PhD and I write books and stuff.
The idea is not that you have some perfectly powerless person at the bottom ranks of society who is uniquely organically inspired to create political change and labors for that change—and then along comes somebody with education and money and influence and sort of hijacks what that person has done. The point is that the institutions that make up elite American society have particular ways of confronting social problems, most of which are bent towards maintaining a particular status-quo approach to the way that things work. So if you are Bank of America and you have a float at Pride every year—it's not that the people involved with doing that at Pride aren't actually interested in gay rights. My critique is that Bank of America must approach LGBTQ issues from that perspective of “let's have a parade and honor these people, let's fly flags outside of our offices to let them know that they're welcome here,” rather than, for example, the vision of queer liberation that many people in the LGBTQ activist space have talked about for a long time; in other words, it is in Bank of America's best interest to conceive of gay politics as sort of an abstraction about respect and love and equality rather than as a matter of dramatically changing the power distribution of the United States, which of course would be inimical to the interests of the sort of stakeholders within Bank of America. And again, this is not about sincerity: Absolutely everyone in an elite institution can be completely sincere about their desires to help people who are trying to create bottom-up change, but that their conception of how we go about doing that is always going to be bent by their own best interests.
John Schwarz, when he was writing for Tiny Revolution (this is from the Bush era)—he came up with this idea of the “iron law of institutions,” which is that if you have people within an institution, they're always going to do what is best for their position within the institution rather than what is best for the institution itself. So for example, you could think of a vice president at a company who heads up his own division, and his research indicates to him that his division is in fact redundant and that you could dissolve the division and distribute its responsibilities to other parts of the company, saving the company a lot of money without any loss of function. And Schwarz's point is that people don't do that, right? They don't do things that hurt their own place within an institution in an effort to protect the institution.
If we want to think of an institution as being a movement for racial or social justice, it's not that people don't sincerely care about achieving that kind of racial or social justice. It's that by dint of their perspective on the world, they're not going to sincerely confront the possibility that something that actually hurts their place within this movement is something that's going to be good for the movement. For example, various organizations within the Black Lives Matter umbrella have now been revealed to be subject to systemic corruption. I think this was quietly one of the more significant moments of the past few years; I think many many people were just quietly disillusioned to learn that many billions of dollars are missing, and that we know of hundreds of millions of dollars that were diverted inappropriately.
The point is that as you move up the power spectrum, you start to encounter the needs of people at the top. You start to encounter the needs of institutions. And those necessarily divert energy in unproductive ways.
Mounk: That's very interesting. I certainly agree with the iron law of institutions, as you call it. I think for listeners who remember our episode with Jonathan Lynn, the creator of Yes, Minister, that is one of the things that that show brilliantly portrays—the way in which the civil service is driven primarily by its own institutional interests; in which the head of a civil-service department or the head of a ministerial department mostly measures their success and influence in the budget that their department gets, rather than what they're actually doing with it.
I guess that raises the natural follow-up point of whether or not that more radical vision for improvement is, in fact, right. And this is where you and I might agree on certain aspects but disagree on others. When it comes to something like the gay and lesbian liberation movement for example, I buy the argument of people like Jonathan Rauch and Andrew Sullivan, who have said, “Look, when we started to talk about gay marriage, when we wrote the first essays advocating that idea in any major magazine in the United States or in the world, the first people we had to convince was more radical members of the gay rights movement who said, ‘We don't want anything to do with heterosexual marriage. We don't want anything to do with that bourgeois social institution. We want to revolutionize how people live.’”
And that makes me think, especially since they, in particular Andrew, are now quite critical of what has become of some of the gay-rights activist organizations and movements, that there might be three positions here: There's a kind of radical position, which is that the exclusion of gay and lesbians from traditional bourgeois institutions like marriage shows that these institutions are irredeemable and should be rejected. Then there is the position that someone like Andrew Sullivan has historically taken, which is there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the bourgeois heterosexual institution of marriage, and the problem with it is that it excludes non-heterosexuals, and if we widen and expand that institution to make sure that it includes people of all sexual orientations, then it's in fact something valuable. And that's why we want in.
There might be a kind of third position, which is that the furor behind the achievement of marriage for all and the genuine social change that was happening in the great acceptance of gays and lesbians, including the fact that they then had much greater financial resources, led to the creation of these very powerful non-profit organizations that had what I certainly regarded as a very important cause, which is to fight for marriage equality—now, what happens once we win marriage equality? What happens once the extent of discrimination against gays and lesbians in this country plummets? They might say “We've achieved something tremendous, let's downsize our staff and ask for fewer donations. And we're not going to abolish ourselves. It's not like the problem is completely gone. But you know, the problem is less severe than it was, and we've reached our main goal. So let's be a little bit less ambitious.” But you don't want to do that, right? Because you have staff on the books. You're the CEO of a big nonprofit organization making a certain amount of money because of the size of your organization, you want to keep your organization going, and so then you invent a new purpose. At least in this particular example, I'm attracted to the middle position, to the position of people like Jonathan Rauch and Andrew Sullivan, which is to say the problem is not that the radicals didn't win. The problem is that once some of the most important fights were won by the more moderate position, the institutions that once fought for that moderate position then drifted into a new form of pseudo-radicalism to justify their continued existence.
What do you say to that squishy, moderate liberal response to your radical critique of elite control over social justice?
deBoer: Well, first I'll just say something like that didn't get into the book, because there was a concern that these organizations could object—potentially, even legally—to how I was characterizing them. But I found two nonprofits that were founded more than a half century ago that the express purpose that they were founded for was the eradication of smallpox, which was achieved in the 1970s. And yet they still exist. They still accept donations. They still get tax breaks. How did they square the circle? Well, they just generalized. They rebranded. And now they're just sort of general global-health organizations. But it's exactly the sort of thing that you're talking about and that I'm talking about—they're just not gonna say, “Oh, well, actually smallpox genuinely is a solved problem. Let's disband, so the money, the donations, that come into us can go to a better cause.” People don't do that.
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I think an immediate analogy or comparison to your example of gay marriage and where the gay rights movement went is happening all the time in racial justice issues—again, it's really essential that people accept (and many people don't want to accept this, though it’s been true for decades) that most black Americans in polling want more police presence, not less. They are dramatically more likely to identify crime as their biggest problem or as a big problem than other Americans. They are dramatically more crime-oriented than affluent white liberals who help drive the discourse.
At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, there was no polling that indicated that a majority of black Americans wanted to defund the police, which makes sense because defunding the police is a genuinely radical idea. And this is one of the things that consistently frustrates me about people in radical spaces, that it's very important for them to maintain radical branding (which is fine) but you have to accept that radical ideas are by their very nature going to be unpopular. And so it's very similar with the gay marriage fight where—I grew up a lot around a lot of gay people, my father was in the arts, and my father's gay friends were the kind of gay people who wouldn't get caught dead asking for marriage, because that was for squares. They didn't want it. That was for breeders. But often that kind of person became, in a weird way, sort of counter-radicalized into supporting marriage when that became the tip of the spear of gay rights. Once it became a partisan polarized issue, that's when they began to really go for it.
As you said, there's this tension between the people who come together to be the coalition to push an issue. If the issue wins, the organizations and the institutional forces that gather around that don't stop existing. And now they have to go somewhere and ask for something, even though it's not clear what everybody wants. Most black people in polling absolutely want less police violence. They want more equal policing. They want less racist policing. But most black, polled Americans want the same or more policing in their neighborhoods. Wanting less police presence is quite a minority position among black Americans—that's been the reality for decades. Liberals and lefties just have to deal with that. And I think that this all sort of speaks to part of the fundamental weakness of identity politics, which is that in politics you want to have a set of goals and to form a coalition around those goals. Everybody doesn't have to have the same values as long as you're working for the same goal. Gun rights are a good example of a coalition that is very identified with the Republican Party and rural people and white people, etc. But there has also always been a sort of lefty counter-narrative that says that we need to be able to have arms and to be able to fight the government, etc. And so on that they can work together even though culturally they're very distinct. The problem with identity politics is it's always going in the opposite direction: it's starting with a coalition and proceeding to goals; it’s starting with a group of people who are perceived to be together in some sense and then it is saying, “OK, what do we do next?” And that's just an inherently unstable lens through which to view politics.
Now, I'm far from alone in saying this, but the thing that makes the most sense, if you really want to improve the living conditions of black Americans, is to find programs that are ostensibly race-neutral, but which in effect have disproportionately positive effects for black people. So the child tax credit, for example—we expand the child tax credit so that parents who make below a certain income level get cash benefits from the government. The actual bill that we would pass would have no mention of race whatsoever and it would be a racial-neutral program in that it is handing out benefits according to income. But because of the underlying structure of American poverty, it would be a dramatically pro-black, progressive racial-justice program. That's just what we have to do. I think one of the great sins of Ibram Kendi-ism is demanding that everything be named a racial-justice program despite our knowledge that that makes the politics harder.
Mounk: I don't want to put you on the spot. But if your instinct is that part of what's wrong with this movement is that the elites denuded it of the radicalism it needs, you need to tell us a little bit about what that radical demand would be. And in at least two areas, it seems to me that we ultimately end up in a similar place, even though you would call yourself a radical and I would call myself a sort of center-left moderate.
The first is when it comes to something like gay marriage—on that point it seems to me that you and I (and probably your family friends) have ended up embracing the moderate position that actually we did do right by expanding the conception of the definition of marriage to include gay and lesbian people. The same it seems to me is true in the case of the role of the police; you were pointing out—and you were just making an empirical claim, but I assume that there was a normative implication that goes along with that—that most black people worry about police violence. They are angry that they can't call on the police with the same reliability as they might if they were white because they have to fear mistreatment. But what they want is a police force that they can trust. So on those two positions, it seems to me like we actually ultimately agree on what I would say is the center-left position or the moderate position.
Now, the other example you gave is something like universal child credit. I'm all in favor of that, because I think that it would be a great anti-poverty program, would make sure that children get the material resources they need to develop as well as they can (and also, by the way, because it would help with falling birth rates that I do think are going to become a social problem in the United States and many other societies in Western Europe and East Asia and beyond). So I can come on board with that. I don't know that that's particularly radical.
So if the problem is that we're insufficiently radical, what are some radical policies that you think we should seriously entertain that, as a minimum condition, might make me balk a little bit?
deBoer: The problem is not that we're insufficiently radical, which I think is fundamentally a semantic argument. The problem is that the way that elites have tended to define racial problems is the way they define pretty much all social problems, which is as problems of manners and problems of mind. In other words—if you read Robin DiAngelo's book, which was, incredibly, the bestselling book of 2020—it is an instruction manual for viewing racism as fundamentally about people being nice to each other or thinking nice things about each other. And that's always been the wrong way to think about racism. What we ought to think about in terms of race and racial inequality and racial justice is the actual material conditions under which people live. The reason why elite spaces tend to produce manners and language codes and concerns about being nice is because, number one, that's what's achievable, right? It's easy to tell people, “Be nice to black people.” It's hard to close the black-white income gap.
But telling people you have to be nice to black people is not challenging to our power systems, while it is challenging to tell people in power, “You're going to have to play pay a significantly higher tax rates so that we can address poverty and equality generally in this country,” which will, by virtue of how our system is laid out, ultimately end up being a big racial-justice plan.
I quote in the book Stokely Carmichael, who's my father's hero. In speeches, he would say, “If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If a white man has the power to lynch me, that's my problem.” Racism is not a problem of attitude, racism is a problem of power. In other words, he doesn't need people to be nice to him; he needs to live in a world in which he is not materially hurt because he is a black man. Is that radical or not? Well, it just depends on how much intervention you're willing to make into the economy. Most liberals or classically liberal people anyway have a sort of procedural rule-based approach to economics where you set up a set of rules and that everybody plays according to the same rules and the outcomes are just as long as all of the rules are just and they're applied equally. Whereas for someone like me, the existence of the persistence of black poverty is in and of itself an injustice that requires direct amelioration via government intervention into the economy. And there's all different kinds of ways we could talk about how we would do that. There's various policies and things.
Kat Williams is my favorite standup comedian. He came to Hartford, I saw him perform. And his summation was—and he was joking, but not—“look, if we're not poor anymore, you can say the n-word as much as you want.” Once you end the material injustice and the material inequality, you can think and feel however you want to a black people and it won't matter. Whereas the approach of “everybody's got to love each other and be nice to each other”—you have no idea when you've accomplished it. And even if you did, it wouldn't necessarily do anything. What's radical is a willingness to get your hands dirty, to dig into the economy and to actually pull it apart, and to make direct changes that are not based necessarily on procedures or fairness, but that are instead bent on achieving a certain degree of equality of living conditions across racial groups.
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Freddie deBoer on “Peak Woke”